Freshly promoted Colonial Survey officer Massy wakes on the icebound world of Lani III to a first assignment that feels more like a verdict than an inspection. In a colony clustered in drone-hulls beneath frozen mountains, he must judge whether human life can endure where the air itself seems hostile and the sun hangs pale and distorted. When a scrambled transmission arrives through the interference, Massy's quick recognition of its coded pattern draws Herndon's respect and hints that something far larger is wrong. That warning soon becomes catastrophe: Riki Herndon decodes a desperate message from home revealing that the solar constant is dropping, crops are failing, and an entire world is sliding toward glaciation. Massy realizes rescue is nearly impossible, and worse, their own colder colony will freeze first. As grief gives way to resolve, he turns from bureaucratic duty to survival, testing the landing-grids, calculating power losses, and proposing a desperate plan to store heat underground with helicopter-suspended wire grids. But the numbers are merciless. The scheme can only delay the inevitable, exposing both the brilliance and limits of frontier science in the face of planetary disaster. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
