James Enoch and Lania Surkov couldn't be more different. The first is an overconfident but jaded archaeologist who believes he can do everything himself; the latter is a disgraced Chief Engineer with no desire beyond restoring her prior standing and returning to Earth. These unlikely allies find themselves awoken in the year 3535 after a century-long journey to an exoplanet called Cambridge II, where they are tasked with a simple mission: shutting off a beacon that is broadcasting Earth's location to the cosmos. The Terran Coalition, a government encompassing the whole solar system, believes that a hostile alien race destroyed life on Cambridge millennia before and that the same civilization could come back to exterminate humans similarly. However, after an emergency crash landing, the team is shocked to discover settlers from pre-Coalition Earth have already made Cambridge a home.

Personalities clash and loyalties are tested as the Coalition pressures James and Lania to complete their mission, even if shutting down the beacon could destroy the lives of the planet's human inhabitants. When the Coalition dispatches a military fleet to enforce their supposed superiority, the pair must decide between duty to the Coalition and loyalty to humanity before all-out war erupts between these polarized factions.