Night Without Stars: The Chronicle of the Fallers 02 (Chronicle of the Fallers, 2)

Product Description
The planet is isolated from the rest of the universe, unable to seek help as it's targeted by hostile aliens. Bienvenido's ruling authorities have slowly responded to this gradual infiltration, but they have no idea that a highly organized invasion is now under way, designed to wipe out all human life on the planet. All factions must work together to survive. Unfortunately, due to prejudice against enhanced Eliter humans and crippling technophobia, the parochial government won't collaborate.Kysandra, known as the Warrior Angel, heads up the Eliter resistance. With their enhanced capabilities and technological know-how, they could avert disaster, but only if the authorities stop hunting them at every turn. Then, as both resistance and government are caught in a desperate race to save lives, the planet receives an unexpected visitor. As events escalate, petty power-plays, politics, and age-old prejudices may prove fatal. And as the more sophisticated hostiles can hijack a human body, humanity is undermined by spies within-wearing the faces of family and friends.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One

Book One

Another Death for Laura Brandt

When it hit the planet’s upper atmosphere, the starship Vermillion was still traveling at an appreciable fraction of orbital velocity. Like the majority of its onboard systems, the colony vessel’s ingrav and ­regrav drives were glitching badly in the Void, leaving them unable to suspend the titanic bulk against gravity and lower it to a gentle landing as they were designed. But they could still exert some resistance against the planet’s hungry gravity, so they strained to slow the starship’s otherwise-­catastrophic speed. On the bridge, Captain Cornelius and the ten remaining volunteers from the crew did what they could to mitigate the impending disaster. Force fields, normally tough enough to deflect nuclear blasts with ease, headed toward breakdown as they expanded out from the hull. Redline instability warnings bloomed in Cornelius’s exovision as they held Vermillion secure at the center of a bubble of incandescent plasma five kilometers in diameter.

Vermillion curved around the planet, tearing a screaming hole through the atmosphere as it aerobraked to a manageable speed, its fiery hypersonic wake scoring a terrible furrow of destruction across every landmass it zoomed over. After seventy-­two minutes of this torment it finally dropped to subsonic. They were still traveling at eighty kilometers an hour when their altitude reached zero. A last desperate burst of power was pumped into the fading drive units to brake their speed further. The force fields collapsed on impact, and Vermillion’s unprotected hull struck the ground.

Their wild flight had brought them to a rumpled stretch of ground just beyond a massive river where the humidity was a constant mist twisting among the verdant trees. This was jungle territory, with a soft loamy ground. But soft was a relative term for a transgalactic colony ship more than a kilometer and a half long and massing hundreds of thousands of tons.

It hit at the foot of a small incline, pulverizing vegetation and ripping out a deep gorge. Modules and compartments never designed to withstand such forces broke off, tumbling away to their ruin through the trees. But the main section kept surging onward and upward until it, too, came to rest.

Seventy-­five percent of Vermillion remained intact through a miraculous combination of good luck and steely nerves. Captain Cornelius was justifiably lauded by the passengers who’d flown down to the planet earlier in much safer shuttles with good old-­fashioned solid wings. That hero-­worship enabled him to retain his authority as the lost survivors slowly built their civilization in the strange environment of the Void. The threat of the Fallers who began to invade their world from space justified the formation of defensive regiments, of which Cornel