Three hundred and forty years after two kids with a wormhole beat the first crewed mission to Mars and made starflight obsolete, a worn-down professor on a backwater world watches a distant sun blink out of existence—enclosed, instantly, by something vast and deliberate. Risking his pension and his marriage, Dudley Bose travels to a rogue colleague's telescope to confirm the impossible, while a terrorist quietly assembles an arsenal and the ageless investigator hunting him claws her way out of a rejuvenation tank to pick up a century-old trail. When Dudley finally goes public, the man who was once beaten to Mars comes knocking with an offer—and a question hangs over everything: someone caged a star, and no one knows whether it was to keep a threat out, or in.

[Internal Reference: PS101-06-07_ProResHQ [Successful Captions]]