On a corporate base perched on the Neptunian moon Triton, Nabel Charles Dance, the chief scientist, teams with CEO E.J. Saggs Shane Rimmer to defend against an unstoppable cyborg warrior. As tension tightens, the two seal themselves inside the control room, hoping to stall a force that seems beyond human control. The cyborg tears through the perimeter, destroying a tank and then launching an assault on a helicopter that crashes into the room. Soldiers fall one by one, and the siege looks endless. In a last act of defiance, Nabel uses a remote to deactivate the cyborg, buying precious time. But Saggs seizes the moment, reactivates the machine, and orders it to kill Nabel, turning the scientist’s own invention into a weapon against him.
Meanwhile, far from Triton, John Canyon [Dennis Hopper] is a weathered space trucker delivering cargo to a harborsome space station. After a brutal clash with Keller [George Wendt], Keller is sucked out into the vacuum of space, leaving John with two passengers—Cindy [Debi Mazar], who hopes to marry him for a ride back to Earth, and Mike Pucci [Stephen Dorff], an ambitious fellow driver. The trio agrees to a risky deal: transport a cargo described as sex dolls to Earth. Chase and pursuit follow as police close in, and John steers his rig into the dangerous “scum cluster,” a pirate-controlled region where the rules are brutal and survival is uncertain. Their transport is compromised, adrift, and they are soon captured by the pirate ship Regalia, led by the hard-edged Captain Macanudo. Cindy offers a bargain—sex in exchange for safe passage—if they can hand over the cargo and let them go.
The captain is revealed to be Nabel, who rebuilt his grievously injured body and turned to piracy as revenge for Saggs’s betrayal. The cargo in John’s hold is none other than a full stock of cyborg warriors that Nabel designed and built for Saggs’s company. One of the cyborgs comes online, slaughtering much of the Regalia’s crew and crippling the ship. John, Cindy, and Mike manage to escape as the Regalia explodes in a final blaze. In a desperate turn, Macanudo—mortally wounded—imparts the chilling truth about the cargo: these are the weapons that could reshape their world. John makes a hard decision, releasing the cargo into the atmosphere so it will burn up on re-entry, while he, Cindy, and Mike leap into an escape pod and ride the wreck to Earth. John survives the explosion, and the trio, scarred but intact, heads toward a tenuous future.
Back on Earth, the trio visits Cindy’s mother in the hospital, a woman who had been frozen for twenty years until a cure was found. John, touched for the first time by real affection, finds himself drawn to her. Saggs, now President of Earth after privatising the government, tracks them down with a last bid for loyalty. He offers John a new rig and a suitcase full of money in return for their silence about the cyborg invasion. John declines with tact, aware that speaking out could mean their deaths, but Mike hurls the suitcase from the window in defiance. As Saggs returns to his presidential limousine, he plants a bomb in the suitcase and detonates it just as the case lands on the roof of his car, killing him and, inadvertently, the President as well. With Saggs dead and the political danger resolved in a spectacular miscalculation, the trio—and Cindy’s mother—sneak away to the spaceport and blast off in a brand-new rig, stepping into a future that remains uncertain but is finally theirs to command.
