The Warship
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Neal Asher takes us on a thrilling ride into interstellar politics and impending war, in this second volume of Rise of the Jain.
Their nemesis lies in wait . . .
Orlandine has destroyed the alien Jain super-soldier by deploying an actual black hole. And now that same weapon hoovers up clouds of lethal Jain technology, swarming within the deadly accretion disc’s event horizon. All seems just as she planned. Yet behind her back, forces incite rebellion on her home world, planning her assassination.
Earth Central, humanity’s ruling intelligence, knows Orlandine was tricked into releasing her weapon, and fears the Jain are behind it. The prador king knows this too – and both foes gather fleets of warships to surround the disc.
The alien Client is returning to the accretion disc to save the last of her kind, buried on a ship deep within it. She upgrades her vast weapons platform in preparation, and she’ll need it. Her nemesis also waits within the disc’s swirling dusts – and the Jain have committed genocide before.
The Warship is set in Neal Asher's popular Polity universe.
'Neal Asher's books are like an adrenaline shot targeted directly for the brain' – John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War and The Collapsing Empire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this riveting sequel to The Soldier, Asher ramps up the pyrotechnics in the thunderous first salvoes of war between the human/AI Polity and the xenophobic Jain culture, which humans had believed long extinct. In the first book, a single Jain soldier was revived and then destroyed by Orlandine, a cyborg "haiman" in control of the Jaskoran system and one of the guardians of a nearby accretion disc, a former solar system scattered with dormant Jain tech. When the Clade, a swarm AI, assassinates multiple nodes of Orlandine's consciousness, the Polity and the bellicose alien Prador Kingdom are alarmed and send armadas to the Jaskoran system. On Jaskor, Clade units cause further mayhem as they employ war and assassin drones to battle the no-longer-human (but still sympathetic) Captain Trike, who's been overcome and made monstrous by the Shatterjay virus. Meanwhile, in the vicinity of the accretion disc, something mysterious is emerging from Underspace, and the Polity fears it's a Jain ship. Asher depicts warfare as a catalyst of biological and technological evolution while entwining the reader in twisty conundrums and misdirections. This is Asher at the top of his game and the field of military science fiction.
