When it comes to cutting-edge science fiction, Stephen
Baxter is in a league of his own. His mastery of hard
science, his fearlessly speculative imagination, and his
ability to combine grand philosophical questions with
tales of rousing adventure make him essential reading for
anyone concerned with the future of humankind. Now, in
Exultant, Baxter takes us to a distant future of
dazzling promise and deadly threat, in which a far-flung
humanity battles for survival against an implacable alien
foe.
Destiny’s
Children EXULTANT
For more than twenty
thousand years, humans have been at war with the alien
race of Xeelee. It is a war fought with armaments so
advanced as to be godlike, a war in which time itself has
become an ever-shifting battleground. At the cost of
billions of lives, and with ruthless and relentless
efficiency, the ruling Coalition has pushed the Xeelee
back to the galactic core, where the supermassive black
hole known as Chandra serves the Xeelee as both fortress
and power source.
There, along a front millions of
light-years long, a grisly stalemate reigns, until a
young pilot, Pirius, faced with certain death, disobeys
orders and employs an innovative time-travel maneuver
that, for the first time in the history of the war,
results in the capture of a Xeelee fighter. But far from
being hailed as a hero when he returns to base with his
prize, Pirius is court-martialed, disgraced, and sentenced
to penal servitude on a bleak asteroid.
It is not
only Pirius who pays the price. In flying into the future
and back again, Pirius returned to a time before he’d
left, a time inhabited by his younger self. And that
younger self, by the pitiless logic of Coalition justice,
shares the older Pirius guilt and must be punished. Not
everyone in the Coalition agrees. Commissary Nilis
believes that the elder Pirius, whom he dubs Pirius Blue,
may have found a way to defeat the Xeelee. But Nilis can
do nothing for Pirius Blue. Instead, he takes charge of
the younger Pirius (Pirius Red), and brings him back to
Earth, the capital of a vast empire seething with
intrigue.
There Pirius Red will discover truths
that will shatter his preconceived notions of all that he
is fighting for, even of what it means to be human. Pirius
Blue, meanwhile, will learn truths harsher and more
discomfiting still. Yet the most shocking revelation of
all is still to come, waiting for them at a place called
Chandra. . . .