Following a disturbing message from the Soviet Union's counterpart to Majestic, Bach assembles a team that includes Loengard, Juliet and Army Major Colin Powell to investigate. While the team discovers most of Aura-Z's personnel are dead, they find a pair of researchers who survived. As Ludmilla and Pavel tell of experiments with prisoners that backfired and of the convicts who are now holding the head of Aura-Z and Juliet's mentor, Colonel Dmitri Mironov, back in the US, Bach enlists astronomer Carl Sagan in an effort to find the Hive's home planet.