This millennium spanning, galaxy crossing, epic story is full of fast moving action and thrilling intrigue. Star pilot Art King and navy engineer Yelena Kolowski are on the Most Wanted List for hijacking a tiny alien ship. Actually, the vessel has a mind of its own, although it has amnesia. The young couple and the ship are on the run from of the Empire, the most powerful and ruthless kingdom in human history. Far flung humanity is recovering from a plague virus, which drove artificial intelligence computers mad, made hyper flight travel impossible and left millions of worlds isolated. In the post-plague era, most people have an enduring fear of machine intelligence. So, an alien ship which can talk, think and make its own decisions is a frightening prospect. The Empire views the ship as a potential super weapon, as it can emerge from hyper flight directly above a planet, something no other vessel can do. The ship, itself, thinks its purpose is to save humanity, if only it could remember how. Art and Yelena travel from planet to planet trying to restore the ship's memories and find the strange vessel's home world. Meanwhile, the strange ship is not the only artefact left behind by the aliens. The survivors of a shipwrecked colony ship find a mysterious anomaly orbiting a planet and another on the surface. They have no idea what the grey floating ovals are for until a researcher falls into one and discovers a network of gateways, criss-crossing the galaxy. Means of Escape is the first volume of Spinward, an unputdownable trilogy of epic action, space opera adventure and galaxy spanning perspectives.