Honor Harrington is in trouble: Having made her superior look like a fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her.

Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out-of-the-way picket station.

The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens. Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling, the merchant cartels want her head; the star-conquering, so-called "Republic" of Haven is Up to Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over-age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system.

But the people out to get her have made one mistake. They've made her mad!

Emma Watson, a research physician, has been training for the mission of a lifetime: to study living organisms in the microgravity of space. But the true and lethal nature of the experiment has not been revealed to NASA, and once aboard the space station, things start to go wrong.

A culture of single-celled Archaeons, gathered from the deep sea, begins to rapidly multiply and infect the crew - with deadly and agonizing results. As her estranged husband and the ground crew at NASA work against the clock to launch a rescue, Emma struggles to contain the lethal microbe.

With the contagion threatening Earth's population, there are those who would leave the astronauts stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station. Emma must race against time to prevent a catastrophe.