Branded terrorists and on the run from the Fleet, ex-Marines Carmina Serra and Charlie Carter and mining superstar Zia Hollywood crash land on Lucifer, a planet at the end of the universe. Populated by two warring factions a religious cult and a crime syndicate Lucifer is blighted with a spate of murders that threaten to plunge the planet into civil war.

Relegated to oversee the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland deals with persistent malfunctions and communication interference from a toxic purple star. He reaches out to the universe using an old-fashioned space radio and gets a strange signal - a woman's voice that echoes across a thousand light-years of space. Is the transmission a random bit of static or a warning of an undying menace?