HARVESTMAN

“A simple mission, they said,” muttered Leonardo. 
“We shouldn’t have crashed,“ said Baz. 
“Crashed? We should not be alive.“ 

His military career wrecked and disgraced after the Newhope disaster, Capt. Leonardo Valencia has one last run on the miserable freighter Resurgam before he can retire, grab his pension and drink the days away. 

Then on his last voyage, Resurgam crashes into an icy planetoid returning from a routine archeological mission. Valencia awakens to find all but three of the crew dead from strange circumstances on a planet that shouldn't be where it is. More mysteries pile up as the crew discovers one passenger, a reclusive archeologist, survived only to flee into the planet’s snowy wastes with illegal alien artifacts. Valencia and his remaining crew suddenly find themselves facing many questions and short on time. Is this archeologist in fact the Harvestman, organizer of the Newhope disaster and leader of the Martian separatists group the Free Mars Republic? What’s going on in the strange tunnel he fled to at the planet’s southern reaches? Capt. Valencia and his crew are stranded with only
days to figure out how to thwart the plans of this madman. 

But if they fail, the FMR will destroy all life on Earth and replace it with something horrific, fulfilling an ancient vendetta.