When an experimental shuttlecraft fails, Captain Christopher Pike suspects a mechanical malfunction--only to discover the very principles on which Starfleet bases its technology have simply stopped functioning. He and his crewmates are forced to abandon ship in a dangerous maneuver that scatters their party across the strangest new world they've ever encountered.

First Officer Una Chin-Riley finds herself fighting to survive an untamed wilderness where dangers lurk at every turn. Young cadet Nyota Uhura struggles in a volcanic wasteland where things are not as they seem. Science Officer Spock is missing altogether. And Pike gets the chance to fulfill a childhood dream: to live the life of a cowboy in a world where the tools of the twenty-third century are of no use.

Yet even in the saddle, Pike is still very much a starship captain, with all the responsibilities that entails. Setting out to find his crewmates, he encounters a surprising face from his past--and discovers that one people's utopia might be someone else's purgatory. He must lead an exodus--or risk a calamity of galactic proportions that even the Starship Enterprise is powerless to stop...