On the day of the ceremony marking the transition from the A.D. to the Universal Century calendar, the space station Laplace, official residence of the Earth Federation prime minister, is destroyed by a terrorist bombing. One of the terrorists, a young man named Syam Vist, is caught in the explosion but barely manages to survive. He obtains a forbidden box that will come to be known as Laplace’s Box.

Almost a century later, in Universal Century 0096…

The camouflaged freighter Garencieres, which belongs to an anti-government organization known as the Sleeves, docks at the space colony Industrial 7 which is being constructed in a shoal zone. Its objective is to obtain Laplace’s Box, which is secretly held by the Vist Foundation. Banagher Links, a boy who entered the custody of his unknown father after his mother’s death and is now attending the Anaheim Electronics Industrial College, meets a girl who has stowed away aboard the Garencieres and entered Industrial 7. Banagher saves the girl, who has accidentally fallen into a zero-gravity area, and she tells him there is someone she needs to meet with in order to prevent a war.