After the novel being out of print and hard to find for over a decade, Palmer made arrangements with Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press in 2018 to have his works reprinted.

By the time the narrative opens, Candy has acquired a high school education, some college, and learned karate, having achieved her Fifth Degree Black Belt from her neighbor, 73-year-old Soo Kim McDivott, who she is led to believe is merely a retired schoolteacher.

With international relations rapidly deteriorating, Candy's father, publicly a small-town pathologist but secretly a government biowarfare expert, is called to Washington.

With pet bird Terry, a Hyacinthine macaw, her "lifelong retarded, adopted twin brother," who tends to "parrot" Candy's words even before she speaks, she survives the attack in the shelter beneath their house.

First the hunt turns up "Adam", a cheeky, irrepressibly punning, multitalented 13-year-old boy, who immediately sets out to win Candy's heart; next, Rollo Jones, a middle-aged physician with a broad history of survival-in-the-wilds experience ranging from a stint in the Peace Corps to mountain climbing; and finally, Kim Melon, an early-20s mom whose background is in computer engineering with Lisa, her six-year-old daughter.

They have identified those who wiped out mankind, the Bratstvo, translated as the "Brotherhood", a cabal of H. sapiens, working from inside the Russian military to destroy all H. post hominems.

At this point, however, the AAs' plans have come unstuck: They have modified the Hale to reach geosynch orbit, though it is a one-way, suicide voyage for the crew; but the miniature robot handler they have built to penetrate the bomb-carrying rocket and disarm the doomsday device is not up to the task.

Then she resets the navigational computer to land on the dry lake at Edwards Air Force Base and tries to secure herself against a bulkhead in preparation for the stresses of reentry.

The author has left a number of threads trailing at the conclusion, some of which are followed-up on 25 years later in a sequel entitled Tracking, serialized in Analog Science and Fact magazine in the summer and fall of 2008.

The book is a first-person narrative, written in the form of Candy's journal, in telegraphic style, which is based on the means employed by those sending telegrams to save money.

[5] Dave Langford reviewed Emergence for White Dwarf #92, and stated that "Finale close-run victory of narrative thrust over blatant plot devices (doomsday weapon access hatch big enough for space-suited eleven year old only, carrier vehicle handily reprogrammable to enable safe landing ... ).