It's simple...strap a rotating habitat to an untested fusion rocket, put six astronauts in experimental cryogenic sleep, hurtle them at nine-tenths the speed of light toward an undiscovered planet near an unknown star, wake them nine years later, and save all of humankind.
SIRIUS-ly?
All Asil Silverwood wanted to do was pilot commercial shuttles between the Earth and the Moon.
To get money to pay for the training, he enrolled in one of those cryogenic deep-space drug studies. When he was awoken NINE YEARS later by a smart-ass AI aboard an experimental starship near the star Sirius, he was shocked to learn that his life had become incredibly more complicated and incredibly more dangerous.


Being the first human to captain the crew of an interstellar craft through the maze of forces created by a three-star system was something he wasn't prepared for.
Asil, his brain function enhanced by another experiment called ALIT, and his special crew, using technologies just barely more advanced than 20th century rocketry, must find a way to explore a hostile planet that some hair-brained scientist who believed the stories of the Dogon.
The Dogon-an actual ancient African tribe-believed a race of amphibian-like aliens once visited them and inhabited this planet near Sirius.

...As the cavern opened, huge columns of smooth black obsidian rose from the floor and attached to the ceiling some thirty or forty meters up. Their bases were at least ten meters in diameter on average. The columns narrowed and curved slightly as they rose upwards toward their apex.
....Everything was so smooth in this alien city. I had to call it a city for that is what it truly was.


..."You shall not take her!" I yelled as loud as I could as I hit the water. The ever-building wave simply picked me up and carried me higher and higher as it built towards its breaking point. It continued to push thousands of liters of water under me until it broke, curling under its own weight! The breaker hurled me high into the air and toward the trees atop the cliff on the plateau.
...The surge spun me among the debris, and then it changed direction. As it began a swift retreat back toward the edge of the cliff, I looked up to see water spilling over the edge in a violent froth of wood and stone.
...I spoke into my helmet, "Power off."
...The planet had defeated me.