 Alicia DeVries had retired to Mathison's World, a remote fringe world of the Terran Empire - a puissant interstellar polity sprawling over several sectors, and bordered by the hostile and alien Rishathan Sphere ("the Lizards"), both of which are bordered by the Quarn Hegemony ("the Spiders"), a race of fanatic businessmen allied with the humans against the Rishathan, reputedly because the Rishathan cannot take a joke.Alicia forced her retirement at so young an age after she'd taken a royal prisoner that felt honor bound to disclose the traitor in the midst of the Empire's military intelligence establishment, the traitor who'd sent her unit into a deliberate trap and so had undoubted culpability in getting most all of her former unit killed in the prior operation.Her retirement had been quiet and idyllic, until the day an extremely brutal group of space pirates razed her world and landed at her homestead, killing her younger brother, grandfather and parents.