As a post-war consequence, the US loses all ground west of the Mississippi River as American-claimed western lands secede from the Union and create their own sovereign countries in the wake of the victorious South.

Along with this altered timeline came a slowed development of technology keeping the world of July 1987 at a roughly 1940s level, as no jet engines, television, atomic weapons, nor computers were ever invented (with the exception of command logic machines), but helicopters do exist without turbine propulsion and the preferred means of telecommunications in this time is by VHF radio.

A decorated but disgraced Imperial Russian Army Major, Gregori has left the military for a maritime life in Southeastern Alaska and has a sport fishing boat which he uses for charters and occasional smuggling.

It turns out that Gregori's native Alaskan rescuers are revolutionaries called the Dené Republik that seek to liberate their Yukon lands and Alaska itself from Imperial Russia which has driven them away from their home for hundreds of years.

At first the rebels are outnumbered in the face of the Imperial forces, but after successful attacks against fortified colonial towns, capturing weapons, recruiting more people of Alaska against Imperialist rule, and military assistance from the US and California, it appears victory for independence is plausible.

[5] Publishers Weekly praised Compton's "depiction of warfare under extreme arctic conditions" as "horrifyingly realistic and vivid", and noted the "plausible backstory" for the timeline.