Forty light years outside their celestial nursery and a handful of scientific revolutions beyond their reach, humanity’s attention is drawn toward a garden in the night. The TRAPPIST-1 system, comprised of an ornery dwarf star and her seven fertile daughters, seems nothing short of an Earth-in-waiting to the fervid ambitions of a species just now beginning to outgrow the cradle.

Some centuries after and some distance away, the dollar is obsolete and salaries are paid in access to scarce Suspension Pods - the almighty Minute. Every working man and woman born aboard the ITS Santa Maria is pursuing a chance at sleeping away the waning decades of the interstellar voyage they’d inherited to nurture for themselves that garden in the night. For a restless few, a chance isn’t good enough and neither is the pay.

Drastic measures will be undertaken and political anachronisms revived as struggles of an ancient character threaten to undo a mission of post-scarcity proportions. Whatever the danger, though, be it on the first attempt or the hundredth and at any expense, that humanity would not be denied his new conquest was never in doubt.

But to survive a trip on the scales of light, it was inhumanity which had learned to be crafty.