Earth. I never thought I’d ever miss the place.

Granted, it wasn’t much near the end. Little blue ball of dirt and mostly water, in a corner of a small galaxy at the ass end of the universe. Five billion years it spun around in space, and then we managed to fill it up with a hundred billion of our species in just fifty millennia. Spoiled water, lousy air, mostly dead oceans. And what we didn’t ruin, we fought over incessantly, killing each other by the millions over the centuries as our technology far outpaced our ability to keep the vestigial lizard parts of our brains in check.

The alien forces known as the Lankies are gathering on the solar system’s edge, consolidating their conquest of Mars and setting their sights on Earth. The far-off colony of New Svalbard, cut off from the rest of the galaxy by the Lanky blockade, teeters on the verge of starvation and collapse. The forces of the two Earth alliances have won minor skirmishes but are in danger of losing the war. For battle-weary staff sergeant Andrew Grayson and the ragged forces of the North American Commonwealth, the fight for survival is entering a catastrophic new phase.

Forging an uneasy alliance with their Sino-Russian enemies, the NAC launches a hybrid task force on a long shot: a stealth mission to breach the Lanky blockade and reestablish supply lines with Earth. Plunging into combat against a merciless alien species that outguns, outmaneuvers, and outfights them at every turn, Andrew and his fellow troopers could end up cornered on their home turf, with no way out and no hope for reinforcement. And this time the struggle for humanity’s future can end only in either victory or annihilation.

No, things are not looking good for humanity. The theoretical worst-case scenario has finally caught up with us. If things don’t turn around, we are looking at the extinction of our species within the next year, maybe two.

But we are humans. We are obstinate, stubborn, belligerent, unreasonable. And we are doing what most sentient creatures do when you corner them and leave them no avenue of escape: We bare our claws and our teeth, and we go on the attack.

It’s not looking good for the home team!

The aliens have been very industrious. They go to a colonized and terraformed planet with their seemingly indestructible seed ships, kill off the human “vermin”, and set up shop. They have taken over most of our frontier worlds. Now they have moved into our solar system and they’re wiping out our settlement on Mars. Relatively speaking, that’s just a couple spits’ worth of distance from Earth.

Mars and its 20+ million colonists are dead – or close to dead. Human outposts and communications are either destroyed or isolated. It this system on the brink, Andrew Grayson and the forced of the North American Commonwealth in desperate alliance wit the Sino-Russian Confederation make a last ditch attempt to hold off the Lankies lest Earth itself be destroyed.