For decades the Thousand Worlds traded goods, sentients and ideas to the benefit of nearly everyone. The lone worm in the interplanetary apple was the dreaded Taranok Empire using the gate system to bring hundreds of worlds under their tyrannical control, the non-Taranok and therefore inferior life forms enslaved, tortured for sport or merely exterminated. The only threat to the Taranok Empire's absolute dominance was Jan Youngblood, the one man holding the key to the infamous gate system. Youngblood's sole ambition was to defy the empire and save his family--and to reach ancient Earth once more!