Cold and Dark

Life and War

By: Marc Neuffer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Sequel to HEAT and LIGHT

Cold and Dark: Life and War Sequel to Heat and Light

Gene "Hornblower" Bonner has been dead for twenty years. It was the only way to keep the universe from consuming him.
From Shangri-La — a hidden planet that exists slightly sideways from the rest of reality — he runs the Universal Library Foundation with a race of gentle bear-like scholars and one ancient AI who became human. He has two children he's never met. A dead man's secret kept by Sandy, who raised them alone, and by Mica and Abby, who gave them a family on the ranch at Satchel.

Coming home changes everything.

Sandy's twins have grown into people he could never have predicted: Sarah, an engineer with her mother's bluntness and a gift for technology that startles even the Surrons; and Noah, a biologist who carries something rarer — a quantum marker that allows him to walk through a Mintic portal two billion years old, into a place where the last 331 members of the most advanced race in history have been waiting in suspension for exactly this moment.

The Surrons have come back because the Zees — those extra-dimensional beings Hornblower once trusted as allies — have a secret hierarchy. The Upper Zees have been manufacturing interstellar wars across the universe for sport, running civilizations like pieces on a board, wiping the slate every two billion years and starting over. The current game is still in progress.

What follows is a war — not a single battle, but the long, grinding work of building an Interspecies Congress, a multi-species Marine Corps, a covert operations unit that ghosts through enemy territory in virtual reality, and a plan to shut off the Zees' access to a universe they've treated as entertainment for fifty billion years. Sandy commands the Marines. Hornblower runs covert ops. Sarah designs weapons that can move planets. Noah walks into the Zee realm itself to find the evidence that ends it.

Cold and Dark is the second book in the Hornblower series, a novel of family found late, children who exceed all expectation, and a war fought not with rage but with patience — and one spectacular exception.
Includes two bonus stories: Two Moon Tavern, a spacer-bar tale with a ghost-ship chill, and SteamWork Hearts, a comic Victorian steampunk adventure.
Hornblower Series — Book 2