Two astronauts, Adam Wade and Jake Carpenter, fly in a shuttle ripe for scrap metal by all. They are in search of a colony on the planet Antares to which nearly thousand years ago every contact has broken off. Before her scanners can announce something, it comes for a disturbance, and the shuttle gets in the field of force of the planet. In the last second Adam manages to bring up the tax bat - and the shuttle Starex 401 crashes in the endless desert of Antares.
Because Jake was injured with the impact, Adam explores the planet at first only. What he finds, the language nails up to him: ama zones under the guidance of the picture-nice queen Sumuru rule over the planet, and men are held as slaves in the mines!
But it comes even worse: underground lives a huge queue monster to whom the women bring regularly victim to calm the queue God, the Antares regularly with earthquake strikes.
Jake and Adam are arrested. They find out that it concerns with the ama zones the descendants of the colonists who have lost almost her whole engineering device with a catastrophic explosion.
Jake does a few investigations. The results are sobering: Antares is unsteady in the core, and will break - hence, the quakes. If one does not manage to evacuate fast the ama zones, they will die all. However, do evacuate with which?
Adam tries to persuade Sumuru of his findings. However, the queen is distrustful. In addition, Sumurus rival, shows queue priestess Taxan, suspectly a lot of interest to Adam.
Now Adam and Jake have to do all hands fully: they must hold Taxan in chess, Sumuru persuade which release men from Antares, the queue monster defeat, and find a way to leave the planet. Then, and maybe only, humanity has one more chance. Since there is something that both astronauts have hidden from the ama zones...