The other side of the gate was cold.
Quinlan stepped through and his boots hit frozen soil. The air carried the bite of deep winter. Around him stretched forest in every direction, evergreen and bare oak rising tall against a pale winter sky.
But the land directly ahead had been worked.
His people from Miri Town had been clearing this stretch for months under his standing orders. Several square kilometers of forest thinned and felled, the timber hauled back to the settlement for construction, the stumps pulled, the ground leveled.
For every tree they took, they planted seeds elsewhere in the biome. Quinlan had mandated that personally.
He had infinite life ahead of him, and he intended to spend it on a planet that still had forests.
