In a galaxy ravaged by a fifty-year war against the relentless, insectoid Kryll, veteran Sergeant Cal Rourke is a man hollowed out by endless slaughter. Plucked from a battlefield apocalypse, he's offered a terrifying "opportunity": Project Chimera. To turn the tide, humanity's last desperate gamble involves bonding elite soldiers with Kryll symbionts, creating monstrously powerful super-warriors. Cal and his unit become something more, and terrifyingly less, than human, wielding alien power at the cost of their sanity and souls. But as they unleash their enhanced abilities on the enemy, they discover the Kryll are far more than mindless berserkers, and the true nature of their new power holds a horrifying secret.

Thrust into the heart of the Kryll hive, Cal's unit uncovers a truth far more insidious than High Command ever imagined – a vast, ancient alien intelligence with a chilling purpose for the galaxy. As their experimental enhancements become their greatest vulnerability and betrayal strikes from their own side, Cal must confront not only the alien enemy but the monster within. Hunted by both the Kryll and the very forces that created him, Cal faces a final, desperate choice: surrender to the alien, or fight for the last vestiges of a humanity already sacrificed. Can one broken soldier expose a conspiracy that reaches to the stars, or will he become just another ghost in the machine of war?