Grover Gardner
The Méridiens are fleeing to their far colonies—and they have reason to run. Over the course of decades, they have lost hundreds of ships, billions of people, and seven Confederation colonies to an alien enemy: an advancing swarm of silver ships transported in the bowels of a gigantic, spherical vessel.
Alex Racine, who once enjoyed the solitary life of an explorer-tug captain, is now an admiral and responsible for the lives of a quarter
...The saga of the Rêveur continues in this second novel in the Silver Ships series.
The surviving Méridiens have returned to Confederation space, aided by their recently discovered cousins, the New Terrans. They expect a celebration after their seventy-one-year absence. Instead, they're shocked to find the silver ships have destroyed half the Confederation.
The Méridiens are fleeing in advance of the horde of alien ships. But Alex
...Nine years of tranquility came to an abrupt end when a Méridien starship entered the Hellébore system, sounding a dire warning for Alex Racine, the Haraken president. Unwanted visitors had arrived again. But this time, they're not alien; they're human. Claiming to have followed the course of a colony ship launched a millennium ago when Earth wrestled with resource wars and climate change, the mission commander, Antonio García, requests a meeting
...The Omnian expeditionary fleet sails for the faraway place they call "the wall." The worlds of humankind have consolidated their resources to create a powerful armada to confront the alien federation.
During the Omnians' previous encounter with an alien fleet at the wall, the Nua'll comm sphere spoke to them in multiple languages. When the messages were deciphered by SADEs, the humans' digital friends, the Omnians realized two things. One,
...After the passage of two decades, the Omnians discovered a second, critical clue about the Nua'll, humankind's enemy, while investigating Celus-4, the home world of the intelligent, canine-like aliens, the Dischnya.
This striking discovery, combined with the final broadcast of the Nua'll sphere at Libre, prior to its detonation, gave Alex Racine and company the means to narrow the search for the Nua'll home world.
Alex has a consuming
...The great spheres and probes of Artifice, humankind's enemy, haunt every inhabited world near and far. The Omnians' long and arduous search for Artifice has ended. They've located Artifice's lair in the Talus system.
The sentient digital entity rules a vast swath of worlds, known as the federacy, through ruthless intimidation. Its insidious programs are embedded in every races' digital systems—warships, shuttles, stations, domes, comm
...Alex Racine, who led an elite group of humans and SADEs (self-ware digital entities), left the newly discovered planet of Celus-5 under difficult circumstances. Few of the Harakens with Alex thought there was little he could do to bring peace to the embroiled planet. From their viewpoint, the demands of the Celus-5 Swei Swee, the six-legged aliens of the ocean, and the Dischnya, the warring, dog-like, intelligent creatures, who inhabited the dry
...For its initial mission, Haraken's explorer ship, the Sojourn, undertook the investigation of Celus-5, a world identified by Willem, a SADE (self-aware digital entity), and his team of scientists, as the best candidate for a new colony.
What should have been a routine survey mission became a disaster. To the Harakens' surprise, they discovered not one, but two alien species, which were constantly engaged in conflict. One species, the
...9) Alliance
Trouble infiltrated the Harakens' capital city of Espero, in the form of New Terra criminal gangs who grew wealthy and powerful on the moons of Ganymede, hiding behind the cover of an ill-conceived mining charter. The gangs brought stims and addictive hallucinogenic drugs to Espero, distributing them to the young on the planet.
Christie Racine and her friends visited a hidden club rumored to be a source of the dangerous drugs and have run
...Sol's warships paid the ultimate price for threatening the Haraken and New Terran worlds. Now, Haraken President Alex Racine and his Méridien partner, Renée de Guirnon, are engaged in a desperate gamble to stop a war between their worlds and United Earth's (UE) massive forces before it starts.
What's Alex's grand plan? He hasn't a clue, but his people believe in him and hope he will find a way to protect them. Alex does have powerful assets:
...Until the Confederation created Allora, it had produced SADEs (self-aware digital entities) for hundreds of years with enormous consistency and harnessed their capabilities to power the society. But this particular young SADE was disturbed by her confinement. Trapped in metal-alloy housing on the bridge of a luxury passenger liner, Allora sought to possess the same freedom enjoyed by humans, who came and went from her starship with abandon.
Allora's
...