Book excerpt: Historically, evolution moves at a slow place, with advances made by incremental steps. Occasionally, however, when circumstances permit, a massive leap catapults a species into a different future. Now, ten thousand years into such a future, humanity has evolved into a barely recognizable form, with the ability to manifest multiple personal entitieseach with a distinctly different physical identity. The Exiger hegemony has exploited this evolutionary springboard, giving it virtually irresistible military, political, and even social advantage as it seeks the utter subjugation of the galaxy. Commander Solon Draco lost his parents at ten, and that experience shaped his entire future. As an adult, he dedicates his life to the military. For his own reasons, he chooses to display only one personality, a single-minded drive that has propelled him through the ranks. When Draco learns that the bearer of the genetic leap that founded his race and the Exiger Empire thousands of years ago has discovered a means to eliminate the change, he is dispatched into the past, leading an interstellar battle fleet from an even more distant future to foil this plan. He knows that if this crucial change is eliminated, he, his whole race, and the future they populate will vanish in an instant. As adversaries who are millennia apart race against time on a mission that will carry them to the very end of time, everything hangs in the balance. What path will humanity tread into the unknown future?