They thought the war was over . . . the enemy had other ideas.

Two years after the end of the Psi War, Caleb Mitchell is Emperor in all but name, leading his armies on a crusade to cleanse the colony worlds and Earth itself of the last of the psionic madmen known as the Changed.

But the citizens of the Commonwealth weren't the only ones devastated by the war; the criminal cartels in the Pirate Worlds are in chaos, their trade cut off, their resources running out.

A young warlord named Amos Dobrev rises up to unite the cartels into a union they call the Syndicate. He builds an army of psionic supermen and tries to carve out his own kingdom among the former Commonwealth colonies.

Dobrev says they are only doing what they have to do to survive. Mitchell considers Dobrev a threat who needs to be put down before he destroys everything that's left.

And caught in the middle is Randall Munroe, Mitchell's right-hand man, trying to decide whether the bigger threat is an outlaw Syndicate . . . or the power of Cal Mitchell's Imperium.