In the year 2098, the Blue Pearl is nothing more than a rotting fruit in space. One hundred and ten years earlier, the United Nations passed the historic Resolution 43/53 to protect the global climate as a ‘common concern of mankind’. Yet the promise gathered dust in the archives: autocrats, national egoism, and insatiable corporations failed for a century. In the wake of devastating resource wars, acidified oceans, and beneath an atmosphere choked with soot and ozone, human civilisation stands on the verge of final suffocation.

As a last hope, Dr Joanna Deveroe draws upon her parents’ technological legacy. On the storm-lashed Scottish peninsula of A’Mhòine, she has expanded the family enterprise, Deveroe-Voss, into the last bastion of the species. In gigantic orbital shipyards, she is having vast interstellar colony ships – the Arks – constructed to save tens of thousands of selected pioneers and carry them to a new world.

Yet whilst time is running out for planet Earth, a merciless war without fronts erupts in the shadow of the launch pads. The ruthless industrial magnate Damian Rourke (head of HelixCorp) and his political henchman, the charismatic but thoroughly corrupt Senator Damien Vale, stop at nothing to hijack Joanna’s project through espionage, blackmail, and emergency decrees. They seek to privatise the salvation of humanity and turn the berths aboard the Arks into an exclusive life insurance policy for the old elite. To defend her life’s work against sabotage and hostile takeovers, Joanna is left with only two allies she can trust implicitly: the iron-hardened former Navy veteran Arman Keller, who holds the line as her Head of Security, and Morgan Fellon – a lethal shadow operative who officially exists in no registry and wields the blade in the underground against Rourke’s syndicate.

Whilst the battle for the Arks escalates on Earth, the world waits desperately for the decisive signal from the Aurelia. Acting as the vanguard, the state-of-the-art research vessel has pushed 1,400 light-years into deep space to the Kepler-452b system to verify the supposed Garden of Eden for the approaching wave of colonisation. Yet upon descending to the alien planet, the elite team encounters a reality that shatters all imagination: Kepler-452b is no untouched natural world, but an artificially created, strictly calculating construct.