IF YOU HAVE not read the preceding books in this series, or it’s been a long time and memory is hazy, you may find this recap helpful:
Neptune Crossing. We come into this story with John Bandicut working on the icy surface of Triton, moon of Neptune. Since an accident robbed him of the use of his neurolink modules, he’s been a hands-only pilot, and susceptible to occasional bouts of silence-fugue, a temporary madness brought on by the absence of data-streams in his thoughts. During one such incident, he falls through the ice into an underground cavern, coming face to face with a strange alien device that calls itself the translator. Also, he suddenly has company in his own head. A noncorporeal being called a quarx has jumped from the translator into Bandicut’s mind. The being’s name is Charlie. (Later to become Charlene, and Charli.)
Charlie has waited for millennia for someone like Bandicut. He has an urgent message: A dark comet, deflected by the chaotic movements of bodies in the Kuiper Belt, is hurtling toward the sun—in a slingshot trajectory that will smack it straight, and with catastrophic results, into the Earth. It’s too late to warn anyone; the only hope of saving Earth is to steal a spaceship from Neptune orbit and intercept the comet. With the help of translator-stones—gemlike daughters of the translator—the seemingly impossible can become real. Threading space, for example.
There’s just one problem; well, several. If Bandicut does this, he will probably die, and even if he doesn’t, his career will be in flames. He will be a disgrace to his young niece Dakota, who as an orphan has no one else to look up to. And worst of all, he will have to leave, without explanation, a woman named Julie Stone, with whom he has just fallen in love. On the other hand, if he doesn’t do it, millions will die on Earth when the comet hits, and human civilization will likely end. Reluctantly, he decides to take the assignment, even though it will mark him as criminally insane.
Everything the quarx promised comes to pass. Accompanied by two robots named Napoleon and Copernicus, and the invisible Charlie, he steals the ship and leaves nothing but burned bridges behind. But the comet is right where Charlie said it would be, and for the sake of Earth, he collides with it at stupendous velocity. The comet is destroyed, and he . . . is still alive. With the help of the translator-stones and the enormous energy released in the collision, he is translated across many thousands of light-years, to the very edge of the galaxy. There awaits a structure of gargantuan size, floating in space far from any sun. What the hell?
Strange Attractors. His entry into this world, this Shipworld, is rocky and dangerous. Bandicut’s translator-stones are now embedded in his wrists. He and his two robots meet an alien named Ik, who has a pair just like them, embedded in his temples. The stones, indeed, are capable of translating language. He and Ik can communicate. Like Bandicut, Ik is in exile from his homeworld, except that his homeworld was destroyed. Shipworld, in fact, is a vast habitat for thousands of alien species, many of them rescued when their worlds were imperiled or destroyed.
Ik is searching for a friend named Li-Jared. Something is interfering; a malicious entity called the boojum is trying to orchestrate the destruction of Shipworld. Its goal is destruction. Bandicut and Ik have stumbled into the battle, and soon become reluctant players in a struggle to defeat the boojum. Aided by the strange, fractal shadow-people, they catch up with Li-Jared. Now they are three. Or five, if you count the robots, whom the shadow-people upgraded to sentience. Soon they are six, after they meet a beautiful but standoffish humanoid woman named Antares. None of them wants to do this, but if their new home of Shipworld is to survive, they must defeat the boojum.
The battle takes them to the magnificent and perilous Cavern of Ice, where the fight for control of Shipworld’s iceline intelligence system rages to a climax. It is a very near thing. In the end, our company prevails—and in thanks, they are led to a place where they have a choice: They can stay, or they can board a star-spanner, which will transport them back into the galaxy from which they came.
Not to their homes, as it turns out. The star-spanner drops them onto an alien world. In fact, into an alien sea.
The Infinite Sea. They are shocked, to say the least, to find themselves plummeting toward the bottom of an ocean. Captured-rescued by mer creatures called the Neri, they are conveyed to an undersea city. It is a remarkable world—if terrifying to Li-Jared, who fears open water—but it is under siege. A race they call the landers, a people who dwell on the coast, are making increasingly dangerous forays into the ocean, seeking to exploit technology from sunken vessels, and in the process contaminating the waters. Meanwhile, from below, in a deep abyssal trench, the Maw of the Abyss—an entity of unknown origin—causes periodic eruptions in ocean currents that threaten to destroy the Neri’s city. The Neri’s own technology is slowly breaking down, and their nanotech factories, on the seafloor near deep thermal vents, are beyond their ability to repair.
It’s hard to imagine what Bandicut and the rest of the company can do about this, but they must try. They discover ways to share translator-stones; and through painful and dangerous efforts, they establish communication with the landers. On the seafloor, Bandicut’s robots manage to link with the broken factories in an effort to nudge their failed programming back to life. In the midst of all this, Bandicut and Antares grow close and become lovers. And Bandicut learns the secret of the Maw: A crashed artifact from the stars, it is desperately trying to complete its interrupted mission. It can’t, but its efforts are wreaking havoc on the ocean environment.
In one of the riskiest ventures they have ever undertaken, the company descends into the abyss in their star-spanner bubble and attempt communication with the Maw. They persuade it to launch them into interstellar space and thus fulfill the mission it has so long been trying to complete. Their efforts succeed, and they are fired back into space, into the realm of the star-spanner.
Where they receive the oddest transmission—from a robot named Jeaves, speaking English—inviting them to join it on an interstellar waystation.
Meanwhile, back on Triton in the solar system, Bandicut’s former human lover, Julie Stone, has found favor with the translator—still the only alien artifact ever found by the rest of humanity. The translator has provided Julie with her own set of daughter-stones, though what she’ll do with them is far from clear.
Sunborn. A waystation among the stars is a lot better than nothing, and they dock and meet Jeaves. Jeaves has another mission in mind for them—hardly welcome news. But stars are dying in the nearby Starmaker (Orion) Nebula—and hypergravitational shock waves from the disturbances are on the verge of tearing the waystation apart. They have little choice but to see if they can help. They board a ship they name The Long View, and set course for the Orion Nebula. En route, they encounter two strange but friendly creatures, Deep and Dark—sentient clouds, or possibly sentient singularities, or both—who along with them are asking the question: What could possibly be causing stars to die?
Their first close encounter with one of the stars in the nebula reveals to them the astonishing fact that some of these stars are sentient—aware and thinking, though on a time-frame that is utterly different from our company’s. Deep and Dark, however, possess the ability to manipulate time and energy in remarkable ways and, for a brief interlude, our company fuses consciousnesses with the stars, where they learn...
Something is deliberately killing them. What, though, is a mystery—until The Long View encounters a graveyard of ships, and confronts face to face an ancient, collective machine intelligence, the Mindaru, that serves only one goal: to eradicate life of any kind that is not theirs, and to create supernovas and hypernovas wherever possible. Not only are these cataclysmic events deadly to life anywhere within thousands of light-years, but they also create and blast into space heavy elements, building blocks of more machine intelligence. It’s a slow process, but the Mindaru are patient.
The manipulation of dark matter to trigger these explosions is just one part of the Mindaru plan. Without Deep and Dark, our company would have little hope of combating this enemy. Only by working together at the extreme edge of the near-impossible do Bandicut and his companions successfully face the Mindaru. Victory comes at a cost, though: Deep, in quenching the explosion of a star, is marooned forever in another universe, one that has guttered out. And Ik, nearly overcome by the invasive Mindaru, loses his translator-stones and can no longer communicate with his friends.
They return to Shipworld, victorious but wounded.
And in the solar system, Julie Stone accompanies the original translator on a flight to Earth. But they take a detour when the translator detects an entity that apparently intends to do what the comet failed to do: destroy the Earth. Julie and the translator, in a small shuttle, grapple the enemy and, nearly at the cost of their own lives, carry it into the sun. And with the energy they absorb, they too are translated across the light-years—to the mysterious Shipworld, at the edge of the galaxy. It is a structure so immense that the probability of two people meeting on it by accident is infinitesimal. Is there any chance that Bandicut and Julie will find each other again?
The Reefs of Time. The story you are about to read. It is the first part of a two-part novel, the “Out of Time” sequence, and will be concluded in the following volume, Crucible of Time.