A diplomat trapped in a war for survival. Now the Cyborgs want to take her and her team apart atom by atom. Caught up in the Federation’s response to the Cyborg raid, Kate and her courier spaceship speed to a noncombat sector to free up Navy combat vessels – and drop out of flickerspace onto a fleet of ten Cyborg warships in the opening clash of the Cyborg-Federation war. Kate and her crew’s willingness to innovate, use untested, experimental weapons, and unleash their lightning-fast AI defeats the fleshbots in several desperate battles but cannot help them when the wily borgs, who can kill them with their bare hands, demand negotiations with the “only flesh units they respect.”