Billingate: illegal shipyard, haven for pirates and brigands, where every vice flourishes and every appetite can be sated... gateway to the alien realm of the Amnion and clearinghouse for all they require to fulfill their mutagenic plans against humanity.

It is here that beautiful UMCP cop Morn Hyland is about to be traded to the Amnion by the buccaneer Nick Succorso - an act of profiteering and revenge that pushes his crew to mutiny. Now Nick's survival depends on retrieving Morn's sixteen-year-old son 'force-grown' by the Amnion, a boy struggling to gain his identity. To accomplish the rescue, Nick must turn to his mortal enemy Angus Thermopyle. Irrevocably altered, programmed for an unknown purpose, Thermopyle has apparently escaped captivity and fled to Billingate with the infamous double-dealer, Milos Taverner. Together, they will mount a raid against a man called the Bill, illegal spaceport owner and traitor to the human race - and into the center of the most heavily defended shipyard in the universe.

At Billingate the stage is set for confrontation, when the fate of Morn Hyland is to be decided in a kaleidoscopic whirl of plot and counterplot, treachery and betrayal.