The Saga of Seven Suns

Hidden Empire (2002). By 2427 humanity has spread across the Spiral Arm on borrowed Ildiran stardrives and split three ways: the Hansa, which rules Earth through a figurehead Great King and a Chairman who decides; the forest world of Theroc, whose green priests speak instantly across any distance through their potted treelings; and the Roamer clans, who skim the stardrives’ fuel, ekti, from the clouds of gas giants. The saga opens with a demonstration. Above the gas giant Oncier the Hansa tests the Klikiss Torch, an ancient device found in the ruins of a vanished insect race, drops a neutron star into the planet and turns it into a small new sun. Watching from his warliner, Adar Kori’nh, admiral of the Ildiran Solar Navy, is not impressed:

“Disposable planets and disposable suns… how very Terran.”

There were hydrogues inside Oncier. Out of the gas giants rise their diamond warglobes, and the Roamer skymines go first: Ross Tamblyn’s Blue Sky Mine before any other. A hydrogue emissary comes to the Whisper Palace, forbids humanity the gas giants and kills Old King Frederick. Chairman Basil Wenceslas has a replacement ready, a fourteen-year-old street boy, Raymond Aguerra, whose family dies in a fire Basil has set. Raymond wakes with his hair dyed straw-blond and his brown eyes turned greenish-blue, is told he is now Prince Peter, and is crowned.

On Ildira, where night never falls, the young green priest Nira, sent with old Otema to read the Ildirans’ epic aloud to the worldforest, and the Prime Designate, Jora’h, fall in love. The ailing Mage-Imperator has Otema killed and Nira carried off, and Jora’h is told that both died in a fire. A rememberer who finds proof of an ancient hydrogue war cut from that epic is killed to keep it secret. On the desert world Rheindic Co, the archaeologists’ black Klikiss robots kill Louis Colicos, and his wife Margaret escapes through an alien stone doorway, a transportal. Ross’s brother Jess answers the hydrogues by dropping comets into Golgen, and Cesca Peroni, Ross’s betrothed and the woman Jess loves, becomes Speaker of the Roamers.

A Forest of Stars (2003) opens five years on. The Roamers raid the gas giants for ekti in dive-and-run scoops; Peter, King for five years, has started defying his Chairman; and Basil marries him to Estarra of Theroc as a piece of policy. The couple will turn the match into a real partnership, and point it at him.

Nira is alive, a prisoner in a breeding camp on the hidden Ildiran world of Dobro. She has borne Jora’h’s daughter, Osira’h, and since then, by order, children by other Ildiran fathers. Jora’h, who still believes her dead, learns of the camp’s work from his father and from its keeper, the Dobro Designate, Udru’h:

“Human folly reawakened the hydrogues, but we have always known they would return.”

Mage-Imperator Cyroc’h tells his son more than he ever has: ten thousand years ago the hydrogues and the fiery faeros fought the wentals, a mind of living water, and the verdani, the mind that grows as Theroc’s worldforest; and Osira’h is being bred as a bridge to the hydrogues. Then he takes poison, so that Jora’h must inherit the rest through the thism. Kori’nh, who has felt the empire’s telepathic bond go empty, leads a cohort of warliners in a suicide charge against the warglobes at Qronha 3; he dies, and nearly fifty warglobes are destroyed. Jora’h takes the chrysalis chair as Mage-Imperator.

At Osquivel the Earth Defense Forces are massacred. Jess’s sister Tasia, an officer in the EDF, loses her lover, Robb Brindle, who goes down into the clouds to parley and is given up for dead, and a Roamer clan pulls the spoiled officer Patrick Fitzpatrick III from the wreckage. Jess, alone in a nebula, finds the last wentals and, when hydrogues shoot his ship apart, drinks them and lives. The hydrogues destroy the colony Corvus Landing, killing Estarra’s brother Beneto, then fall on Theroc and kill her eldest brother, Reynald. The faeros drive them off and leave much of the worldforest burning.

In Horizon Storms (2004) three wars open at once. Jora’h’s brother Rusa’h wakes from a coma with visions, goes home to the pleasure world Hyrillka and uses shiing, its drug, to cut his followers out of the telepathic bond that joins every Ildiran to the Mage-Imperator. Jora’h’s eldest noble-born son, Thor’h, joins him, assassins reach the Prism Palace, and the Empire is at civil war. Udru’h hides Nira on an island in a vast lake and shows Jora’h her grave; she escapes on a raft, and Jora’h goes on believing she is dead.

The Hansa turns a fuel crisis into a war on its own Roamers. When a young Roamer finds an ekti hauler gutted and blasted, Cesca accuses the EDF of piracy and cuts off the fuel. The EDF answers by destroying Rendezvous, the clans’ hidden asteroid capital, and the Roamers scatter. Jess, part water now, takes stock on the ocean world where he set the wentals free:

“Everybody probably thinks I’m dead.”

He recruits water bearers to seed the wentals on other worlds, and he cannot safely touch Cesca, who is free at last. The Hansa sends colonists through the transportals to the empty Klikiss worlds, and the robots stop pretending: through programming hidden in the EDF’s new Soldier compies they take a Juggernaut and five Mantas and bombard the new colony on Corribus, while the farm girl Orli Covitz watches from the cliffside caves. Hydrogues and faeros put out Crenna’s sun, and the trader Rlinda Kett and her ex-husband BeBob carry its freezing colonists away. On Theroc the forest grows a wooden golem in Beneto’s shape.

Scattered Suns (2005) is a book of hunts. The EDF hunts the scattered clans. Old Jhy Okiah, the former Speaker, dies on Jonah 12, where a hibernating army of Klikiss robots wakes; Cesca, hiding from them on the frozen surface, is badly hurt, perhaps dying, when Jess comes for her. A ruse of Thor’h’s delivers Adar Zan’nh, Jora’h’s soldier-born firstborn, into Rusa’h’s hands, and the rebellion takes another world; Zan’nh breaks free and turns warliners on the rebels, Thor’h is taken alive, and the beaten Rusa’h flies into Hyrillka’s sun, where faeros close round his ship. The EDF launches rammers crewed by Soldier compies, and at the order to charge the compies do not respond; the robots take the ships and Tasia with them.

Osira’h is lowered into Qronha 3 in a sealed chamber to speak to the hydrogues. On Theroc, when the warglobes return, the Roamer inventor Kotto Okiah sends one reeling with a gadget built from the secrets of a hydrogue derelict found intact in Osquivel’s rings, Jess’s wental comet falls as rain on the burned forest, and the verdani’s own battleships, colossal thorny treeships, arrive from the beyond. Udru’h confesses that Nira is alive. At Osquivel, Patrick plays on Zhett Kellum’s feelings to escape, Soldier compies run amok through her clan’s shipyards, and he brokers a cease-fire that sends the prisoners home; on Earth the news leaks that Queen Estarra is pregnant. Then Osira’h comes back up, and she has not come back alone: an armada of warglobes hangs over the Prism Palace.

In Of Fire and Night (2006) the hydrogue war ends. The hydrogues’ terms come out of Osira’h’s mouth: help destroy the humans, or perish. Jora’h agrees in secret. The trap inside every Soldier compy springs, and the EDF loses most of its fleet to its own robots. Cesca, dying, is carried into the wentals’ ocean and comes out changed like Jess, deadly to everyone else and able to touch him at last. On Dobro, after two centuries, the human captives revolt and Osira’h turns on Udru’h; later, when fire has burned the breeding camp to the ground, Jora’h finds Nira alive and meets her children. On Earth Basil confines Peter and the pregnant Estarra, who come to believe he means to kill them.

Wentals and verdani join forces, and Beneto’s golem seals himself into a treeship. Jess pulls Tasia and Robb out of a hydrogue citysphere. When the hydrogues make their last assault on Earth, the Solar Navy, which has come under the pact, turns on them at the last moment; the treeships crush warglobes in their thorny branches; the hydrogues are beaten back into their gas giants. Peter and Estarra escape to Theroc with the old Teacher compy OX at the controls and are proclaimed its Father and Mother. Then Rusa’h comes back out of the fire:

“I no longer see the Lightsource—I am the Lightsource.”

He burns the deposed Udru’h to a black mark. And on the colony Llaro, on the last page, the transportal comes alive and the Klikiss themselves, believed extinct, pour through.

Metal Swarm (2007) turns from the war just won to the enemies left over. The Klikiss come home to reclaim the worlds humans have just settled: giant insect hives, each ruled by a breedex, at war with one another and with the black robots that betrayed them. Margaret Colicos, who has lived among them since she fled through the transportal, comes back as the colonists’ interpreter, and on Llaro the spy Davlin Lotze, who faked his death to retire there, plans the colonists’ escape. The robots, still holding stolen EDF warships, raid human worlds, and at the end Sirix leads them against the Llaro hive. In the turmoil of a Klikiss attack on the stockade the captives break out to Davlin’s hideout, while Davlin, at the hive’s fissioning, throws himself on the larva of the next breedex and is swallowed by the hive mind.

Humanity splits. Peter and Estarra’s Confederation on Theroc draws in the Roamers and the breakaway colonies; Nahton, the only green priest on Earth, warns it of a planned invasion and is gunned down by Hansa guards; Admiral Willis mutinies rather than turn her guns on a colony; Patrick, a deserter now, wins Zhett Kellum back. Basil, isolated on Earth, leans on Unison, the state religion, and its Archfather, a former actor. Rusa’h, the faeros incarnate, learns to spark new faeros by burning Ildiran souls, and the faeros hunt down those joined by a new link a green priest has made between telink and the Ildiran mind-bond. They turn on the wentals too, and near Jonah 12 they destroy a tanker of wental water with Cesca’s father, Denn Peroni, aboard. Jora’h swears an alliance with Peter on Theroc, but on his way home Admiral Diente, sent by Basil, cripples his warliner and takes him and Nira prisoner, and Rusa’h takes the Prism Palace. As the book ends, fire comes to the worldforest.

The Ashes of Worlds (2008) ends everything. The faeros burn Theroc’s groves until the wentals rain on them, and Beneto, fused with his treeship, drags the possessed trees into space and goes with them. Ildira burns under Rusa’h. Jora’h is Basil’s hostage on Earth’s Moon, and Basil has the Archfather crown a new puppet, King Rory: the name of Peter’s little brother, believed dead with the rest of his family. The Chairman tries to bargain with the Klikiss and makes a pact with the robots.

Every tyranny in the series falls, and most fall from the inside. Blind Tal O’nh brings the empty orbital shipyards down on Mijistra. The Solar Navy frees Jora’h, and a faeros armada breaks Earth’s Moon apart. At Golgen, Osira’h calls up the hydrogues once more against the fire. The Klikiss swarm arrives over Earth, and its One Breedex turns out to be Davlin, swallowed by the hive and fighting it from within; Kotto’s Klikiss Siren freezes the swarm. Rory steps down, Basil draws a weapon on Peter, OX shields the King, and Deputy Chairman Eldred Cain stabs Basil in the heart.

In the ruins of Mijistra, Jora’h faces his brother, and with his children, Nira’s treeling, the worldforest and the wentals behind him he demands that the soulfires Rusa’h has stolen be freed. The faeros are sealed in their stars, the Davlin-breedex leads the Klikiss away through a transportal, and the wentals leave Jess and Cesca. On Theroc, Peter relaunches the government of humanity with Estarra and their son beside him, and speaks the saga’s last words:

“Together, we build a new future for all, and together we can achieve the impossible.”