Roughly thirty years after first contact with a vast Galactic Community, the first human leaves Earth behinds to become a full galactic-citizen. The young scientist James Aldwin emerges from his quarantine with his bright eyes set on the future. However, it soon seems like some things might not be as they seem. Be it people reacting with fear to his appearance and demeanor, biases that he had been previously unaware of, or rules that strangely did not seem to apply to him: Something always seemed to be off. And from the very moment he had stepped out of his quarantine-chamber, James couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was being watched, but only ever managed to catch glimpses at his supposed observer. Yet his life gets shaken up when he, after a misunderstanding and misidentification of species, gets mildly injured by one of his crew members: The dangerous deathworld predator Shida, who all the rest of the crew seems to be afraid of. But wait...isn't he a dangerous deathworld predator, too? Maybe he and his 'attacker' have more things in common than just their species' appearance. Follow James, Shida, and many of the people they meet along the way as they inadvertently stumble into a secret that goes so much deeper than any of them bargained for, uncover galactic corruption, and learn more about the galaxy and themselves than they could have ever imagined.