Search Worlds Without End

Best-selling author Eric Brown has created a brand new shared world for Abaddon Books: Weird Space. This thrilling space-opera series will begin with the release of The Devil's Nebula. Brown will introduce readers to the human smugglers, veterans and ne’erdowells who are part of the Expansion – and their uneasy neighbours, the Vetch Empire.

When an evil race threatens not only the Expansion, but the Vetch too - an evil from another dimension which infests humans and Vetch alike and bends individuals to do their hideous bidding, only cooperation between them means the difference between a chance of survival and no chance at all.

Telepath Den Harper did the dirty work for the authoritarian Expansion, reading the minds of criminals, spies and undesirables, for years. Unable to take the strain, he stole a starship and headed into the void, a sector of lawless space known as Satan's Reach. For five years he worked as a trader among the stars -- then discovered that the Expansion had set a bounty hunter on his trail.

But what does the Expansion want with a lowly telepath like Harper? Is there something in the rumours that human space is being invaded by aliens from another realm? Harper finds out the answer to both these questions when he rescues a young woman from certain death -- and comes face to face with the terrible aliens known as the Weird.

Satan's Reach is the second volume in the Weird Space series, a fast-paced action-adventure that pits humanity against unimaginable terror from beyond.

The growing threat of the dimension-invading Weird has driven the Expansion government to outright paranoia. Mandatory telepathic testing is introduced, and the colony Braun's World -- following reports of a new Weird portal opening -- is destroyed from orbit, at an unimaginable cost in lives.

Delia Walker, a senior analyst in the Expansion's intelligence bureau and a holdout of the pragmatic old guard, protests the oppressive new policies and is drummed out. Sure there's a better way, she charters the decrepit freighter the Baba Yaga and heads into the lawless "Satan's Reach," following rumours of a world where humans and the Weird live peacefully side by side.

Hunted by the Bureau, Walker, her pilot Yershov, and Failt -- a Vetch child stowaway, fleeing slavery -- will uncover secrets about both the Weird and the Expansion; secrets that could prevent catastrophic war...

"My name is Cassandra. My mother was the Walker."

The peace and stability of Stella Maris have been lost, perhaps forever. Weeks after Delia Walker found the remote world, trailing murderers and soldiers in her wake, more ships are coming. And now the impossible: a young woman claiming to be Walker's daughter has come out of the Weird portal, demanding passage off the planet.

For Cassandra, her mother's former young charge Failt, and the cynical, worldly-wise Yale, a desperate race begins to reach the very heart of the Expansion and avert a disaster.

On Stella Maris--the "star of the sea"--a fight has begun to preserve the refuge and its fragile harmony from those who would exploit it.