In the year 2509, over sixty years since the invention of time travel, the timeline is monitored and policed by Temporal Security. During his routine end-of-shift checks, Commander William Herschel, a vampire with an outstanding career in the organisation, discovers that someone is using the time travel facility of the time station Epoch to smuggle narcotics through time. When he attempts to apprehend the criminal he is attacked, and wakes up later in a cell. Having been effectively framed for the crime, with all of the evidence pointing against him, he is exiled to Earth's distant past to live out his long vampire life; a sentence that was tempered from execution only because of his exemplary service record and the intervention of his friend, Admiral Bruce Rivette. Upon his arrival in the past, William immediately gets to work on trying to find a way to re-power the time shuttle that he was exiled in to return to his own time to find a way of proving his innocence.
Meanwhile, his friends in the twenty sixth century continue the investigation to find the real perpetrator in order to exonerate William before he is lost to ancient history. His best friend Luke Hawking is determined to do whatever it takes to clear his name, with the help of Admiral Rivette, the admiral's wife Larissa, a vampire lieutenant named Cephra O'Neil, and the cantankerous Professor Zahlmann, as well as some, but not all, of their colleagues aboard Epoch. Luke soon suspects that there is more to the crime than mere smuggling, and that the perpetrator has a much bigger endgame.
Upon reaching the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis in the year 1438 BC, William very soon discovers that the threat from the future has followed him into the past. He must learn to survive in that era without his vampire presence impacting history or he will still face the sentence of execution by Temporal Security.
