Kylara Vatta is summoned back to the world of Slotter Key, the home planet of the Vatta empire. Ky had never meant to return but sometimes family summons cannot be ignored. Yet nothing about this trip will go as planned. When her shuttle is sabotaged, she ends up crashed in arctic waters along with a desperate handful of strangers. It falls to Ky, as ranking officer, to help them survive and find land, but when they arrive on a frozen island that, until now, has always been known as a terraforming failure, what she discovers there is shocking. And now she must not only solve the mystery of who sabotaged her ship, but what it has to do with the secrets a shadowy government faction seems more than willing to kill to keep hidden.