Moving to another planet is never easy. It's even harder when you never arrive...

Laren Brightstar knows refusing to work for Augustus Troy makes him a target. Accepting the chief terralogist position on a primitive planet on the other side of the galaxy seems like the simplest solution. Getting there, however, isn't. When the affluent family leaves fog-shrouded and predictable Mira III for Cyraria they have no idea their luxurious lifestyle is about to end forever. His wife, Sharra denies it, trusting their fate to her indomitable bondling. Teenage daughter, Creena,...

Things are never so bad they can't get worse. For the Brightstars they just did.

Laren Brightstar knows his family's in serious trouble. If he doesn't finish building the heat exchanger before Opposition's heat sets in they'll all perish. Then what little money they have is confiscated and he's hauled off to territorial prison in a midnight raid, leaving his teenaged son, Dirck, responsible for the family's welfare.

Above everything else, Dirck is acutely aware that none of this would have happened if his missing sister, Creena, had followed the rules.

It's May 1978 and a normal night at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah--until a bogey shows up in their restricted air space. It gets even stranger when the UFO requests permission to land. It changes its mind, but by then F-16s escort it to the ground. A human girl in her early teens and a robot exit the craft, a strange botanical lifeform found onboard later that night by a USAF landing party. The vehicle, robot, and strange plant are impounded and subsequently sent to Area 51.

NASA astrobiologist, Gabriel Greenley, is called in to study this new lifeform that at first appears...