Deathworld

Jason dinAlt is a gambler who wins whenever he wants to, and tonight a stranger wants him to turn twenty-seven million credits into three billion.

The stranger is Kerk Pyrrus, and the money is meant to buy weapons for his home world. Pyrrus has double gravity, savage storms and earthquakes, and every plant, insect and animal on it seems made to kill people, growing deadlier year by year. Its colonists are the toughest humans alive, and they are losing. Against Kerk's warnings, Jason follows him there. With Meta, a pilot who could break him in half, he has to survive long enough to learn why a whole planet wants its settlers dead, and what the despised grubbers beyond the city walls know that the city does not.