Parts (Descent)
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The book is told in three Parts. Part 1 takes place aboard the ship; Parts 2 and 3 on Calima.
Part 1
Aboard the ship of the Pioneers mission, near the end of its voyage to Calima, the engineer Kurt lives as almost everyone does: inside Omega's recreations, waking only for the vigil shifts. Uneasy about what the arrival will change, he looks into Raina's idea that their reality may itself be a recreation, begins an affair with Aditi, the new leader of the researchers, and drifts away from Claire. On the morning they reach orbit, the ship is struck and falls to the surface.
Part 2
Kurt wakes among the wreck on Calima: only a tenth of the crew survived, the ship's energy is running out, and Ifiok makes him second of the engineers. The survivors have reorganised themselves: Claire leads a new group of hunters, Kseniya works with the reclaimers, and Wang, as Yong, has gathered young followers to keep order. Kurt learns that a crystal-plant hybrid can pass its energy to a few people with a rare gene, finds that he and Wang are among the nine candidates, and wins the assembly's approval for an expedition into the fog.
Part 3
The expedition reaches the crystal, but on the way it meets a black fluid that turns animals into the sunken. Back at the wreck Ifiok is dead, the energy transfer works, and the sunken attack; Pedro uses the fear to impose a mass migration, and Aditi flees west alone in the exploration vehicle. The hunters' rebellion, planned by Claire and fought by Kurt in a modified exploration robot, ends when Kurt discharges lightning in a duel with Wang, who lets the rebels march east towards the mountains.