Terran child psychologist Bryn Haslund has her hands full, treating youngsters from war-torn planets. Arthur Nagy, the brutal dictator of the interplanetary Star Alliance, ruthlessly suppresses dissent, launching increasingly devastating military campaigns. Once idyllic worlds are embargoed or bombed into ashes, and Nagy's StarOps secret police lurk everywhere. Bryn has tried to stay out of politics, leaving that to her charismatic statesman father, Ernst, the only one with the stature to stand up to Nagy.
Despite her efforts to remain neutral, Bryn gets caught in the crackdown of a protest-turned-riot and only her status as her father's daughter keeps her out of jail. Ernst makes a speech in which he is expected to condemn the violence but instead, he issues his whole-hearted support for Nagy's policies and then goes missing under mysterious circumstances.
With the Alliance's secret police hot on her heels, Bryn locates her father in the research labs of Alpha. Here she discovers that Nagy's scientists have implanted a mechanical mind-control device in Ernst's brain. In her search to disable the device, she finds the records of a remote, almost-forgotten planet where psychic powers have been developed to an extraordinary degree...Cottman IV, known as Darkover. In the desperate hope that Darkover's powerful natural telepaths can free her father's mind, Bryn and her father arrange transport on a smuggler's ship. Powerful winds knock their shuttle off course when they try to land on Darkover, and send it spinning out of control. Bryn cries out for help...
...and someone answers her telepathic plea.
The shuttle crashes in the rugged, glaciated Hellers mountain range. Here Bryn and her father must contend with new dangers, from ice avalanches to blood-thirsty bandits to gigantic carnivorous birds. Moreover, this new world has a complicated, often contentious history with Terra. When the Terrans rediscovered Darkover after millennia of isolation, the aristocratic Comyn struggled to maintain their unique culture. Using their extraordinary psychic abilities called laran, they forced the Terrans to honor Darkover's independence. The vicious interstellar wars waged by Star Alliance eventually forced the Terrans to withdraw. So far, Darkover's leaders have managed to avoid becoming a battleground for a larger conflict but now Bryn's quest threatens to break that precarious isolation.
To make matters worse, the mind-control device seems to be tig