For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. From 4,500 years in our future, Bree Matthews and Jude LeClaire would wrinkle their noses at such a basic theorem, dismissing it with almost scornful laughter, considering it as hardly worthy of being taught as a first principle. Even such sayings as "power accretes to power" or "when great forces clash, the gods rise from their restless slumbers and take notice" would appear as trite and boring clichés. If only that could be true.
Much like the cataclysmic but invisible forces that undergird wormhole transit, the race between Old Earth and Galileo to develop the next generation of interstellar transportation draws the attention of others, those formidable and potent in their own right, hidden, and biding their time.
At the centre of this great contest are Alexis Romachenko, a scion of Old Earth and the leader of its World Council, and the Silva, an order comprised solely of women and the chief power on the world of Galileo. Though these two competitors have agreed to combine forces to jointly solve the last of the engineering problems they individually are facing in constructing their own wormhole generators, each is scheming to renege on their agreement and bring ruin to the other. And the means to that subterfuge is Jude LeClaire.
Despite all that she has accomplished and personally sacrificed to provide the Silva with a new means to create an enhanced wormhole system, she feels herself betrayed by the Sisterhood. As part of the secret negotiations with Old Earth, she is required to marry Alexis. Against her will. Against her desire for freedom, Against her nascent and growing love for Bree Matthews.
Like Jude, Bree is another child prodigy. However, unlike her, he was born into squalor and poverty, never enjoying the least of even the simplest of pleasures Jude has taken for granted every day of her life. For he is a leveller. Unknown to the general population of Galileo, a people exist below the surface of their planet, incarcerated there by the Silva for crimes purportedly committed by their ancestors more than two thousand years ago. For long generations, the levellers have sought to escape the warrens where they have been eking out their miserable existences, each added year only intensifying their hatred for their oppressors.
Bree knows he has every right to loath Jude, but he follows after her once she is forced to depart from Galileo, hoping to rescue her. Though it comes at a great personal cost. He abandons his younger brother, Wynn, who is being tortured by Bree's former sponsor, Head Cadia Janus Torian. And knowingly, he willingly gives up his plans to free the levellers, and leaves his personal droid, Theo, to fend for himself as it is attacked by other mechanical intelligences controlled by the Silva. Bree, in his budding love for Jude, wants to give her what they each have long desired: a future based on their own free choices.
Notwithstanding their prodigious intellectual talents, both Bree and Jude are unaware of the machinations occurring all around them that have only one intended outcome: their deaths.
Yet, even as Old Earth and the Silva seek to deceive and ultimately betray each other, there are other forces arising and moving to work against these two competitors: individuals who have their own grievances and purposes from as long as millennia ago and their own plans for Bree and Jude. Their futures, as well as that of Old Earth, the Silva, the levellers and even humanity itself hangs in the balance.
