ANCIENT EARTH IS DOOMED...

Earth's Sun will explode, not millions of years hence but in mere lifetimes — violently enough to scour Earth clean and leave the Empire of the Hundred Worlds adrift.

The Empire's scientists deem that nothing can be done. The age of heroism is past: this is the long, stagnant afternoon of the human race.

Until — over massive opposition — a single young woman makes her way to the Emperor with that rarity, a new scientific insight... and a plan, flowing from its implications, to mobilize humanity's slumbering energies toward a thousand year effort of applied astrophysics. Of engineering carried out on the hearts of stars. A plan to save the Earth. To save the Sun.