Following a series of disasters, the last remnants of humanity are threatened by a fatal disease affecting pregnant women. Kevin Brady, an Irish sailor, travels to Norway and is recruited to work on the Gandreid Project, a plan for some people to escape the ravages of the disease by colonising a distant Earth-like planet, using an interstellar spaceship already in orbit. Kevin begins work under the cloud of being a murder suspect. He meets and falls in love withLaila, a mathematician involved in computing spacecraft orbits, whom he has already helped renunite with her abducted daughter,...