The year is 2081. Earth teeters on the edge of civil and environmental collapse as the Liberal Atlantic Republics and Eastern Pact fight over resources to perfect tactical artificial intelligence. In her twenty short years, Hitomi Sullivan has been many things: Cargo brat, C student, LAR fighter pilot, survivor. Her job running ore shipments from Mars through enemy blockades has barely kept her family afloat while driving her to the edge of nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown.  It's only a matter of time before she either blows up or burns out. On what should be a routine run, the cargo ship Hitomi is escorting makes a critical error, bringing them both under fire and crashing to the decimated No Man's Land on Earth. Forced to rely upon each other to survive, Hitomi and the cargo pilot, Gunnar Diaz, make the long trek through a collapsed North America and towards Gunnar's destination, the opulent LAR capital city of Summerland.