This strange and mysterious tale made me feel the cold and sense that dismal time in Siberia during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. We meet Padarovich, a disgraced and exiled Colonel, after a disastrous Japanese offensive defeated the Tsar’s forces in China. The year is 1908, the beginning of a new era, though most don’t yet realize it, though the winds of change are blowing.

Russia’s military is demoralized, there is rising unrest in the working class, and a bizarre and disastrous crash, possibly a meteor strike, has been witnessed in the small backwater known as Vanavara. Colonel Padarovich follows the trail north and discovers a technological wonder far beyond his capabilities to understand.

Who created it? Not the Tsar, surely, probably not the Chinese, but perhaps the Empire of Japan, so secretive yet possessing great technological prowess. Padarovich does not know for certain, but hopes that acquiring this colossus might change his fortune. Then he meets young Bolshevik Ioseb Jughashvili, a Georgian thinking himself Russian, enduring his third exile to Siberia, who wants only to avoid official attention.

The two men travel toward that far northern horizon. Both hope that what lays trapped in the steppe’s permafrost could possibly further the cause…of one of them. Who is this mysterious young Bolshevik and will his fortune be made by the discovery of this vast and alien technology, in the coming revolution?