After some meddling on the part of the Admiralty, many of the Academy's best are assigned to the oldest, smallest hulk in the Wargame, the unfortunately named corvette Chihuahua. Thanks to a genius engineer, an Army veteran loaned to the Navy for the war game, and an unconventional captain, they make a new discovery which turns her into the most valuable warship in the fleet: The first ever Shieldclad warship. The crew abruptly finds itself center stage in a real combat action, however, when Earth is attacked by an unknown foe, and a lone squadron of these once-mothballed ships is the Alliance's only hope to respond…

    It's heading for Earth at twelve thousand miles per hour...and it will land virtually undetected. For Jack McAllister, a young writer who has finally launched a career for himself, it begins tragically: his estranged father, a former NASA engineer, dies suddenly at his home in Merriweather, Indiana, leaving Jack's Alzheimer's-stricken mother a widow. But in the wake of personal heartbreak, he's confronted by an even more astonishing event--the covert landing of an alien machine in the forest just a few miles outside of town. Now Jack must unmask the true purpose of the otherworldly device that has begun a detailed environmental survey of the woods. Aided by the town's young and resilient female deputy sheriff, he soon discovers that the alien scout is only one small part of a much larger operation, and the countdown to a terrifying global catastrophe is about to take place. Drawing deeply from his father’s scientific influence, all while attempting to avoid the snares of a sexy, seductive and scheming local TV reporter, Jack uncovers—and ultimately finds himself an unwilling component of—an alien plan set to terminate life on Earth as we know it.