The virus optimizes life forms it infects for survival changing them, often rapidly, in response to environmental pressures.

The primary characters are: Erlin Tazer Three Indomial, a 240-year-old doctor and xenobiologist who has come to Spatterjay hoping to find her old lover Captain Ambel and seeking a new meaning in her increasingly boring life Janer Cord Anders, an 'eternal tourist' paid by a hornet hive-mind to travel the universe and carry hornet observers to new planets.

Sable Keech a thousand-year-old reification (a dead body reanimated by cybernetics) seeking the last of the eight people he swore to bring to justice for crimes against humanity during the Prador war.

When he was human, Jay lead a ruthless and sadistic gang of pirates named ″The Eight″.

Their primary goal was trade with the alien Prador in human slaves, via removal of higher brain functions and spinal columns and implanting Prador thrall devices into their central nervous system.