Leonora Mendoza, Captain of the Terra Nova I, awakes in her hiberpod in orbit around the planet Goldilox. The Space Eeks ('Speeks') have already built an enclosed city and set up an elaborate life-support system. There's even a shopping mall.
Leonora and Dr Tan Wangzi go down to the surface, check the accommodation and meet the Speeks who constitute the Goldilox Management Board.
The Speeks' arrangements seem perfect and the migrants begin transferring from spaceship to planet. They soon find that the hard part of the mission is just beginning - setting up a self-contained human community with diverse ethnicity and a 4:1 sex ratio. But Hepplewhite, the urbane leader of the Speeks, is always on hand to help. He even has a solution for the sex imbalance.
Thanks to Dominique Dupre's passion for field exploration, the colonists discover that they are not the only sentient beings on Goldilox. That proves to be a game-changer.
