Officers Ryan Matson and Sandy Rie meet on the Alpha Queen 9, furthermost outpost of the Alliance fleet. Sandy Rie, an eager newbie gunner, nurtures a secondary agenda: historical research to verify her failed college Master’s thesis that some of the first hundred colony ships sent out from Sol system 500 years previously, have indeed made planetfall.

The Kritsch, a race of sentient insects (‘bugs’), are inimical to all other sentient life. They are the bane of the Alliance’s advance up the arm of the galaxy.

Matson flies the Needle, a fast recon ship, into uncharted regions of deep space. Statistically, in number of missions flown, he has outlived his life expectancy. Sandy and Ryan establish a personal and professional relationship, which eventually develops into a first-class team flying updated Needle 2’s.

They find one of the old colony ships, where Sandy uncovers valuable information about what happened to those first exploratory flights. However, each mission they fly brings them closer to that last, fatal mistake that could be the end for them and would likely result in a pull-back of Alliance space exploration.

DUNBAR'S STATION

Observe any modern high school at class break, and you'll see lots of kids moving down the halls in a more or less orderly fashion. Some are hiding the desperate secret of abuse. Suppose in that milling throng, we focus on three girls who happen to ride the same school bus. Because all of them live in their own private hell, each recognizes the signs of abuse in the others. Wary, they form a pact--not quite a friendship--and escape to another town where they are thrown into the uncertain, brutal life of the streets. They recognize that so long as they stay together, they survive. A string of near fatal events take them to an old mud-brick place in Dry Wells, Texas called Dunbar's Station run by a man who is the dregs of human life. There, they find the space and time to recover. But . . . what happens if the smartest one starts to unravel? What if they forget they must stick together to survive?