Surgeon Captain Lioren was a perfectionist who expected similarly high standards from everyone who worked with him. But on a First Contact mission to a planet where plague had reduced a peaceful civilisation to barbarism and war, Lioren's perfectionism was his undoing. In his zeal to find a cure for the plague he unwittingly caused the death of the entire planetary population.

Lioren's guilt led him to seek the ultimate penalty - death. But instead, he was sent to the Sector General hospital as a lowly trainee in the psychology department. But when an alien - and the first of its kind to reach Sector General - needed help he would speak to no one but Lioren. And before the alien can be cured, Lioren must do the impossible: forgive himself.