This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Though the war with Russia is drawing towards its close, James Rutherford, the captain of the steam gunboat Spartan, has much to occupy him. A war-fuelled growth in piracy that seems almost impossible to combat effectively and word of a new, enemy naval base, being established in Manchuria, while his relationship with Emily Lawton continues to be opposed by her father, all feeding a sense of frustration and disillusionment that now increasingly besets him.