Description:Young Midshipman Ichiro Sato joined the Terran Navy to escape a tyrannical father and find freedom among the stars. He had no idea when he boarded the survey starship Aurora for his first assignment that he and his crew would make humanity's first contact with a sentient alien species. In an uncharted star system where Aurora's crew discovers two planets inhabited by a non-human civilization, Aurora is disabled by gigantic alien starships before she can escape. Boarded by nightmarish blue-skinned warriors with claws and fangs, the aliens learn all there is to know about the ship, including all its stored information about humanity, before the crew is slaughtered in a series of ritual combats. Ichiro, the sole survivor, is returned to Earth as a messenger to warn of the aliens' coming invasion of human space.For that is the Way of the Kreelan Empire, an ancient and dying race that has waged war across the galaxy for a hundred thousand years, slaughtering every sentient species it...