author : Allen M. Steele

Their destination is the mining colony Apollo. Jamey will have to learn a whole new way to live, one that entails walking for the first time in his life. It won’t be easy and it won’t be safe. But Jamey is determined to make it as a member of Lunar Search and Rescue, also known as the Rangers. This job is always risky but could be even more dangerous if the new US president makes good on her threat to launch a military invasion. Soon Jamey is front and center in a political and military struggle stretching from the Earth to the Moon.

It’s 1941, and Wernher von Braun is ordered by his Führer to abandon the V-2 rocket and turn German resources in a daring new direction: construction of a manned orbital spacecraft capable of attacking the United States. When the top secret plan is leaked to Franklin Roosevelt, the president determines that there is only one logical response: The United States must build their own spacecraft to destroy the Germans’. Robert Goddard, inventor of the liquid-fuel rocket, agrees to head the classified project.

So begins a race against time between two secret military programs and two brilliant scientists whose high-stakes competition will spiral into a deadly game of political intrigue and unforeseen catastrophes played to the death in the brutal skies above America.

Now, after his death, the Arkwright Foundation dedicates itself to the exploration of space and to creating space colonies with the ultimate goal of finding and colonizing an Earth-like planet several light-years distant. Fueled by Nathan’s legacy, three successive generations of Arkwrights are drawn together, and pulled apart, by the enormity of the task and the weight of their name as they try to ensure the continuance of humanity in the galaxy.