Niall Encardi is ready to graduate after long, intensive years of medical training and go home to the colony world of Sorendaal. His life-long dream has been to become a healer and help the people his uncle, the governor, leads. The revolutionaries who over throw the current government of the Central Allied Worlds have other plans. When the homeworlds of Niall and his classmates don't immediately give support and approval to the revolutionaries, the medical students are labeled enemies of the state and transported to prison.

Despite every effort to stay focused on his first calling, healing and medicine, Niall becomes a leader, first on a prison planet, then on the prison space station known as the Abyss. Every time the government changes hands, he and his friends and then his allies in the prison society are labeled conspirators and sympathizers and condemned to yet more imprisonment.

By the time the Abyss is attacked, Niall and his people have become a force to be reckoned with in their goal of freedom...even if it means turning pirate, like the falsely imprisoned nobleman who once sailed the ancient seas, on a ship called the Vendetta.