"Refugee, criminal, and linguist Sean Wren is made an offer he knows he can't refuse: life in prison, 'voluntary' military service--or salvaging data in a long-dead language from an abandoned ship filled with traps and monsters, just days before it's destroyed in a supernova... In the bowels of the derelict ship, surrounded by horrors and dead men, Sean slowly uncovers the truth of what happened on the ship, in its final days and the terrible secret it's hiding"--