Organisms from an Ancient Cosmos

An alien spacecraft the size of a city appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, provoking the world’s military forces to join together in a cataclysmic battle. The conflict ends with the ship reduced to wreckage and scattered across the ocean floor, at the cost of countless military and civilian casualties. Amongst those killed is the fiancée of Carlton Land, a billionaire whose attempt to treat his grief with drugs and alcohol ends in a drunk driving accident in which a woman and her children are killed. Land is sentenced to ten years in prison, but before entering incarceration, he pledges his entire fortune to the creation of Operation: World Safeguard, an organization devoted to studying the alien’s technology in order to construct a vessel capable of ferrying human astronauts on a diplomatic mission to galaxies beyond our own.