Dark Secret

Dark Secret

<i>"Gripping. Impossible to put down."</i><br />-- Jack McDevitt<br /><i></i><br /><i>"Leave it to Edward M. Lerner to take a notion, run with it, squeeze every ramification out of it, and put it altogether in an irresistible page-turner. </i>Dark Secret<i> is a crackerjack novel -- hard science fiction at its best."</i><br />-- Robert J. Sawyer<br /><br />When the experimental ship <i>Clermont</i> is urgently recalled from a long-range test flight, neither Dana McElwain nor Blake Westford, its captain and crew, imagines that they are about to embark on a much more urgent voyage -- or that this new mission will determine the fate of the human race.<br /><br />A gamma-ray burst -- the deadly beam of radiation spawned seven thousand years earlier in the death throes of doomed neutron stars -- is about to wipe the Solar System clean of all life. Only the <i>Clermont</i>'s prototype Dark Energy Drive might carry anyone, and any of humanity's legacy, to safety before that extinction. <br /> <br />And then what? Where beyond the Solar System <i>is</i> safe? What if the price of survival is to become less ... human?<br /><i></i><br /><i>"</i>Dark Secret<i> is a unique tale of catastrophe and survival on multiple levels, gripping and harrowing yet ultimately inspiring. Lerner shows what it might really be like to be forced from an out-of-control frying pan into a far worse fire, and how humanity might endure even if what the refugees bring with them is worse than what they find."</i><br />-- Stanley Schmidt