Book excerpt: On Monday, September 17, 1860, near Carbonwood, a small mining town located in Northern California, tragedy strikes. Mine worker Silas Jeremiah Baldwin is killed after an unusually bizarre encounter with another individual. Baldwins death initiates a series of historical events that will in time allow three modern day high school teenagers to come into possession of two devices. The second device, a gravitational force-based weapon called the extraspatial otivicon, is inconceivably more powerful than any other weapon in the known galaxy. The teenagers possession of this device is bringing upon them adverse difficulties, even as police officials and military officials are after them. Yet, a greater threat is facing them all. Two enormously powerful, yet opposing alien forces are coming to retrieve this fearsome device. Inadvertently, these teenagers have found themselves caught in the middle of a raging interstellar conflict that has engulfed numerous inhabited worlds and is precipitating the rise of a galactic empire. In a high-suspense story spanning four centuries and involving numerous planetary civilizations; the creation of the galaxys most powerful weapon, murderous betrayal and one individuals insatiable craving for absolute power are the explosive catalysts that is pushing the entire inhabited galaxy toward its deadliest conflict.