Search Worlds Without End

For Adam Hardy and his small Berkshire community, hardship is all they've ever known. For almost a century after the coming of The Sisters, the survivors of rainswept England have huddled in their tiny communities, scavenging the ruins of the old world. Now, finally, the Long Autumn is coming to an end, and society of a kind is starting to rebuild.

But for how long? A new tyrant, Frank Pendennis, has risen in the east, while rumours of something even worse are coming from the north.

The struggle to inherit the world is just beginning...

Young Forktongue Davy has visions; epilepsy, his Ma calls it. He's barely able to help around the family farm.

But something about the lad is attracting attention: the menacing stranger who might be the angel of death himself; the women-only community at Wycombe; Daniel, sent by the mysterious Guz.

They all want Davy for their own reasons.

But what use can he be to anyone? He has visions of flight, but how can flight ever be possible in this shattered world?

A simple farmboy, caught up in events beyond his power to control--but his visions may be the key to the future.

This is the second book in The Aftermath series. The first book is Shelter, by Dave Hutchinson.

After the war in the Parish, Adam is looking forward to a period of peace, but his superiors have other ideas. There are rumours from Oxford and the Cotswolds that Father John - who once almost overthrew Plymouth - is building an army, and someone has to go and investigate.

Arriving in Oxford, Adam is surprised to find a thriving city with a healthy populace and technology not seen since before the fall of The Sisters. He also finds it patrolled by the descendants of the Thames Valley Police, among them Detective Inspector Leonie Mellow.

However, it doesn't not take long for dark events to concern Adam. Murders, paint-splashed graffiti on walls, people going missing - and he can't help but wonder if the past is following him.

In the wake of the Asteroid Wars that tore across the solar system, Victor Zacharius makes his living running the ore-carrier Syracuse. With his wife and two children he plies the Asteroid Belt, hauling whatever cargo can be found. When the Syracuse stumbles into the middle of a military attack on the habitat Chrysalis, Victor flees in a control pod to draw the attacker's attention away from his family. Now, as his wife and children plunge into the far deeps of space, Victor has been rescued by the seductive Cheena Madagascar. He must do her bidding if he's to have a prayer of ever seeing his family again.

Elverda Apacheta is the solar system's greatest sculptor. The cyborg Dorn was formerly Dorik Harbin, the ruthless military commander responsible for the attack on Chrysalis. Their lives and destinies have been linked by their joint discovery of the alien artifact that had, earlier, profoundly affected industrialist Martin Humphries. Similarly transformed by the artifact's mysterious powers, Apacheta and Dorn now prowl the Belt, determined to find the bodies of the many victims of Harbin's atrocities so that they can be given proper burials.

Kao Yuan is the captain of Viking, owned by Martin Humphries, who's determined to kill Dorn and Elverda because they know too much about the artifact and its power over him. But Viking's second-in-command, Tamara Vishinsky, appears to have the real power on board ship. When Viking catches up to Apacheta and Dorn, their confrontation begins a series of events involving them, the Zacharius family, and Martin Humphries and his son in the transformation of the human solar system...