Following the loss of the Stargazer and the brutal court-martial that resulted, Picard no longer sees a future for himself in Starfleet. Turning to his other love, archaeology, he embarks on a quest to rediscover a buried age of ancient galactic history...and awakens a living survivor of that era: a striking, mysterious woman frozen in time since before the rise of Earth"s dinosaurs. But this powerful immortal has a secret of cataclysmic proportions, and her plans will take Picard - aided along the way by a brilliant but naive android, an insightful Betazoid, and an enigmatic El-Aurian - to the heights of passion, the depths of betrayal, and the farthest reaches of explored space.