A couple of years have passed since the victory that ended Vattas War, and the Space Defense Force Kylara Vatta founded and commands is still hunting the remnants of Gamnis Tureks fleet, if the supporting nations can be cajoled into keeping the SDF funded. However, Ky has been called back to her home planet of Slotter Key to attend to the business of her family and its rebuilding trade empire, and so reluctantly she returns to the place where most of her family was killed. When her shuttle trip down is sabotaged and the Academy Commandant who had come to receive her is killed, Kylara takes command of the motley mix of survivors, not all of whom are friendly, and gets them to shore on a chilly continent thought dead, but which turns out to be anything but, dodging dangers both human and climatic. Meanwhile, friends and family, including her lover, Rafe Dunbarger, CEO of InterStellar Communications, still a massive corporation if rapidly downsizing due to the revelations of the previous series, do what they can from afar to find and assist her. But the conspiracy that landed her in polar waters isn't finished yet...
The series includes the following books:
- Cold Welcome
- Into the Fire
This series contains examples of:
- Brain/Computer Interface: The series staple multipurpose implants have more abilities shown here, one of the most prominent being an event where a character sets his to safe mode to prevent intrusion, then has it mimic the effects of dementia to thwart kidnappers - to such a degree that he actually feels those effects and is concerned about being able to switch back. Fortunately, he does.
- Chemically-Induced Insanity: In Into the Fire, the people who survived Miksland with Ky Vatta in the previous book have been quarantined and drugged into a stupor by The Conspiracy for fear that what they saw on the supposedly uninhabitable continent could derail their Evil Plan.
- The Clan: Your family name holds quite a bit of importance on Slotter Key, and the First Families in particular have a lot of power. The Quindlan family's patriarch turns out to be the Big Bad, and was an associate of the previous series's Big Bad. It's also noted that the Vattas are not among the First Families: they "only" arrived on Slotter Key 170 years ago.
- Earth That Was: It's not clear what, if anything, happened to Earth, but it's always referred to as "Old Earth" in a tone that makes it clear it's a rather mysterious place that none of the characters have interacted with.
- Everything's Worse With Bears: Depends on who you ask. The castaways encounter a cave bear and its cubs, but with a bit of caution squeeze around it to continue their escape from pursuing mercenaries. The mercs aren't so cautious, and get wiped out by either the bear or the cave collapse they trigger in their panic. There are also Polar Bears around, but the castaways never see one in person, only footprints and from surveillance cameras.
- Evil Luddite: Continuing from the previous series is the use of people from the Miznarii faith, which eschews any modifications like the otherwise omnipresent implants, as antagonists. It's not true of the faith as a whole, and Kylara notes that she has no bias against them, but it's pretty glaring that the military unit intended to kill the survivors and the mole in her group are all Miznarii.
- The Load: Kylara's aide, Jen, is stuffy and strict on regulations, even on a world with a completely different and more relaxed set, and in emergency conditions. She turns out to be having such trouble adjusting that she's easily manipulated by a traitorous NCO into turning against Ky.
- Occupiers Out of Our Country: Less than a century ago, Slotter Key had several nations on it; Grace Vatta got stuck fighting as a guerrilla during the Unification War and was tried for war crimes afterward. There remains an undercurrent of separatism in the formerly independent territories. The Big Bad turns out to be a separatist leader who is preparing for a revolution and using the supposedly barren southern continent to gain resources for it.
- Planet of Hats: The Cascadia hat as a lethally polite planet takes on a darker tone than in the first series, where to the protagonists it was a mostly harmless and fairly useful ally, becoming one of the major supporters of the Space Defense Force and a second home for Vatta. Here, stuffiness that always went with the politeness is accentuated, leading Ky's Cascadian aide, Jen, to undermine her command and Cascadia to hold Ky and Vatta responsible when Jen dies caught in crossfire with a traitor, stripping Ky of the command she created and freezing her assets. On a lighter note, Stella is rather nonplussed when she learns after Assassin Outclassin' two men who broke in while she was in the bathtub, that if they'd survived the Cascadians would have executed them for discourtesy.
- Precursors: One of the theories bandied about as to the origins of the continent spanning underground facility that is discovered by the shipwrecked survivors.
- Selective Obliviousness: For hundreds of years Slotter Key has ignored its southern continent, vaguely tagged a terraforming failure and therefore assumed devoid of life. This apparently causes them to completely ignore the lack of proper satellite imagery and overwatch, the extensive vegetation on a continent they assume is denuded (which should have been quite visible to the eye from orbit regardless of the lack of imagery), and the wildlife that includes caribou, polar bears, and woolly mammoths (animals the characters make clear they either only vaguely recall from Old Earth fauna lists or were extinct when humanity left). The conspiracy, at least, knows that it's inhabitable and has done so, but how they both remained hidden and prevented all inquiries into a visibly vegetated continent has not been explained.
- Too Dumb to Live: A couple of slackers literally qualify when they catch a pufferfish and try to eat it without sharing with the rest of the group, dosing themselves with neurotoxin as they didn't take care of the poison sac properly, despite having already been informed of the danger.
