For Orenthal James Farmholder, the universe was meant to be a place of quiet wonder. On the sheltered agricultural world of Ceres Prime, his hands knew the intricate rhythms of hydroponic farms, while his mind soared on the smuggled poetry and forgotten science of a lost Earth. He was a boy who could coax life from engineered soil and see a symphony in the flow of water and light. But the galaxy he dreamed of was a beautiful, fragile lie, and the real universe, the one of iron and blood, was coming for him.

When the hulking warship Devastator blots out his sun, Oren’s peaceful world is shattered. Impressed into the insatiable Terran Galactic Navy, he is violently torn from his home and thrown into a brutal training asteroid named Purgatory, a place designed to grind boys into obedient, expendable parts for the war machine. To survive the calculated cruelty of his instructors, Oren learns to hide his intellect, to become a ghost in the system, a quiet observer in a universe of noise and pain.

Assigned to the T.G.N.S. Reliant, a battered destroyer known to its crew as the “Bullet Magnet,” he is plunged into the relentless grind of a losing war against the terrifyingly alien Kronath. In the dark, humming guts of the dying ship, he discovers a strange truth: the complex systems of a warship are not so different from those of his farm. While others see only chaos, Oren begins to see patterns, to hear a fatal rhythm in the enemy’s perfect song of destruction.

Now, as the entire Terran fleet sails into a perfectly laid trap at Epsilon Staude, facing annihilation from a new and horrifying Kronath weapon that unravels ships molecule by molecule, the high command is blind and the captains are resigned to their fate. The only hope lies in a secret held by a forgotten farm boy in the belly of the most disposable ship in the fleet. It is a desperate, impossible theory born not of military tactics, but of a half-remembered lesson about sunlight, soil, and the subtle frequencies that ward off pests. Can a farmer’s ingenuity turn the tide of an unwinnable war? And what will be left of Orenthal James Farmholder when he pays the price for his unique and terrible knowledge?