Food doesn't grow easily on New Earth. Much of it arrives on massive supply ships and when one goes missing, the planet's few thousand inhabitants are in grave peril.
Chloe Meeks, a beautiful and gentle soul longing for a human utopia, is a rookie space pilot who doubts her abilities. Putting those insecurities aside, she joins her stern British captain Gordon and Nix, a wise-cracking young man vying for her affections, to find the lost craft.
Dodging asteroids and other dangers in a rickety spaceship, they find the supply vessel drifting, its crew dead. Chloe is soon confronted with the horrifying knowledge that her former lover Amon Earl is responsible. She later learns that New Earth has been quarantined as a galactic threat and even worse, Earl intends to eradicate the few humans remaining as atonement for Earth's demise.
To stop him, Chloe will have to do the unthinkable, murder the man she loved.