A light-hearted science fiction novel about first contact, exploration, and desperately trying not to screw up from an up-and-coming sci-fi author. On humanity's first extra-solar mission, the exploration vessel Magellan, or as she prefers "Maggie," discovers an alien artifact. Deciding that finding advanced alien life is too important to ignore, Captain Allison Ridgeway chooses to return to Earth while ordering her crew to reverse engineer technology far beyond anything back home. Meanwhile, at mission control, the governments struggle to maintain the existence of aliens a secret while also combating bureaucracy, the military industrial complex, and everyone else who wants a piece of the science that could skyrocket humanity into a new technological golden age. Little does everyone involved know that the bumbling of a few highly evolved apes in space hasn't gone unnoticed and the people of Earth have put themselves on a collision course with a far wider, and potentially hostile, galaxy.