The Commandos team up with Navy Chief Admiral Gray Jack Dundee on a mission to eliminate raiders from the aptly named Pirate Stars. Sogan assumes command of Dundee’s battleship to fight one of the most challenging duels of his life against a Pirate Stars opponent. If successful, the unit must depart for what is likely to prove a suicidal assault on the heavily armed renegade base supporting the enemy battlecraft. Even as they struggle in space, a new threat has developed at home. The fact that Sogan survived his execution has at last been discovered by his former associates. Four of them are on-world, and they question what to do about him, whether to ignore or eliminate him, while the Emperor himself conceives a very different plan for his disgraced former admiral.