Gist of it in that book is, that a spiderlike sentient race lived on a planet, that orbited a sun that would "Blink off" for whatever reason and they braved the resulting total planetary freeze (including freezing and snowing oxygen and whatnot) in "Deepnesses" in hibernation. However during the last blink off season we read about in the book, the spiders have advanced to something of a Cold war era tech and are embroiled in a war, that is for the first time being fought while most spiders are in hibernation, mostly underground. However, a group of spiders are doing a raid or somesuch on the surface while wearing basicly space suits. During this raid, the humans that have been orbiting this planet and observed the spiders have a space battle with lazers missiles and whatnots on orbit, and the spiders see this, very clearly mind you, since there is no atmosphere at all due to the sun being switched off and it all froze and snowed to the ground. the "main spider" character who is somewhat of a scientist and a tinkerer/engineer wonders what the crap was that whole light show.

Good book, I recommend it.