Chapter Seven: Hard Copy
Chapter Eight: The Thirst That from the Soul Doth Rise
Chapter Nine: The Pain of Eternity
Coda
Afterword to the Galactic Center Series
Timeline of Galactic Series
About the Author
BATTLE STARS
As we got closer we could see the brawl. Fat, wobbly stars flaring like angry gods, spewing red tongues. They were the children of awful marriages, when two stars had collided, merged, and fallen into the same oblate quarrel. Stars ripped open, spilled, smelted down into fusing globs. They lit up the dark, orbiting masses of debris like tiny crimson match heads flaring in a filthy coal sack.
Amid all that were the strangest stars of all. Fast ones, they were. Each half-covered by a hemispherical mask. Light escaped freely on one side. The mask bottled it up on the other. That pushed the star toward the mask. As far as the wretched star knew, however, it was able to eject light in only one direction. So it recoiled in the opposite way.
Somebody was herding these stars. Those masks made them into fusion-photon engines. Sluggish, but effective. And the herd was headed for the accretion disk.
Somebody was helping along the black hole’s appetite.
ACCLAIM FOR GREGORY BENFORD’S CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER
IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT
“A major novel . . . evokes truly majestic feeling for the vast distances and time scales upon which the universe operates.”
—Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“A brilliant book, a weather vane for the changing winds of science fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly
FURIOUS GULF
“A heady mixture of science . . . and no-holds-barred adventure.”
—New York Times Book Review
“When it comes to conjuring the marvels of space and the bizarre possibilities of high-energy physics, Benford is second to none.”
—Kirkus Reviews
ALSO BY GREGORY BENFORD
Fiction
Beyond Infinity
The Sunborn
The Martian Race
Eater
The Stars in Shroud
Jupiter Project
Shiva Descending (with William Rostler)
Heart of the Comet (with David Brin)
A Darker Geometry(with Mark O. Martin)
Beyond the Fall of Night (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Against Infinity
Cosm
Foundation’s Fear
Artifact
Timescape
