From the introduction:
The year is... no longer important. Earth is gone, blown apart and replaced by a giant alien battle station called The Rose. You are an alien, a Good Guy, fighting in a war against the Bad Guys. It does not matter where you are from, what you look like, or your gender. Everything you got going for you comes from your human heroes, selected from a hundred years’ worth of radio, TV, and Internet signals still floating around the solar system. You've got your style, you've got your threads, and you've got your marching orders...