"Hello, people of Mercury. This is planet Earth. Are you receiving this? Please respond."
Lieutenant Adeheid Koning was only twenty-three when the Earth's long fight against its environment ended in collapse and nuclear war. Earth's sudden silence leaves the colonies of the inner solar system without lifelines, in various stages of self-sufficiency.
Or, in Mercury's case, not.
To help her fellow stranded colonists of Mercury survive starvation and a breakdown of order, Adelheid fights some cold equations and makes some hard choices, ending up wearing an iron crown as queen of one of the rail cities of Mercury, constantly moving to stay ahead of the Sun.
Fifty years later, Adelheid's granddaughter, Frieda, is a seventeen-year-old princess who would rather be an engineer. Frieda's life is shattered when a suspicious accident takes one of her arms-and is then turned upside-down when her mother dies from that accident. Frieda is left a young and vulnerable queen, locking horns with her grandmother, who is now regent and dowager.
When the Earth makes contact again, after fifty years of silence, Frieda is eager to end Mercury's isolation, but Adelheid is suspicious of the Earth's sudden return, and wary of the other latitude towns' desires to accept all that the Earth is offering, without question.
With thousands of lives on the line, is it wise to hope for healing? Or are we forever defined by what we do in the dark?
The floor shuddered. Deceleration pulled at their bodies. Some students grabbed onto things. Others, like Alfons, stumbled and fell over with a cry.The floor shook in a way that felt wrong to Frieda's feet. The Messenger had stopped before, but never so suddenly and never this close to the Dawn Line. More than that, the vibrations made it feel like the town still wanted to go forward. The walls, floors, railings, everything, went out of rhythm, like a cart running over corrugated metal.Bangs ripped up the length of the Robinson Rail, growing louder and louder.Inertia pulled them forward, sharply this time, and everyone stumbled. Cara fell over, smacking her shoulder. "Merda!" she gasped. Frieda would have laughed, but the forward-facing deceleration yanked at her stomach.The lights flickered, then went out.Classmates shouted. Some screamed. Frieda clutched the safety rail, and someone grabbed her arms, nails digging in. "Hey!""Sorry." Alfons's voice.It was dark and, other than the cries of her classmates, so silent it was deafening. Frieda realized with a lurch that the wheels and generators had all stopped.Switches clicked, then clicked again. They grew louder as red lights turned on, illuminating the trackworks, moving closer and closer before passing, flicking on farther and farther toward the forebridge.Alfons struggled to his feet. "What happened?""Emergency power kicked in," Frieda muttered. The red lights illuminated only on backup power. Josef had said they'd taken the solar power system offline for maintenance. "We're running on batteries alone." The stillness beneath her feet made her heart ache. "We're parked."Her words sent a chill through the class. All eyes turned to the portholes. "How far are we from sunrise?" Alfons whispered. "How far?""They said half an hour," said Cara. "That was minutes ago."The students peered. The jagged horizon of Mercury was dark, for now.Through the trackworks, boots pounded on the metalwork. Shouts cut through the distance. The students shifted to the walls as trackworkers came running. "Where's the obstruction?" workers shouted. "What stopped us?""We need to go," said Koske, but his students either ignored him or couldn't hear him. "Students!" he shouted. "We need to go, now!"Josef stepped forward and started nudging students toward the exit stairs. "We shouldn't be here," he yelled. "Please! Let-"A senior engineer caught Josef by the arm. "Meneer
