How can the people of Earth reach the stars? One faction prefers the slow but safe method of sending a colony ship with its passengers and crew cryogenically frozen. The voyage will take 75 years, and the colonists will awaken as anachronisms, but the technique has been tested and can be depended on. Not everyone is willing to accept exile from friends and family as the price of interstellar travel. Two of the Saunder children- Brenna Saunder and Morgan Saunder McKelvey- have thrown the resources of the vast Saunder empire into developing a faster-than-light propulsion system which would permit people to travel freely within the universe during their normal lifetimes. So far, on unmanned test vehicles, it works. But its first manned test ends in a terrifying explosion, killing Morgan's parents. Brenna's lover, Derek, loses faith in faster-than-light travel, joins the crew of the colony ship, and urges Brenna to do the same. And now Brenna, caught between her lover's pleas and the project she has already sacrificed so much for, risks losing not merely Derek- but Earth's path to the stars as well....