Six years in the making. Six seconds from disaster...

At long last, the dream of a functioning research colony on Terradox has become reality.

Thousands of men, women and children now call the distant romosphere home, with experts in countless fields recruited from Earth to spearhead the most ambitious research projects ever devised.

All eyes fall on the closing stages of a colony-defining isolation test within Terradox's least hospitable zone — the man-made hellscape of Little Venus, where six astronauts-in-training have survived fifty-one weeks surrounded by an almost impossibly hostile atmosphere.

But while the astronauts of tomorrow count down their final few days until freedom, the gravest threat of all might already be on the wrong side of their Isolation Kompound's impenetrable walls...