Caryn begins the saga of the MacDowell family some thousand years in our future. She is strong, tall, beautiful and a woman of action as well as intellect. Becoming an orphan while in high school, she decided on the most dangerous and potentially rewarding human profession - a Scoutship captain. Her discoveries have made her wealthy. She only lacks a family - the one thing that was robbed from her so many years before. And she hasn't the slightest idea of what is coming in her already illustrious career. Something outside the wildest imagination of any human alive.