The human colony on the planet Argo, in the Pollux system, has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an alien race. The Argonauts, as the human colonists call them, have been gone for hundreds of thousands of years due to some calamitous event that devastated their civilization.But when an archaeology team stumbles into an ancient military installation, they accidentally activate a terrible weapon: a weapon that will destroy the entire colony, and its star, if they cannot discover how to deactivate it.Evidence at the site suggests that the weapon was created for the ancient Argonauts by another race, a race of star-faring traders. When the documentation is deciphered by the experts, they see a map of the ancient interstellar trading empire, and the coordinates of the main trading station - a place that every human child on Argo knows because it is the setting of the most famous of the translated Argonaut stories."The Spider Star is no star, and the Spider Star is no planet, but it is a place anyway, and its golden heart is the source of all good and evil. But mostly evil. For that which comes last, colors all that has come before."Since the information is a hundred thousand years out-of-date, the only hope for Argo is to send a ship and crew into the unknown to find the Spider Star and try to negotiate for a way to shut down the weapon. Read Less