The Ymir Contingency

Dr. Aris Thorne is a lead geophysicist tasked with the terraforming of Niflheim-7, a barren, frozen exoplanet at the edge of human-charted space. His mission is simple: drill deep into the crust, plant the thermal atmospheric engines, and melt the ice to create a new ocean world for colonial expansion. But during a deep-core extraction, Aris’s drill strikes something that shouldn’t exist—a layer of warm, bioluminescent fluid. Niflheim-7 is not a dead rock; it is a dormant, planet-sized biological entity. When the corporate overlords at Apex Industries order the atmospheric engines ignited anyway to harvest the creature’s limitless bio-thermal energy, the planet’s primordial immune system awakens. Trapped on the surface as the ice violently shifts and monstrous biological drones emerge to cleanse the infection, Aris must journey into the subterranean depths to communicate with the waking leviathan before Apex destroys the entity, and the entity destroys the colonies.