Conn Maxwell is home, but he’s a stranger in his own skin. Returning to Poictesme after years on Terra, he finds a landscape of beautiful decay, where the glory of the System States War has been replaced by poverty and piracy.
The local populace is obsessed with a phantom: Merlin, a legendary strategic computer that could bring prosperity back to the stars. To his community, Merlin is a savior; to Conn, Merlin is a myth. Yet, looking at the crumbling infrastructure and the desperate faces of his kin, Conn sees an opportunity. Alongside his father, he embarks on a high-stakes gamble: using the legend of the machine to fund a grander, more dangerous scheme of salvage and exploration.