Guy Stanger is a scout just coming of age on the icy world of Asgard. Scouts have been waiting for decades for Colony Day, the arrival of the breakthrough colony, and now it's here.

Using a soliton drive, the colonists have traveled from Earth at the speed of light, leaping across space and time in an instant. Now they are 25 light years from home, expecting the scouts to help them learn to live on a world gripped by an ice age, and Guy is prepared to do all he can.

This is not your grandfather's space colony. Nineteen ships and 100,000 colonists, ready to land. But someone is standing in the way ...

Guy and the colonists aren't expecting the Kolbergs - a party from an earlier expedition to another star - who already have arrived on Asgard before Colony Day. As the scouts and colonists wrestle with the problems of the new world, they also struggle with a big question: What do the Kolbergs want?

Several sections of the novel first appeared in Analog.