Tiona picks up six years after the end of Vaz. Tiona, Vaz's daughter, is starting grad school in physics, has a "bad boy" musician boyfriend, and does her own strange variety of charity work at a homeless shelter. Her professor has her start work on a project to try to achieve high temperature superconduction by doping the graphene membranes her lab partner has figured out how to precipitate. Oddly, her experiments are plagued by bizarre movements in the membranes when she applies current to them. When she mentions the movements to Vaz, he soon determines that her "problem" represents a physics breakthrough that could result in the production of a "reactionless drive" capable of lifting a craft into space.