THE DARK BETWEEN THE STARS
Kevin J Anderson
The Seven Suns universe is my love letter to science fiction, a response to all the stories and the sheer sense of wonder I experienced over a lifetime of reading the genre.
This book is dedicated to the creators of the many incredible universes that took me out of a mundane childhood and transported me from everyday life to different planets and cultures—including, but not limited to, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Julian May, Andre Norton, and many, many more.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a novel is a solitary job, but writing a good novel requires a lot of help. For The Dark Between the Stars I would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Deb Ray, Diane Jones, Louis Moesta, John Silbersack, Pat LoBrutto, and my wife, Rebecca Moesta.
People assume that historians want to witness seminal events, but I must disagree. As a historian, my task is to record, to understand, to be objective. Yet objectivity is elusive when one is in the thick of a war that devastates the entire Spiral Arm. Personally, I would rather be an observer than a participant.
Nevertheless, while living through the conflict we now call the Elemental War, I did acquire a unique perspective. Now that I look back over the two decades since the end of that war, I see a time of peace and recovery. Civilization across the Spiral Arm is catching its breath.
The fiery beings called faeros have been driven back into their suns; the hydrogues are contained within their gas-giant planets. The Klikiss insect race departed on their final swarming, disappearing through their mysterious network of transportals to uncharted planets, and their treacherous black robots have all been wiped out.
The corrupt Terran Hanseatic League has become the Confederation, ruled by King Peter and Queen Estarra and composed of former Hansa planets, independent worlds, and Roamer clans. Although Earth remains important to the human race, the Confederation’s capital is Theroc, where the worldforest thrives and telepathic green priests tap into the vast knowledge stored in the sentient trees.
The Ildiran Empire is still humanity’s closest ally, and I admit to a fondness for their race and culture, having spent most of my professional career translating their billion-line historical epic, the Saga of Seven Suns. The Mage-Imperator even keeps a human green priest as his consort.
Impatient readers might consider twenty years plenty of time to chronicle such sweeping events, but in truth we are just getting started. It will take decades of peacetime contemplation to sort out the details.
If only we had that luxury.
ONE
GARRISON REEVES
He had to run, and he fled with the boy out into the dark spaces between the stars.
Garrison Reeves stole a ship from the Iswander Industries lava-processing operations on Sheol. Though he’d planned his escape for days, he gathered only a few supplies and keepsakes before departing, careful not to give his wife any hint of what he intended to do. None of his possessions mattered more than getting safely away with his son.
He knew the disaster could come soon—any day now. Lee Iswander, the Roamer industrialist, dismissed Garrison’s concerns about third-order tidal shifts in the broken planet; Garrison’s own wife, Elisa, didn’t believe him. The lava miners paid little attention to his warnings, not because they disputed his geological calculations, but because they didn’t want to believe. Their priorities were clear. Adding “unnecessary” and expensive levels of redundant shielding and “paranoid” safety measures was irresponsible, both to Iswander Industries and to the employees, who participated in profit-sharing.
Lee Iswander had commissioned follow-up reports, biased reports, that painted a far rosier picture. Garrison didn’t accept them.
So he made his choice, the only possible choice. He stole one of the company ships, and when she found out about it, Elisa would claim that he stole their son.
He flew out of the Sheol system, running far from any Roamer settlement or Confederation outpost. Elisa was not only an ambitious woman, she was abusive, tenacious, and dangerous—and she would come after them. He needed a head start if he had any hope of getting away.
The ship was a standard Iswander cargo transport, a workhorse, fully fueled with ekti, run by an efficient Ildiran stardrive. Garrison could fly the vessel without special training, as he could fly most standard spacecraft.
Ten-year-old Seth rode in the cockpit next to him. Garrison made a game of familiarizing the boy with cockpit systems and engine diagnostics, giving him simple navigation problems to solve—as any good Roamer father would, even though Garrison had chafed under how his stern father had raised him. He would not make the same mistakes with Seth.
Roamers were free spirits, sometimes deprecatingly called space gypsies, whose clans filled niches too rugged and dangerous for more pampered people—places such as the Sheol lava-processing operations. He had followed Elisa there because of her promotion in Iswander Industries.
“You should stay away from That Woman,” Olaf Reeves had warned him, not once but dozens of times. “If you defy me, if you marry her, you will regret it. You are spitting on your heritage.”
Now, Garrison hated to admit that his father had been right.
He closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened them. He studied the markers on the ship’s copilot control panels, then turned to his son. “Go ahead and set the next course, Seth.”
“But where are we going?”
“You pick, so long as we’re heading away from Sheol.” He tapped the starscreen, which showed infinite possibilities. “On this trip, we’re truly roaming. I just need some time away from everybody so I can rethink things.”
Though anxious, the boy was glad to be with his father. Seth respected his mother, even feared her, but he loved his father. Elisa never let down her walls—not with any business associate, not with Garrison, not even with her own son.
“Will I be able to go to Academ now?” Seth asked. The Roamer school inside a hollowed-out comet had always fascinated the boy. He wanted to be with the children of other clans, to have friends. Garrison knew his son would be happier at Academ, but Elisa had refused to consider sending their son there.
“Maybe we’ll arrange that before long. For now, you can learn from me.”
Unlike other Roamer children, Seth hadn’t grown up in a pleasant domed greenhouse asteroid or on the open gas-giant skies of an ekti-harvesting skymine. Rather, his daily view was a blaze of scarlet magma erupting in a smoke-filled sky. All the personnel of the lava-mining facility lived in reinforced habitat towers mounted on pilings sunk down to solid rock. More than two thousand employees, specialists of various ranks—engineers like Garrison himself, metallurgists, geologists, shipping personnel, and just plain grunt workers—filled shifts aboard the smelter barges or control towers, surrounded by fires that could have inspired Hell itself.