The beginning of the 22nd century, the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare goons like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways to escape the vast, crime-infested metropolises where daily rations are limited to foul-smelling soy processed foods and where people are killed for a piece of meat. You can win the lottery and go to colonize distant planets. Or you can join the army. True, there are fewer and fewer winners over the years, so Andrew joins the army for the sake of real food and the opportunity to see the distances of space. But he still doesn’t know that he will have to pay too high a price for this, that he will have to fight not even with the enemy, but with his own command and fellow citizens brutalized by hunger and poverty, that few people return from the army, and in the colonies there is often a real hell. He doesn’t yet know that the world will soon change, because space is fraught with dangers, the scale of which people can’t even imagine.