A nanotech-enhanced soldier-of-fortune joins with his A.I.-equipped spaceship on a mission to acquire forbidden tech. Jon and Lobo are back and enemies on all sides are out to get them. Haunted by memories of children he could not save, Jon Moore becomes so increasingly self-destructive that even his best friend, the hyper-intelligent Predator-Class Assault Vehicle, Lobo, is worried. So when Jon receives both a job offer and a message from a woman from his distant past, he and Lobo leap at the welcome diversions. That the job is illegal is the least of their problems. They're happy to retrieve stolen artifacts from Jon's quarantined home world, and their fee is high even for a job so highly illegal. The forces protecting their targets are formidable, and the assault team that's chasing them is even more dangerous but Jon and Lobo are used to that. The scientist Jon and Lobo need for the mission has an agenda of her own, but they've faced that problem before. This time, though, the knowledge that they and the others seek spells doom for Jon. Racing from planet to planet, Jon and Lobo come at last to a world so inhospitable that its statues and monuments outnumber its living inhabitants. Desperate and out of options, they encounter their deadliest challenges yet and must make life-changing decisions from which there truly is No Going Back.