Ethan is a ranger, sworn to protect his walled settlement from the dangers of his ravaged wasteland planet. One night a mysterious light thunders overhead and Ethan investigates, discovering a crashed spacecraft and two soldiers from a moon base he didn’t even know existed. Captain Salus and Commander Kurren have risked everything to find a Planetsider to help save their people. Ethan needs them to answer questions that have haunted him all his life – what happened to his world and why?
Seduced by the prospect of learning the truth, Ethan agrees to help Captain Salus and Commander Kurren. Disobeying the orders of his council, he travels to the UEC outpost on the moon. There Ethan gets his answers, but the truth only leads to more questions and more doubts.
To make matters worse, Kurren and Salus are not the only ones looking for a Planetsider. An enemy faction, trapped on an orbital space station, will stop at nothing to capture Ethan, and prevent him from helping the UEC. With time running out to save the moon base, Ethan agrees to embark on a dangerous mission to recover vital technology set adrift in a radiation field that only a Planetsider can survive.
But his ship is intercepted by the rival faction and Ethan is taken to the space station. There he meets the faction’s leader, who turns his life upside down and inside out. Everything he thought he knew was a lie.
Plucked from a life of ignorance and obscurity, Ethan is thrust into the center of a war that has raged for over a century – a war that created the world he grew up in. Yet fate has a cruel sense of irony, because now the survival of two entire civilizations rests in the hands of a solitary Planetsider.