The Spheres of Heaven
 LOSE THE STARS-
OR LOSE EVERYTHING!
Spacer Chan Dalton is torn between two masters. The pacifist aliens who hold Earth under Quarantine want him to find out why their starships have been disappearing in the Geyser Swirl, the Bermuda Triangle of the galaxy. Earth's military, which has secretly discovered a way to break the quarantine, assumes that someone out there is making ships vanish, including Earth's, and wants Dalton to find the culprits and hopefully stop themwith extreme prejudice, if necessary.
The trouble is, the aliens hold the taking of intelligent life, even in
self defense, to be the greatest of sins. It was Earth's violent ways (in defense of the damned pacifist aliens!) that led to the quarantine in the first place-and if Dalton is forced to fight, it will unveil, and so destroy, Earth's final chance to reach for the stars again.
So when Dalton does indeed discover the hostile invaders responsible for the lost starships, he is faced with an impossible decision: Fight and lose access to space forever; or allow a rapacious enemy to run riot over all that he holds dear....
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Sheffield, a mathematician and physicist, is a past president of both the American Astronautical Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. He has published over a hundred technical papers and monographs on such subjects as nuclear physics, gravitational field analysis, and general relativity, and an equally large body of popular science articles for the layman. He serves as a science reviewer for several prominent publications.
In science fiction, Dr. Sheffield has received the coveted Nebula and Hugo Awards, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel for Baen, Brother to Dragons. His other SF novels for Baen include The Mind Pool (to which The Spheres of Heaven is a sequel), Between the Strokes of Night, Convergent Series, and Transvergence. He is also the author for Baen of Borderlands of Science: How to Think Like a Scientist and Write Science Fiction, which is both a nonfiction survey of current scientific frontiers and an explanation of how a science fiction writer can write SF using bona fide scientific knowledge. Which is just the sort of SF that Dr. Sheffield has been writing for some time now, to the resounding acclaim of readers and critics alike.
Illustration by Bob Eggleton
Cover design by Carol Russo Design
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 Hardcover
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and
events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real
people or incidents is purely coincidental.
First printing, February 2001
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN: 0-671-31969-8
Copyright © 2001 by Charles Sheffield
All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.baen.com
Typeset by Windhaven Press
Auburn, NH
Electronic version by WebWrights
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