Coldlight – Paperback

Ninety days of darkness. Thirty days of heat.

On Vesper, a frozen moon circling a gas giant that never sets, the sun goes down for the last time in a season. Lantern Point has nine people, a reactor called the Contessa and a molten-salt Tank that holds every unit of warmth they will see until sunrise.

Then the Contessa scrams, and will not restart.

Station chief Ines Varga does the arithmetic and gets the same answer every night: thirty days of heat for ninety days of dark. There is a refuge built for four. There is a borehole, a failing radio and a long, lethal walk across the ice to a second shelter. Every choice is a ledger, and every ledger is someone’s name.

But the numbers are not adding up. The Tank is losing heat faster than the books say. The safety system that should have caught the fault waited fourteen seconds before it acted. And somewhere above the shelf, a company that stands to profit from a disaster with no survivors has stopped answering the crew’s calls.

Ines has a dying reactor, a crew who trust her and a growing certainty that the failure was no accident. To bring anyone home, she must decide who stays warm, who walks into the dark, and what the truth is worth when only five people can carry it out.

COLDLIGHT is a hard science fiction survival thriller about engineering, sabotage and the price of keeping people alive. Fans of Andy Weir, Kim Stanley Robinson and The Thing will find the cold they came for.

Ninety days of night. One honest ledger. Not everyone gets to sunrise.