David C Jeffrey 
Through a Forest of Stars 

Year 2217. Earth’s biosphere is dying, Mars’s terraforming projects are in ruin, resource wars are brewing, and even the discovery of voidoids—eerie neo-quantum portals into nearby star systems—has failed to yield other habitable worlds in Bound Space. But that’s about to change. Aiden Macallan, Terra Corp’s maverick planetologist aboard the survey ship Argo, is plunged to the center of a deadly conflict over a miraculous discovery in the Chara system, 27 light years from Earth. For a dying human race, Sylvanus—a singular incarnation of the Gaia Hypothesis fully realized—should be a cause for rejoicing. Instead, Unified Earth Domain and the Allied Republics of Mars are on the brink of a catastrophic war over its possession.

But Aiden has even deeper concerns. Long before his arrival in the Chara system, he’s been haunted by a recurring dream that transports him to a lush alien forest where pagan archetypes grow frighteningly real, and more personal, with each step. It’s one part of the intricate puzzle he’ll need to solve as he treks across a very real, but profoundly mysterious, landscape in a race against time to save an extraordinary world from destruction—a world that holds humanity’s last hope for survival.