Twelve light-years from Earth, Lieutenant Commander Valory Jeanne, is alone in the astrophysics lab when an unexpected meteor storm strikes the United Earth Space Force ship Copernicus. After just four orbits around a newly discovered planet in the Tau Ceti star system, the ship is destroyed. Now stranded onboard without any means of escaping to the planet below, the Ph.D. astrophysicist must struggle against insurmountable odds to stay alive...