Beyond the Rift

ABOUT BEYOND TH RIFT ~ Earthforce Saga #22

The extraordinary evolution of the Kirov series into a science fiction space opera now enters its 22nd volume with the release of Beyond the Rift. The title of this volume, Beyond the Rift, refers to the line of obscuring gas and dust nebulae that prevents us from directly observing the center of the Milky Way Galaxy from Earth. Wiki says: ‘The classical Greeks described the Great Rift as being the path of devastation left by Phaeton, who tried to guide the chariot of Helios (the Sun god) across the sky before losing control, wreaking havoc, and finally being struck down by a lightning bolt of Zeus.’ The rift now acts like a curtain concealing some dramatic event, but as it is some five hundred light years away, Fedorov is going to have to wait five centuries before the light from that event reaches Earth. Fortunately, he has other means of finding the underlying cause of this mystery. One is to go there on one of the Startides and peek beyond the rift, and the other is to go to Eridia and seek an audience with the Lyrians to ask them about it. He does both, and so Orion and the entire cast comes along, because something has slipped, and it promises profound changes ahead in the series.
Well, something has lost control there in the center of the Milky Way, as Karpov and Fedorov begin to get intelligence exacerbated by the testimony of vagrant refugee aliens as they migrate away from the galactic center towards the outer spiral arms. The author opens this tale with his characteristic way of presenting common events to auger things to come of far greater magnitude. This book starts with the work of a small commercial hauler called the Star Keep, out on a job near the farthest frontier of Human controlled space, 31 light years from Sol. The Story begins like this:

‘Running into the unexpected in outer space was not an uncommon thing, and was often a very dangerous thing. No one aboard expected what they would encounter, or would even come to understand what they found. It may have been more appropriate to say that something found them, and it was a rendezvous that seemed fated at the time, something that would resound with the ring of destiny’s bell.’

The importance of this event is in the warning it brings, not from any local event, but from things happening ‘Beyond the Rift.’ And brothers, that bell is going to ring in this volume, so hold on to your seats. The small local threat then begins to layer up when Commander Arras testifies that his people encountered many alien species on the move during the time his Centaurids were exiled from Human controlled space, and that some of these aliens are benign, while others may prove to be hostile. This, plus information Tyrenkov brings from his ‘Dark Wire’ Intel net, convinces Karpov that there is a problem brewing out there, somewhere ‘beyond the rift.’ He want’s to know what it is out of a military necessity.
More than a problem, this volume will present the most cataclysmic events yet seen in the series, or ever to flow out of this author’s prolific pen.