It couldn't happen again.

Not in your lifetime, you say. Not in this, the first quarter of the 21st Century.

If that's what you think, you'd better take another look around.

Media manipulation has become mind control -- and mind control, an art -- Secret treaties have been made in back rooms, on the Internet, and in Secret laboratories. The power of the Second Alliance has coalesced, and terrorism institutionalized. New concentration camps bring "Ethnic Cleansing" to a terrifying intensity. The Second Alliance stands poised to conquer the ruins of Europe with a brutality .

Your only hope is the New Resistance. People like:

• Dance Torrence and his fellow urban warriors on Earth
• Claire Rimpler on the L5 colony, FirStep
• Smoke, the damaged visionary
• Alouette, a precocious cyber-jacked little girl on the cutting edge on a strange new frontier of human collective-consciousness -- the Entelechy