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The protagonist of the book is Colonel Reid Malenfant, USAF and former NASA Space Shuttle pilot, who has been awakened from a rudimentary cryonic suspension and experiencing a severe case of culture shock in the mid-24th Century. He has been awakened because his wife Emma, although apparently from a different timeline, requires rescuing from Phobos, where she is believed to have died in 2004. Malenfant is accompanied on his mission by Bartholemew, a medical android with a particularly caustic sense of humour, and Greggson Deirdre, a childishly enthusiastic yet ambitious young woman who desires to see what lies beyond Earth. While Malenfant is the viewpoint character for the vast majority of the book, Deirdre is quite obviously the heroine, since she is the one who makes most of the decisions and the different sections of the book refer to ‘her’ not ‘him’.