Synopsis: A Western Sunrise

Venus. It's hot. Its atmosphere is thick enough to crush anything man-made. It's as close to a fire-and-brimstone Hell as we've found in the solar system.

But for all this, Venus is not unlike our own Earth. Had things turned out slightly different, Venus might be a thriving garden-world, but for the grace of God and all that.

Fast forward. The solar system has been colonized by a renegade entrepreneur, using the windfalls of lost alien technology - technology that seems to have been left behind by a primordial civilization from the time of the dinosaurs.

Projects of resource development and colonization have begun from Mercury to the Kuiper Belt, connected by the near-magical wormhole and electro-inertial machinery discovered by InterSpace Technologies.

Venus is next on the list, seeded with massive atmosphere-processing cities and nanotech microbes. For all the effort, it will still take centuries to make the world remotely human-habitable.

Or so they thought. An ambitious project to crash a series of water-ice comets into Venus to accelerate the process has met with unexpected obstacles - someone (or thing) on the Cytherean surface has begun making changes of its own.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the Galaxy, Marrigan ign-Talram has been sent to investigate, and possibly exterminate, an intrusion into the Crown, an artificial structure built out of a stellar cluster. The Crown is a sacred place to the Emanation, the god whom Marrigan's people serve.

As a Visioner, voice and priestess of this enigmatic force, Marrigan must deal with the problem before the Emanation decides to intervene more directly. But the refugees she finds, troublesome though they may be, are only fleeing from a much worse problem...

And watching it all is the unknown agency responsible for all of Galactic civilization.