-9e74-536e-b6e5-359ea5514146">
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr. 2018
Cover illustration © Gregory Bridges
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
William H. Keith, Jr. asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008121129
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008121136
Version: 2018-10-24
As always …
for Brea
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Epilogue
Keep Reading …
By Ian Douglas
About the Publisher
The Consciousness had known of Earth and of the starfaring civilization centered there for a long time. Indeed, given that it spanned vast gulfs of time as well as space, it was as if it had always known.
In the heart of the teeming sphere of 10 million ancient suns known to the humans as Omega Centauri, at the central rosette of six massive black holes orbiting their common center in a patently artificial arrangement, the Consciousness brooded on the intelligent beings it had found in this new, painfully young universe.
Intelligent was such a relative concept.
This was bolstered by the fact that the Consciousness had … tasted a number of them, sampling the minute ships and other structures within this volume of space.
Most of the minds it had sampled were of pathetically slow and limited capabilities. A few—a very few—were of higher orders of intelligence, though none came close to the Consciousness in terms of depth or scope of Mind.
Methodically, the Consciousness consumed those worth the effort.
The rest it deleted.
And with a slowly increasing vigor, it explored more deeply into this corner of the new universe. It had identified a sullen red ember of a star, called Kapteyn’s Star by the minds it had assimilated, with a world engineered by beings uploaded into digital form, extremely ancient beings called the Baondyeddi, the Adjugredudhra, and the Groth Hoj. These species, parts of a corporate polity referred to by various sources as the Sh’daar, were in hiding from some unknown threat … quite possibly from the Consciousness itself, though the digital refugees didn’t seem to know exactly what it was they feared.
Despite their attempts to make themselves undetectable—including the slowing of
