Gideon De Souza is the youngest colony commander ever to be appointed in the history of space exploration. Decorated war hero and favoured son of the space administration CASPAR and its masonic inner circle, Clan Octagon, he assumes his new role on the remote planet of Anskar, where a human settlement co-exists peacefully with a race of alien cats known as the Felinians, who are not indigenous to Anskar but settled there centuries before, and have sinced retrogressed into a semi-primitive society. Warned of the Felinians mesmerising charm by the old outgoing commander, Gideon ignores this advice, breaking CASPAR protocols and forming an intense and eventually intensely sexual relationship with the Felinian queen, the beautiful and seductive Lilianthi.

Under Lilianthi's influence, Gideon questions for the first time the iron hand with which CASPAR controls its colony worlds, becoming disillusioned by their motives, and courts a group of independence activists, the kind of people that he had once sworn to destroy in CASPAR's name. Betrayed by the machinations of Anskar's eccentric and powerful Sukhov-Matshiba Corporation representative, two hundred year old Anton Sherekov, Gideon is lured back to Earth by the death of his family in a space accident, and is charged with protocol crimes by his fellow members of Clan Octagon. During his interrogation and torture he is told of CASPAR's plans for Anskar - to expand the colony, evict the Felinians, and turn it into a new Earth, a new home planet. Aided by independence activists at great risk, Gideon escapes and returns covertly to Anskar, where he finds martial law has been declared and Sherekov in control. The Felinian forest city has been attacked and torched, and the alien refugees and the human freedom fighters have allied themselves against the forces loyal to CASPAR and Sherekov. They await Gideon's return to lead them in battle against Sherekov.

But CASPAR sends a battle fleet commanded by the mad Admiral Wargryphon to support Sherekov's regime, and Gideon's small force finds itself hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. Their only hope is in the efforts of a group of young Felinians who have travelled to the neighbouring island of Nessus, a place sacred to the cats, on a quest to find the lost secrets and science of the Felinians, the science that brought them to Anskar from their dying homeworld and may now provide the key to save them all.......