About the Book
The Empress
Maj Thovold has led the Galaxy for three decades, a Golden Age of peace and prosperity. She is weary and ready to resign, but two pieces of unfinished business remain. The first is her choice of a successor; the second, an old enemy that only she has the power to defeat... if anyone can.
The Rebels
Once, Brin Lütken and Catherine Leonov were the unquestioned rulers of the galaxy. Then Maj Thovold came, and their power evaporated. For thirty years they have made their plans and laid their traps... and now it is time for the last battle, in the strangest battlefield known...
The Web
Tendrils stretch across lightyears, superconducting flashes of current; habitable regions hang suspended in the biospheres of newborn stars, with pockets of oxy-nitrogen and oxy-helium and water; apparently free-floating globules connect with the body of the Web by diamond threads, responding to light, heat, gravity, magnetism like colossal, fragile sensory organs – and somewhere in the unexplored cubic parsecs of the Web are rumored huge lumps of tissue that resemble neural or circuit patterns, great brains the size of continents, dreaming their own visions imcomprehensible to the maggots that crawl among their far-flung strands...
