Jev Bjorn is a sixteen-year-old teenager growing up on Earth's first colony world Alessi, which for the past five years has been ruthlessly controlled by a reptilian alien race known as the T'kri. Kiyel Lhevic is a telepathic felinoid crew member of the Caitaran scout ship Lekur, shot down by the T'kri while attempting to ascertain why a probe--which had been launched to this previously uninhabited world a decade earlier--suddenly ceased functioning...