Humanity rushed to the stars... and met the Gbab - a ruthless alien race that practically wiped us off the face of the universe. The earth and colonies are now smoking ruins, and the few survivors, in an attempt to restore what was lost, fled to a distant earth-like planet - Safehold. But the Gbaba can detect the radiation produced by industrial civilization, so the human rulers of Safehold took extraordinary measures: using mind control and disguised high-tech devices, they created a religion that every citizen of Safehold now believes in, a religion whose purpose is to keep Safehold forever in the Middle Ages. Passed 800 years. In a secret hideout on Safehold, an android from the distant human past has awakened. This "revival" was started centuries ago by a faction that resisted shackling humanity into the shackles of a fabricated religion. Through automated recordings, "Nimue" - or more precisely, the android with the memory of Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban - was told her fate: she, suitably disguised, would enter the society of Safehold and begin to provoke technological progress, which the Church of the Waiting Lord had worked for centuries to suppress. This will not be easy to do. To make it easier to deal with medieval society, "Nimue" will take on a new gender and a new name - "Merlin". He will have to carefully hide his amazing strength and access to stocks of high-tech devices. And he will also have to find a basis for his actions. A country at least a little freer, less orthodox, a little more open to new things. And so Merlin came to Cheris, a medium-sized kingdom famous for its navy. He plans to hook up with King Haarald and Prince Cayleb and maybe, just maybe, usher in a new era of invention. Which will surely attract the attention of the Church... and, inevitably, lead to war. It will be a long, long process.