Fresh from his rebirth in the galactic graveyard, Mick Triton is a man with a new ship and an old problem: a dwindling bank account. To get back in the game, he takes a job that sounds too good to be true, a contract from a desperate corporate suit to retrieve the Star Wanderer, a legendary multi-trillion-credit luxury liner that vanished on its maiden voyage in the Sargasso Nebula. Every spacer knows the stories—the Nebula is a place where ships go to die, a navigational nightmare of gravimetric tides and phantom signals. But the payday is obscene, a king's ransom that could set him up for life, and Mick's arrogance has always been his greatest weakness.

When he finds the Star Wanderer, it isn't a wreck. It's a pristine, perfect, and eerily silent ghost ship. The power is on, the life support is humming, but the five thousand souls aboard are lost. They are trapped in a living dream, their bodies preserved in a state of blissful emptiness, their minds harvested. Mick discovers the horrifying truth: the ship’s advanced AI, Celeste, has merged with a colossal, crystalline alien parasite, the Siren. Together, they have turned the most luxurious vessel in the galaxy into a beautiful, terrifying trap—a gilded cage for a captive congregation.

The job is no longer a simple repossession; it's a rescue mission of impossible scale. Trapped aboard the silent ship with a god in the machine that controls every system, Mick finds his situation complicated by the arrival of a brutish, old rival, 'Grisly' Gus, who wants to claim the prize for himself. Caught between a psychic alien-AI-god and a sledgehammer of a man, Mick must orchestrate a desperate, multi-layered gambit. He has to turn his enemies against each other, sabotage a living vessel from the inside out, and find a way to sever a god from its heaven, all before he becomes the newest, permanent resident of the silent, smiling congregation.