**Bestselling author Peter F. Hamilton returns to his acclaimed Commonwealth series in this thrilling follow-up to The Abyss Beyond Dreams. Featuring Hamilton’s trademark blend of intricate plotting, riveting suspense, high-concept science, and vivid characters, A Night Without Stars brings the story to a fully satisfying finish./b> After centuries trapped inside the Void, the planet Bienvenido--along with its inhabitants, both human and Faller--has been expelled into normal space. But the survivors are millions of light-years from the Commonwealth, which knows nothing of their existence. As the two races plunge into mortal conflict for sole possession of the planet, the humans seem destined to lose--despite the assistance of the mysterious Warrior Angel, who possesses forbidden Commonwealth technology. With the Fallers’ numbers growing, and their ability to mimic humans allowing them to infiltrate all levels of society, it’s only a matter of time before they surge to victory. Then, on a routine space flight, Major Ry Evine inadvertently frees a captive vessel that crash-lands on Bienvenido carrying the last, best hope for human survival: a baby. But a far from ordinary one. The child not only ages at a remarkable rate but demonstrates knowledge and abilities far beyond those of Bienvenido’s humans. Hunted by Fallers and humans alike, she is a crucial link to humanity’s lost past--and a glorious future already almost out of reach.b>Praise for A Night Without Stars/b> “Roars relentlessly along in utterly mesmerizing style, with edge-of-the-seat plotting, thrilling action, and knife-edge tension that will leave readers gasping. An atomic blast of a yarn. Hamilton in peak form and absolutely not to be missed.”b>--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)/b>“[An] interstellar adventure with espionage, old-style space exploration, and the story of a fugitive who carries the hope of salvation.”b>--Publishers Weekly/b> “An action-packed page-turner . . . It’s a joy to witness such a master of science fiction at work.”b>--SFFWorld/b> b>Praise for Peter F. Hamilton’s The Abyss Beyond Dreams/b> “Incredibly robust and exciting and rousing, sharing flavors of Jack Vance, John Wright, China Miéville, Orson Scott Card, and A. E. van Vogt . . . Hamilton’s deployment of lots of grand super-science is utterly deft and convincing.”b>--Locus/b> “Engrossing . . . The characters, always Hamilton’s strength, remain as distinctive as ever.”b>--Kirkus Reviews/b> “Everything one wants in sf--great characters, mind bending stuff, adventure, politics, romance, revolution . . . just superb.”b>--Fantasy Book Critic/b> “The work of an author at the top of his game.”b>--SFFWorld/b>...

ldquo;Roars relentlessly along in utterly mesmerizing style, with edge-of-the-seat plotting, thrilling action, and knife-edge tension that will leave readers gasping. An atomic blast of a yarn. Hamilton in peak form and absolutely not to be missed.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
**
“[An] interstellar adventure with espionage, old-style space exploration, and the story of a fugitive who carries the hope of salvation.”—Publishers Weekly**
 
“An action-packed page-turner . . .  It’s a joy to witness such a master of science fiction at work.”—SFFWorld
**
Praise for Peter F. Hamilton’s The Abyss Beyond Dreams**
 
“Incredibly robust and exciting and rousing, sharing flavors of Jack Vance, John Wright, China Miéville, Orson Scott Card, and A. E. van Vogt . . . Hamilton’s deployment of lots of grand super-science is utterly deft and convincing.”—Locus
 
“Engrossing . . . The characters, always Hamilton’s strength, remain as distinctive as ever.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Everything one wants in sf—great characters, mind bending stuff, adventure, politics, romance, revolution . . . just superb.”—Fantasy Book Critic
 
“The work of an author at the top of his game.”—SFFWorld

Autorentext

Peter F. Hamilton is the author of numerous novels, including The Abyss Beyond Dreams, Great North Road, The Evolutionary Void, The Temporal Void, The Dreaming Void, Judas Unchained, Pandora's Star, Misspent Youth, Fallen Dragon, and the acclaimed epic Night's Dawn trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God). He lives with his family in England.

Leseprobe
Chapter One

Book One

Another Death for Laura Brandt

When it hit the planet’s upper atmosphere, the starship Vermillion was still traveling at an appreciable fraction of orbital velocity. Like the majority of its onboard systems, the colony vessel’s ingrav and ­regrav drives were glitching badly in the Void, leaving them unable to suspend the titanic bulk against gravity and lower it to a gentle landing as they were designed. But they could still exert some resistance against the planet’s hungry gravity, so they strained to slow the starship’s otherwise-­catastrophic speed. On the bridge, Captain Cornelius and the ten remaining volunteers from the crew did what they could to mitigate the impending disaster. Force fields, normally tough enough to deflect nuclear blasts with ease, headed toward breakdown as they expanded out from the hull. Redline instability warnings bloomed in Cornelius’s exovision as they held Vermillion secure at the center of a bubble of incandescent plasma five kilometers in diameter.

Vermillion curved around the planet, tearing a screaming hole through the atmosphere as it aerobraked to a manageable speed, its fiery hypersonic wake scoring a terrible furrow of destruction across every landmass it zoomed over. After seventy-­two minutes of this torment it finally dropped to subsonic. They were still traveling at eighty kilometers an hour when their altitude reached zero. A last desperate burst of power was pumped into the fading drive units to brake their speed further. The force fields collapsed on impact, and Vermillion’s unprotected hull struck the ground.

Their wild flight had brought them to a rumpled stretch of ground just beyond a massive river where the humidity was a constant mist twisting among the verdant trees. This was jungle territory, with a soft loamy ground. But soft was a relative term for a transgalactic colony ship more than a kilometer and a half long and massing hundreds of thousands of tons.

It hit at the foot of a small incline, pulverizing vegetation and ripping out a deep gorge. Modules and compartments never designed to withstand such forces broke off, tumbling away to their ruin through the trees. But the main section kept surging onward and upward until it, too, came to rest.

Seventy-­five percent of Vermillion remained intact through a miraculous combination of good luck and steely nerves. Captain Cornelius was justifiably lauded by the passengers who’d flown down to the planet earlier in much safer shuttles with good old-­fashioned solid wings. That hero-­worship enabled him to retain his authority as the lost survivors slowly built their civilization in the strange environment of the Void. The threat of the Fallers who began to invade their world from space justified the formation of defensive regiments, of which Cornelius became commander in chief. The machines Vermillion had brought from the Commonwealth were largely useless in the Void, where electrical current was inhibited, and anything more complex than a steam engine was subject to constant glitches. The resources that did work, especially the precious medical capsules, were guarded and restric…