Powers That Be

It was a world of ice and snow - a planet that just supported life and that had been terraformed from frozen uninhabitable rock.The people of Petaybee were hardy, self-reliant, friendly - and also very secretive.Major Yana Maddock, medically discharged from the service, was shipped to Petaybee in the hope that her burnt-out lungs might just recover in the icy air.And at the last moment, she was given a special commission.Unauthorized life-forms had been seen on the planet and, more seriously, geologic survey teams had vanished into nowhere, the odd survivor being discovered abandoned and insane.It was Yana's task to infiltrate Petaybee society and find out who - or what - was causing the eerie events on the planet.She discovered a primitive ice-bound community of extraordinary people - people who possessed some mysterious quality of surviving - and people who Yana discovered she both liked and revered as she found herself becoming one of them.

Préface
The first collaboration between two of science fiction's mightiest names.

Auteur

Anne McCaffrey, the Hugo award winning author of the bestselling Dragonriders of Pern novels, is one of science fiction's most popular authors. She lives in a house of her own design, Dragonhold-Underhill, in County Wicklow, Ireland. Visit the author's website at www.annemccaffrey.net
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, winner of the Nebula Award for her novel The Healer's War, is the author of numerous fantasy novels. She has co-authored eight other novels with Anne McCaffrey. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.