Twenty years after the end of the Cyborg War, the last cyborgs try to hijack a starship on its way to terraform an alien world. They want the new colony to be a cyborg colony in which they will rebuild their strength and practice their way of life. During the fighting, though, the starship is damaged, so that instead of travelling light years across space it ends up a billion years in the future, alongside a planet Earth that is near the end of its life.
The cyborgs, momentarily defeated, leave the ship in a captured landing craft and go down to the planet, but before they go they sabotage the ship so that it is no longer able to support life. The crew have no choice but to follow them down to the planet where they have to fight not just the cyborgs but also forms of life a billion years more evolved than humans. Creatures that have grown tough and hardy in an attempt to cope with the increasingly harsh conditions that prevail there.
As if things weren't bad enough, there is conflict among the ship's crew as they fight to decide which of them will be in charge and how they will meet the challenges facing them, and even if they survive all this they will still have to deal with the discovery of the ultimate fate that awaits all intelligent life in the universe...
