For a thousand years, humanity knew only peace. War was a forgotten word, a bloody relic studied only by historians in climate-controlled classrooms. The Commonwealth had engineered aggression out of its society, building a utopia across the stars, a monument to reason and cooperation.

But the peace was a fragile illusion.

Without warning, a fleet of silent, implacable warships descends upon the Outer Rim. The Hydrans have arrived. Their attack is not a war; it is an extermination. Worlds burn, and humanity’s mastery over the physical world shatters in a single day. In the chaos, a society that has forgotten how to fight is faced with an enemy that knows nothing else.

Björn Arason is a historian, a man whose life's work is curating the very savagery his civilization has outgrown. When the bombs fall, his academic knowledge of long-dead conflicts—of Cannae, of blitzkriegs, of asymmetrical warfare—is deemed useless. He is just another terrified civilian, drafted into the newly formed Evacuation Corps and thrown onto a repurposed freighter, the Orion's Tear, destined to be one more casualty in a hopeless retreat.

Hunted by a relentless Hydran warship and commanded by a battle-scarred sergeant who sees them as little more than cannon fodder, Björn and his squad of misfits—a stubborn cargo-hauler, a terrified comms tech, and a quiet botanist—are humanity's last, desperate hope. They are outgunned, outmaneuvered, and fighting an enemy whose technology seems invincible and whose cruelty is absolute.

But in the terror of first contact, Björn begins to see patterns the soldiers do not. He recognizes the enemy's tactics from his history lessons. He realizes that the key to survival isn't in superior firepower, but in superior strategy—in rediscovering the brutal, brilliant art of war that humanity tried so hard to forget. The lessons of Earth's forgotten battles hold the secret to the Hydrans' one critical flaw.

Now, the historian must become a hunter. He must convince a fleet of refugees to turn and fight, to wager everything on a dead man's strategy. For in the cold, unforgiving dark, humanity's survival depends not on what it has become, but on everything it once was.

The final history lesson is about to be written in fire and steel.