On Treelight Colony, nothing is what it seems.

Treelight Colony has enjoyed more than a hundred years of peaceful, agrarian life, in isolation from the rest of the civilized galaxy. But now they have been bought by the unsavory Pesc Corporation, who plan to drag them into the modern world and make them part of the interstellar family.

Pesc sends Marja Sienko, a social engineer on her first assignment, along with her corporate slave and a robotic secretary, to prepare the colonists to be modernised. But it isn't long before Marja suspects that the Corporation has something else in mind - something both sinister and mysterious. And she is meant to play a part in their plans - not as their delegate but as their victim.

While Marja struggles to modernise landowners who prefer to live like medieval vassals, the Star Brothers arrive for their periodic visit to check on the colony diocese, and Brother Brendan Stillman and his two semi-civilised Lost Rythan "helpers" discover that something is rotten in the "peaceful" colony of Treelight. Highwaymen abound, the bishop knows more than he's telling, and a group of "druids" have formed a symbiotic relationship with the surrounding forest.

Brother Brendan's superior, Father Moto, deploys Dust, a former criminal turned hacker, to snoop through the Pesc Corporation's files to discover what's really afoot, while, back on Treelight, the native forest - whose "trees" are more than mere vegetation - slowly toils to reclaim the planet as its own.

When the truth comes out, it means life will never be the same again for any of them.