Egypt: a country that has recently returned to the ancient tradition of the Pharaohs. The land is once more under the rule of the House of Rameses, and sitting on the throne in Luxor is the Rameses-Variant, a human/machine construct grown from the original DNA of Rameses II, the greatest pharaoh in Egyptian history.1907 and British xenologist George Purbright arrives in Cairo by steam-felucca, summoned there by the Arabic Antiquities Commission. In a secret military storage facility beneath the Sphinx at Giza, he is shown a number of artefacts, recently excavated at the nearby site of Saqqara - pieces of alien technology believed to have crashed there several years before and buried by the shifting Sahara sands: a war machine and what appears to be an alien body, which, much to Purbright's surprise, is still alive.Purbright is keen to study the augmented creature, to attempt to communicate and share information, and at first the AAC are happy for him to do so. But the Rameses-Variant is uneasy, fearful that such a race exists beyond the stars and that his rule might be threatened, and eventually orders that the alien be brutally tortured and disposed of.Before it is killed it gives Purbright a terrifying message - mankind has just seven years left before the end begins.But was the body really alien, or was it some genetically altered human from a future time? Either way, the Rameses-Variant has unknowingly fired the first shots in the Iron War!England, 1939 and the Scarlet Council send two of its best agents - Markham Vale and Gaius Creed - on a top secret mission to North Africa, where they will attempt to cross the border into Egypt.

Since the beginning of the war Egypt has sealed itself off from the outside world, allowing nothing or no one either in or out. But what has it been doing all this time? And are the rumours of dark and secret experiments actually true?Vale and Creed's mission is to infiltrate an area of the country just north of the Sudanese border where reconnaissance photos seem to indicate that massive iron space rockets (codenamed 'The Horus Engines' by the Scarlet Council), built from an alien design and using alien technology, are being assembled and readied for launch. Are these rockets preparing to blast off into space? Is the Rameses-Variant planning to abandon the Earth and take the war to the K'uyth homeworld itself?Or is the K'yuth actually running the country and the rockets are to be used as weapons against the Earth itself? And if so are the rumours that they intend to use the rockets to alter the atmosphere of Earth - to that of their own homeworld - thus wiping out the humans and making a permanent base for themselves, actually true?.