The Burning Heart of Night

Lindal Karr is a one-in-a-million seedship pilot; an extremely rare individual who can exist in the slowed-down fugue-state necessary to pilot one of the enormous, living spacecraft which transports colonists in deep-sleep from one world to the next. But when Karr's ship is sabotaged, his titanic vessel crashes onto the island planet New Ascension, setting a portion of the planet's immense ocean ablaze. Karr ejects and survives, only to learn that this beautiful ocean world harbours a dark secret - a fatal pathogen that affects all life forms. The human colony on New Ascension has resorted to an even darker solution to their deadly predicament - enslaving the Khafra, a sentient native species, and draining their natural immune venom to save the lives of the dying colonists. Many Khafra must die for each human to live. But even this drastic solution is only partly effective, and as human ranks continue to be decimated by this native virus, and colonists fight for their very existence, civil unrest threatens to erupt into full-scale war.