Beyond the Reach of Earth

Ken MacLeod Beyond the Reach of Earth Lightspeed Trilogy - Book #2 ISBN: 9780356514819, 9780356514802 Kindle / ASIN: B0B19M8CYK Genre: Science Fiction Goodreads Rating: 0.00 Paperback, 368 pages Published: 2023 THE FERMI ARE AWAKE. With the invention of faster-than-light travel there is nowhere that humanity cannot go. New worlds are discovered, but with them come new dangers. At the heart of the discovery is the Fermi, mysterious beings that have survived on alien worlds for longer than humanity has existed. But now the Fermi are awakening, and they do not seem pleased to find humans in their midst. But for Lakshmi Nayak and the crew of the Fighting Chance, danger is a lot closer to home. Their search for answers will take them to places, and worlds, they never expected. Science fiction legend Ken MacLeod returns with book two in the Lightspeed trilogy, a gripping tale of first contact and dark conspiracies set among the stars. 'IF YOU LIKE SCIENCE FICTION YOU WILL LOVE THIS. . . A ROLLICKING GOOD READ' Scotsman on Beyond the Hallowed Sky 'MACLEOD'S BEST BOOK TO DATE' SFX on Beyond the Hallowed Sky 'An exceptional blend of international politics, hard science, and first contact' Michael Mammay, author of the Planetside series on Beyond the Hallowed Sky 'MacLeod is up there with Banks and Hamilton as one of the British sci-fi authors you absolutely have to read' SFX 'Prose as sleek and fast as the technology it describes. . . watch this man go global' Peter F. Hamilton on Star Fraction 'Ken MacLeod has an enviable track record of extrapolating from current trends to produce mind-bending novels of ideas' Guardian 2023 - ePub verification and revisions by zardox BEYOND THE REACH OF EARTH Who was actually in Black Horizon? A handful of scientists and officers had broken the news to their astonished governments. The crews of certain submarines and other craft were obviously complicit – though just how many and how much was unknown. The conspiracy was almost certainly highly compartmentalised. It could be presumed that submarines were used as starships only when they were out of contact when on patrol. It was possible that some crew members didn’t know they were on another planet at all, even if they disembarked – and not all did. The rest of the conspiracy remained hidden. And not only on Earth. It was known that they’d been to other planets than Apis, but no mention of these had been made. No one yet knew what resources and reserves Black Horizon might have stashed across the sky beyond the reach of Earth. ORBIT First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Orbit Copyright © 2023 by Ken MacLeod Excerpt from Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh Copyright © 2023 by Emily Tesh The moral right of the author has been asserted. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-356-51481-9 Orbit An imprint of Little, Brown Book Group Carmelite House 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DZ An Hachette UK Company www.hachette.co.uk www.orbitbooks.net In Memoriam Norman Edgar 1948–2022 Contents The story so far Chapter One New Foundations Chapter Two Matching Velocities Chapter Three Instructions Chapter Four Local call Chapter Five Battlestar Europa Chapter Six Continental Drift Chapter Seven A Peak in the Darien Scheme Chapter Eight Meet the Press Chapter Nine Black Gospels Chapter Ten The Keeper of the Bees Chapter Eleven Cephalic Nerve Ganglion Chapter Twelve Wave Function Chapter Thirteen Returns Chapter Fourteen Big River Chapter Fifteen Ancients of New Mu Chapter Sixteen The Cherenkov Flash Chapter Seventeen This Just In Chapter Eighteen Moon of the Mushroom Men Chapter Nineteen In the Eye of Silence Chapter Twenty The Port Glasgow Boys Chapter Twenty-One Sum Over Histories Chapter Twenty-Two Prior Indigenes Chapter Twenty-Three Coda: Terra Nullius Acknowledgments The story so far This is the second volume of the Lightspeed Trilogy, which began with BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY. I assume you’ve read that book, but not that you’ve read it recently. So here’s a quick recap. Faster-than-light (FTL) travel was discovered around 2020 and is being kept secret. This can’t stop other people from discovering it. One of them is London PhD student LAKSHMI NAYAK. In 2067, she receives an airmail letter in her own handwriting, with equations that point to the possibility. To her this apparent communication from a future self implies both FTL and time travel. She expands the equations into a paper and publishes it online, where it’s torn to shreds. After gaining her PhD she’s warned off any further work on FTL by MARCUS OWEN, a humanoid robot operative of the British Council (now a feared intelligence service). The world has three big powers: the Alliance (the Anglosphere plus India and minus Ireland and Scotland), the Union (the former European Union, now a revolutionary ‘economic democracy’) and the Co-ordinated States (China and Russia), all with various client states and non-aligned countries outside. NAYAK defects to the Union and moves to Scotland, where she works for a planning consultancy and secretly develops her theory into a practical engineering proposition. In 2070 JOHN GRANT, a Clydeside shipbuilder, sees a nuclear submarine rise out of the sea and vanish in a blue flash. His queries are blocked by Iskander, the Union’s universal AI interface. At work he’s approached by a colleague who is in ‘the cadre’, the network of revolutionaries that riddles the Union’s democratic institutions. She asks him