Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer offers an epic hard-science space adventure full of technical descriptions of starships and physics tempered by human concerns. In the twenty-first century, the human race has both developed faster-than-light travel and contacted nonhuman intelligent races. Starplex, under the command of Keith Lansing, is one of the contact makers. Lansing faces hostile crew members, the personal and cultural idiosyncracies of nonhumans, the problems of first contact, and a marriage that may be deteriorating. Scientists on the Starplex study the mysterious artificial wormholes that make space travel routine and convenient. Then the wormholes' creators appear, and the scientists must understand and communicate with them to save the galaxy.
Every SF writer should be lucky enough to have a good friend who is both a Ph.D. in physics and a lawyer specializing in intellectual property.
Thanks, Ari, for helping me launch the Argo on its relativistic flight, work out the Lagrange points for the Quintaglio system, design a chemical structure for a new form of matter, and prosecute an extraterrestrial defendant.
This novel coalesced from my primordial cloud of ideas with the help of editors Susan Allison at Ace and Dr. Stanley Schmidt at
Even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.
There would be hell to pay.
The gravity had already been bled off, and Keith Lansing was now floating in zero-g. Normally he found that experience calming, but not today. Today, he exhaled wearily and shook his head. The damage to
All the amazing things they had discovered, including first contact with the darmats, could still end up being overshadowed by politics—or even interstellar war.
Keith touched the green GO button on the console in front of him. There was a banging sound, conducted through the glassteel of the hull, as his travel pod disengaged from the access ring on the rear wall of the docking bay. The entire run was preprogrammed into the pod’s computer: exiting
And, because it was all preprogrammed, Keith had nothing to do during the journey but reflect on everything that had happened.
He didn’t appreciate it at the time, but that, in itself, was a miracle. Traveling halfway across the galaxy in the blink of an eye had become routine. It was a far cry from the excitement of eighteen years ago, when Keith had been on hand for the discovery of the shortcut network—a vast array of apparently artificial gateways that permeated the galaxy, allowing instantaneous point-to-point transfer. Back then, Keith had called the whole thing magic. After all, it had taken all of Earth’s resources twenty years earlier to establish the New Beijing colony on Tau Ceti I, just 11.8 light-years from Sol, and New New York on Epsilon Indi III, only 11.2 light-years away. But now humans routinely popped from one side of the galaxy to the other.
And not just humans. Although the shortcut builders had never been found, there were other forms of intelligent life in the Milky Way, including the Waldahudin and the Ibs, who, together with Earth’s humans and dolphins, had established the Commonwealth of Planets eleven years ago.
Keith’s pod reached the edge of docking bay twelve and moved out into space. The pod was a transparent bubble, designed to keep one person alive for a couple of hours. Around its equator was a thick white band containing life-support equipment and maneuvering thrusters. Keith turned and looked back at the mothership he was leaving behind.
The docking bay was on the rim of
The windows in the four lower habitat modules were all dark. The central disk was crisscrossed with hairline laser scorches. As his pod moved downward, he saw stars through the gaping circular hole in the disk where a cylinder ten decks thick had been carved out of it.
Hell to pay, thought Keith again. Bloody hell to pay.
He turned around and looked forward, out the curving bubble. He’d long ago given up scanning the heavens for any sign of a shortcut. They were invisible, infinitesimal points until something touched them,—he glanced at his console—as his pod was going to do in forty seconds. Then they swelled up to swallow whatever was coming through.
