Supernova (The Lightless Trilogy, Band 2) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 3: The Lightless Trilogy

Higgins, C.A.

 
9780553394474: Supernova (The Lightless Trilogy, Band 2)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553394479 ISBN 13: 9780553394474
Verlag: Random House Worlds, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

C. A. Higgins’s acclaimed novel Lightless fused suspenseful storytelling, high-caliber scientific speculation, and richly developed characters into a stunning science fiction epic. Now the dazzling Supernova heightens the thrills and deepens the haunting exploration of technology and humanity—and the consequences that await when the two intersect.

Once Ananke was an experimental military spacecraft. But a rogue computer virus transformed it—her—into something much more: a fully sentient artificial intelligence, with all the power of a god—and all the unstable emotions of a teenager.

Althea, the ship’s engineer and the last living human aboard, nearly gave her life to save Ananke from dangerous saboteurs, forging a bond as powerful as that between mother and daughter. Now she devotes herself completely to Ananke’s care. But teaching a thinking, feeling machine—perhaps the most dangerous force in the galaxy—to be human proves a monumental challenge. When Ananke decides to seek out Matthew Gale, the terrorist she regards as her father, Althea learns that some bonds are stronger than mortal minds can understand—or control.

Drawn back toward Earth by the quest, Althea and Ananke will find themselves in the thick of a violent revolution led by Matthew’s sister, the charismatic leader Constance, who will stop at nothing to bring down a tyrannical surveillance state. As the currents of past decisions and present desires come into stark collision, a new and fiery future is about to be born.

Praise for Supernova

“An enjoyable, hard science fiction adventure.”—Cinelinx

“Higgins succeeds in expanding her universe and leaving the reader hungry to learn how her debut trilogy will end.”—New York Daily News

“Riveting and thought-provoking.”—Publishers Weekly

Praise for C. A. Higgins’s Lightless

“Gripping . . . sci-fi with a hint of thriller.”—New York Daily News

“[A] measured, lovely science-fiction debut [that is] more psychological thriller . . . contained, disciplined, tense . . . The plot is compulsive. . . . Lightless is the first of a planned series, and you can’t help looking forward to learning what’s next.”—The New York Times

“The stakes in this story are high—life and death, rebellion and betrayal. . . . Higgins continually ratchets up the tension. . . . This is a debut not to be missed.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A taut, suspenseful read.”—Tech Times

“Absolutely brilliant . . . science fiction as it is meant to be done.”—New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

C. A. Higgins is the author of Lightless. She was a runner-up in the 2013 Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing and has a B.A. in physics from Cornell University. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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Chapter 1

Ignition

SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE FALL OF EARTH

In the instant after the bomb went off, Constance was a little girl again, on Miranda and waiting for the next System explosion to shear the skin from her bones. A little girl could hide the way an adult could not, huddled down like a cub in a den. A young thing hid because there was nothing else it could do.

But there was no true hiding here. The System saw them all. Her friends—­her family, such as it was—­were near her, she knew. But there was nothing she could do to save them and there was nothing they could to do save her, and so even though they were near, she was alone. The unstoppable power of the explosion would tear her limb from limb and the System’s cameras would watch with a machine’s chill indifference, and there was nothing, nothing, that she could do in this moment but wait to die.

But Constance wasn’t on Miranda anymore. She was on Pallas, and she was a woman grown, not a little girl. And the bomb that had gone off had been hers.

The rock dust from the explosion billowed. Pallas’s gravity was so low that it could take days for it to settle back down again. The particles reached so high that they dusted against the glassy ceiling of the segmented greenhouse enclosure that separated Pallas’s manufactured atmosphere from the distant stars. Constance stepped out from behind the stone in whose shadow she had sheltered to watch the dust and smoke poison the atmosphere. Some distance behind her, the glass walls that separated this segment of the greenhouse enclosure from the adjoining section shivered with the shock wave of the blast.

“Nice job,” said Mattie with a cough, coming out from behind a different stone windbreak. There was blood on his cheek already, but they weren’t nearly done yet.

Ivan, following him out, was unbloodied. His blue eyes were as clear and distant as the starscape overhead, the one slowly being concealed by the creeping smoke

“Masks on,” Constance said. Mattie took his oxygen mask from Ivan and fitted it over his nose and mouth, but when Ivan handed Constance her mask, his fingers captured hers.

“Keep your head,” he said. After the warmth of Mattie’s Mirandan tenor, the sharp clarity of his Terran accent was startling. Constance did not bother to respond.

“The smoke’s spreading pretty fast,” Mattie said through the mask, with a speculative eye on the dust from the explosion that was already brushing against the shell of the greenhouse enclosure. When the sensors inside the greenhouse enclosure sensed the smoke, Constance knew, they would close off this segment of the enclosure to keep the other segments open and livable.

“How long?” she asked.

She knew Mattie was grinning by the crinkles near his eyes. “I think the System’s got maybe half an hour before they’re trapped in here.”

“Then so do we,” said Ivan, and put his own mask on.

The front of the slow, thick cloud of debris had almost reached them. “Let’s go,” Constance said, and stepped into the smoke and dusted stone.

The sunlight was dim and distant on Pallas but not as distant as it had been on Miranda, where Constance had been born. She was used to seeing by the light of her own eyes. The System soldiers would be Terrans, like Ivan; they would be used to bright sunlight and clear days. She navigated her way through the cloud unerringly, stepping carefully over the olivine-­flecked Palladian stone.

There was a flickering orange light ahead, pulsing through the smoke. Fire. Constance stalked toward it carefully. Shadowed and blurred figures moved around the fire: System agents working to suppress it. In a place of limited oxygen such as the atmospheric domes, there was no higher priority than controlling a fire, and that would distract the System just long enough.

Constance’s goal was the ground zero of the explosion. Here the smoke was thick enough and the flames hot enough that few of the System had dared to come near. But Constance did not slow or hesitate; beside her Mattie stalked forward like a wolf on the hunt and behind her she felt the weighty press of Ivan’s presence. When a few soldiers emerged, coughing maskless in the smoke, Mattie took them out easily with his pistol.

As they passed the bodies, Constance thought she heard Ivan pause behind her, standing over the corpses, but when she looked back, he was moving again with no reaction to the deaths that she could see.

The bomb she had planted had destroyed the outer wall of the System base’s armory. The System probably thought that she had planted the bomb incorrectly and missed out on her chance to destroy them, but the explosion had gone completely according to plan. Constance did not want to destroy this base. She wanted to get inside.

The air was clearer once she was through the shattered wall and into the uniform concrete hallways of the System base. Overhead, an alarm blared with incessant volume, red lights flashing over the hall the way the fire flashed over the stone outside.

Ivan had taken off his mask and was wiping ash off his pale cheeks. Mattie tapped Ivan twice on his waist as he passed, dust congealed in the blood on his face. Ivan did not react, only scanned the hallway, sighted something, raised his gun, and fired. Farther down the hall, a camera that had not been destroyed by the blast shattered under Ivan’s bullet.

“Good shot,” Constance said, her voice muffled by the mask she had not removed, and she headed deeper into the base.

The alarm blared, the sound of it physically percussive. Constance flexed her fingers around the barrel of her long gun warily, keeping it low.

At the point that Mattie had marked out on the blueprints, there were five doors. She gestured Mattie toward one door and Ivan toward another, and they left to explore the rooms she had indicated while she moved on to the third door. It opened easily and led to nothing but a room of small arms. She left it and moved on to the fourth.

Mattie was back in the hallway when she emerged, crouched beside the fifth door, his lock picks out, two of them tucked beneath his teeth. He lifted his eyebrows at her beneath his long bangs.

“Think this is it,” he said around the lock picks.

“Why?”

“It’s the only one locked so far. Low security, but I bet there’s an electronic lock on the other side.” He sounded like he relished the idea.

Constance watched him wiggle the metal bits around a little longer and then checked her timepiece. Less than twenty minutes before the air locks shut them into this segment of the greenhouse; then they would be thoroughly trapped and as good as dead.

“Move,” she told Mattie.

When he was away, Constance fired a burst from her gun at the door. The lock shattered, and the door fell limply open. Mattie scowled at her.

From somewhere nearby a burst of weapons fire echoed hers.

Mattie started, dropping the lock picks on the floor, but Constance threw out a hand to still him. Beneath the relentless alarm, she heard the sound of a different weapon firing: Ivan’s gun.

“Stay here; open the inner door,” she ordered Mattie, and before he could protest, she chased the sounds of the firefight past the door through which Ivan had disappeared.

Ivan’s door had led to a sequence of rooms in labyrinthine combination. Constance walked as swiftly and as quietly as she could from room to room, following the echoing and intermittent gunfire.

She saw them before she heard them. Ivan had gotten close enough...

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Verlag
Random House Worlds
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553394479
ISBN 13 
9780553394474
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780553394450: Supernova (The Lightless Trilogy, Band 2)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0553394452 ISBN 13:  9780553394450
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 2016
Hardcover