This is a sequel to two earlier books. Hurricane Moon told the story of the immense journey of the exploration starship Aeon and how Aeon’s astronauts discovered mild and mysterious Planet Green with its hurricane-covered ocean moon. Then the season of crisis began. Aeon’s engineers had to overcome damage to the ship. Scientists, including some who had not expected to be revived from cryostasis for what they now had to do, overcame terraforming hurdles and repaired the human genes damaged by long star flight. Some people found unexpected love amid the challenges they faced and some encountered profound spiritual mystery as they laid the foundation for a human future on Planet Green. In Downfall Tide, the brave beginning came to a brutal end. War waged by an inhuman interstellar empire brushed Planet Green. The colony was destroyed. The first generation of colonists managed to send their children away in Aeon to a safer haven, stars away. Now Aeon has reached yet another world—one with a human colony already in place but badly in need of the terraforming resources that Aeon brings. In a new future complicated by the likelihood that the inhuman empire still exists, Aeon needs powerful allies. When an ambassador from the stargoing city-state Avendis offers diplomatic relations with Aeon, young Captain John Mark Josephson sees a golden opportunity. He sends a delegation to accompany her to Avendis in her private starship with its reclusive Captain. Aeon’s delegates are Nathaniel Foster, the young pilot and commander of the interplanetary shuttle Lodestar; Hardin Tucker, who had been a veteran diplomat on Earth; Lodestar’s fierce and loyal First Officer, Anastasia Steed—and Lodestar itself for show and tell. Their mandate is to learn how far to to trust the Avendisans and decide how much of Aeon’s past to reveal to them. On the way to Avendis the diplomatic mission goes astray in the Starcross Nebula. The Avendisans and the delegates from Aeon find themselves lost in a strange and dangerous space. And everyone else looks to Nathaniel for leadership. This sets the stage for Nathaniel’s unplanned coming of age. With just a handful of people of wildly different talents and temperaments and some space technology from two different eras to work with, Nathaniel has to deal with monstrous enemies, unfathomable friends, unexpected aliens—and the long cold shadows of the past.