The Federated Interplanetary Government has secretly sent Jacinta Watts and work colleague, good friend and captain of their spaceship Colin Pratt to a "Goldilocks" planet, Kb-104, which orbits a G-class star in the constellation of Pegasus. The planet has an anomaly their employers want investigated. They also want to know if there is an intelligent species on it.
Jacinta is highly qualified and experienced and is the right person to determine the nature of a planet but her first impressions indicate the planet is like most others, barren and lifeless, apart from the anomaly which sees the venting of very high temperatures into the atmosphere.
Her exploration of the planet she unofficially calls Ruby, reveals there was life on it at one time, but it died out sometime in the long distant past, until she finds tunnel entrances in cliffs.
Regulations require her to investigate such things if safe, so Jacinta enters a tunnel Colin has decreed safe. Although she suffers from claustrophobia, Jacinta has no fear as her technology will guide her and warn her of any dangers.
The first thing she notices is the tunnel is not natural, something engineered and manufactured it.
Without realising it, the tunnel takes Jacinta deeper underground as she collects samples of water and basic life forms until she finds a strange blue light. Stepping through the light she finds herself trapped, unable to get out of the tunnel and communicate with Colin who is hovering high above the planet surface. Her sensors are now almost useless to her.
After getting herself under control, Jacinta continues walking within a tunnel labyrinth she knows she can become hopelessly lost in. With fear gripping every step she suddenly finds herself in a different world, a mesmerising place of beauty and grandeur, a place she could only dream of or see in movies.
Grateful to be out of her confining tunnel, she enters a forest alive with many different insects and animals until, quite unexpectedly, she finds what she has been looking for, an intelligent species that may or may not be benevolent.
Unknown to Jacinta and Colin, the alien species has a task for the pair of them.

Stephen. L West writes under the pseudonym of Stephen J Bannister. Stephen was born in the UK but moved to South Australia in the mid-sixties growing up in Adelaide. Enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy aged 17. Married in nineteen eighty. Joined the New South Wales Fire Brigades before moving back to South Australia.
Started writing in the late nineteen-eighties creating technical manuals which led to dabbling in fiction. As an amateur astronomer with a lot of interest in other sciences, he decided to write his first science fiction novel.
Stephen and his wife live on a two acre plot in the rural mid-north of South Australia. Their family has expanded to seven grandchildren.