Eons ago, a war was fought to the death between the parasitic and ferocious Vang and a gifted but doomed race. As a last resort, these gentle beings were forced to use the Starhammer to smash the Vang spacefleets and homeworld, leaving only a handful of survivors. For a billion years a silvery shape drifted through space. More than three thousand years after humanity first went to the stars, an asteroid miner named Seed of Hope was illegally prospecting for radioactives in the Forbidden Areas of the saskatch star system. There it chanced across an alluring silvery object which looked like it would fetch a good price in the market for alien antiques. It was an encounter most of the crew would never remember.