Light Chaser

By Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell

In Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell's action-packed sci-fi adventure LIGHT CHASER, a love powerful enough to transcend death can bring down an entire empire.

Amahle is a Light Chaser – one of a number of explorers, who travel the universe alone (except for their onboard AI), trading trinkets for life stories.

But when she listens to the stories sent down through the ages she hears the same voice talking directly to her from different times and on different worlds. She comes to understand that something terrible is happening, and only she is in a position to do anything about it.

And it will cost everything to put it right.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250769817

Peter F. Hamilton

Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960 and still lives nearby. He began writing in 1987, and sold his first short story to Fear magazine in 1988. He has written many bestselling novels, including the Greg Mandel series, the Night's Dawn trilogy, the Commonwealth Saga, the Void trilogy, short-story collections and several standalone novels including Fallen Dragon and Great North Road.

Book preview

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow—

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream

Edgar Allen Poe, A Dream Within A Dream (1849)

I

AMAHLE COULD NO LONGER remember how old she was. Born human and later imbued with synthetic eight-letter DNA, she was always destined to have a lifespan measured in millennia. Then she found herself flying the Mnemosyne around and around a loop of The Domain’s settled worlds at close to the speed of light, so time compression made her effectively immortal to any observer. But the night before she died, she said: I think I’m finally scared.

Don’t worry, Carloman said. "It will be so quick, not even your nerves can send a pain signal into your brain."

She clung to him in the webbing envelope as the minibots slowly broke up the last extraneous parts of the cabin around them, shrinking it further. That wasn’t quite what I meant. It’s not the pain, it’s death itself.

There is nothing to fear. Trust me, I remember all my deaths.

I’ll try, she said, and gripped him tighter, pressing her face into his skin as if extra comfort might be found there. Really I will.

She had adored her shipboard life ever since it began, whenever it began back in those time-lost circumstances. Mnemosyne was the sleek end product of a society at the height of its technological prowess, a starship that travelled at point-nine-seven lightspeed between the inhabited worlds of The Domain. Its two-kilometre length resembled a thick silver spear as it slipped through interstellar space, a design flourish only the indolence of a true post-scarcity world would bother with. In space, alone and unseen in a bubble of relativity distorted time, there was really no need for aesthetics. Yet its designers had given it a cloak of fluxfabrik like viscid quicksilver that flowed protectively over the long gantry spine of struts which held its component modules together: life support, big enough to carry a hundred passengers in considerable luxury; engineering with its half-million integrated systems maintained by semi-sentient bots and a cluster of manufactories; a hangar where its subsidiary craft rested between star systems; tanks, plenty of those, containing both fuel and matter reserves for the manufactories; and generator stacks providing the phenomenal quantity of energy required by the final module, the negative-matter drive. All of this perfect machinery was controlled by a full-sentient-rated AI, guiding it unerringly across interstellar space on voyages that lasted for years of ship-time and decades of real-time.

Amahle, who’d been its captain and sole occupant for thousands of years as she flew around and around the loop, had relished the wonders and miseries which human civilizations were capable of. It was a perfect life for someone of her origin. Experiencing the lives of others from the safety and solitude of the gulf between stars.

Was.

Had been.

Used to be.

* * *

Now the Mnemosyne was a very different beast as it approached the subgiant star three thousand light years from the outermost worlds of The Domain. No longer slim and streamlined, the silver fluxfabrik cloak had morphed out into a broad umbrella with the transformed starship nestled in its shade, where it was protected from near-lightspeed particle impact. For the last two years of the fifteen-year voyage, a swarm of engineering bots had been industriously restructuring the ancient starship. The hangar with all its surface-to-orbit shuttles and trans-planetary craft had gone, converted into raw mass along with every other superfluous component, to be stored as plasma in big magnetic confinement chambers. That included the palatial life support module, which had slowly been fed into the matter refineries over the final six months of approach. No longer did Amahle have vast compartments of every environment from tropical to polar; the swimming aquarium was long gone, as were the med-clinic and faux eighteenth-century-Earth aristocrat’s dining hall. Life support had shrunk down to a ten-metre sphere, with very basic utilities. Over the last month, the matter refineries had even devoured their own engineering section in a final act of cybernetic cannibalism. All these alterations had reduced the Mnemosyne to an errant clutter of globes ribbed with big flow ducts, transparent pipes that replaced the original gantry in a woven helix of glowing plasma, as if the starship were somehow surrounded by machine DNA.

* * *

Amahle woke on the last morning and smiled at Carloman, who was still in the webbing envelope next to her. He smiled back at her.

Are you sure about this? he asked.

I think that’s what I should be asking you, isn’t it? And anyway, whoever asks, they should have done it fifteen years ago, before we started.

Touché.

They both wriggled out of the webbing. Amahle found the stk bag with her dress in. Peeled it off the wall and opened it. There were no other clothes left, wardrobes the size of houses had all been transformed into plasma.

Nice, Carloman observed as she put it on. You look gorgeous, but then you always do, every time. There was moisture in his eyes as he spoke.

She’d picked the garment up centuries before from a world on the loop that was forever poised on the cusp between totalitarian barbarism and the steam age. It was beautiful, lush red silk that moved like oil, hand-tailored to her unchanging figure, elegant and sophisticated, as well as subtly enticing. The perfect definition of overdressing for the occasion, she told him. But I wanted to go out in style.

Mission accomplished.

When you say things like that, so full of meaning, I never know if you’re quoting some famous deep-history person or not.

Quoting, but very out of context.

They kissed.

Let’s get on with it, she said levelly. Even so, she was shaking slightly as they strapped themselves into the acceleration couches on the wall opposite the bathroom chamber.

Three-sixty visual, she told the Mnemosyne’s network. It wasn’t a sentient AI anymore, not since she’d killed the high-level routines decades before. But it operated the diminished starship’s functions effectively, obediently following her commands.

The little cabin’s walls vanished, replaced by the external sensor feeds. Two acceleration couches sped through space at point-nine-four lightspeed. Behind them was a small patch of red mist, all the stars they were racing away from, including the vast area of space containing The Domain. Ahead was a single point of painfully intense blue light: the subgiant. Between the two, bracketing the couches, was a darkness even Amahle, with all her centuries of space travel experience, found unnerving.

We’re about twenty hours out, she said as navigational graphics slid over her vision. It’s going to get bumpy now.

He grinned. Finally, something that’s physical.

The Mnemosyne was coming in twenty degrees south of the subgiant’s ecliptic, a vector which kept them clear of all the planets, asteroids, comets, and dust that orbited around the star’s equatorial band. But even so, the density of particles grew as they closed on the huge star. Their curving silver shield had been glowing a faint violet for over a year as it repelled interstellar gas and the occasional larger clump of carbon molecules that struck them. Now the glow started to increase as they streaked inwards, exerting a weak braking force against the starship’s terrific velocity. The negative-matter drive increased thrust to compensate.

Amahle pulled two of the subgiant’s planets up out of the visual and studied the associated datafield. Some interesting chemical activity in those atmospheres, she observed as the cloud-wrapped globes hung before them. Very non-terrestrial. Which one is it, do you think?

I have no idea what form The Exalted might take. See, you’re being too conventional looking in the terrestrial life band. They could be evolving on one of the cryoplanets, or maybe floating through the star’s corona.

Not for much longer, she said. As she’d done countless times every day of the mission, she checked the stasis vault. The datafield reassured her the strangelet particle they were carrying at the heart of the Mnemosyne remained stable.

At a hundred AUs out, the glow of atoms rupturing around the silver shield was expanding, stretching out behind them like a flickering cometary tail. Amahle had already felt the starship shudder several times as they smashed into solar debris massing several grams. The resultant detonations were like fusion bombs going off against the fluxfabrik. Their velocity punched them through, putting the blast tens of thousands of kilometres behind them in milliseconds. But the shield suffered, ablation carnage ripping away huge segments of its quasi-solid structure. The thick flow ducts twined around the ship responded instantly, shunting plasma up to reinforce the depleted fluxfabrik shield at near-lightspeed, their radiance rivalling the impact plumes for brightness.

I’m surprised we’re still here, Amahle said. Surely, The Exalted will just change this reality?

Reality is what we perceive it to be.

You mean we’re willing this to happen?

"Not exactly, the physical universe we perceive has an inertia all of its own, the rules, if you like. Time seems to be a constant within it; even we are governed by that while we’re here. Think of this flight as playing chess with causality. And this, the end, is our checkmate

Reviews for Light Chaser

[elorenalory · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stars: 4 out of 5.This is a dystopian novel, even if it takes the reader a while to recognize that. After all, we have a modern spaceship piloted by an AI and a crew member who is tasked with visiting a umber of worlds populated by humans. She trades trinkets and harmless technologies or medicines in exchange for memory bracelets that certain inhabitants of these worlds wear throughout generations. Since her ship travels at speeds as close to light as possible, Her trip between planets might take 5 years, but for those planets, over a thousand years pass between visits.That's where the dystopia comes into play. Because even though Amahle visits these planets every thousand years or so, nothing changes on them. The medieval planet is forever stuck in those dark middle ages. The industrial and steam revolution planet doesn't advance past those innovations. Even the most evolved planet at the end of her loop, where she unloads her stock of memory bracelets, hasn't made any significant breakthroughs in millions of years. Everything stays forever the same. More than that, there is no interstellar travel in this human-populated space, apart from those Light Chaser ships.When Amahle finally discovers the reason why, at first she refuses to believe it, then she is terrified, then she decides to do something about it. I thought this was an interesting take on slavery. Because make no mistake, the entire human race is enslaved by an unknown alien race. Just because humans have no idea that it is happening doesn't make the fact any less appalling. It was also an interesting study on the nature of our memories - what is real, can our memories be manipulated, can erased memories be recovered? And of course, it's also a study of trust, love, and the feeling of safety. And also about hope and ingenuity.It's a quick read and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I questioned the author's decision to start the book with the ending, then rewind the story to show us how the characters got to that point, I think it took away from the suspense of the story - we already know that the characters will succeed and survive until that final confrontation, so there is no tension when they are put in danger in the rest of the book. I think telling the events in the normal chronological way would have added a lot more tension to the story, since we would have had to discover everything along with Amahle, without knowing where the story was going. We would have been a lot more invested in the discovery and the struggle itself, and the ending would have been a lot more satisfying. Anyway, if you want a fun book about space travel, love, and reincarnation, I would highly recommend this one. Plus it's only 172 pages long, so it's a fast read for a rainy afternoon.PS: I received an advanced copy of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[glennis.leblanc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a novella set in a far-flung space empire that growth on the various plants is fairly static with a range of preindustrial to space faring and yet they all know about space travel and are fine with it. The Light Bringer stops by once every 1000 years on each planet to trade goods and gather memory collars that record every moment in someone’s life. These collars are passed down in families and when it is time to collect them those families are rewarded handsomely. If it is lost, then they go down in status. Other people watch them on the higher tech worlds. The Ai ships move in set patterns between these worlds gathering and distributing the collars. Amahle has been doing this for thousands of years and she watches the memories to alleviate the boredom of the years between worlds while traveling at near light speeds. And then she starts getting messages directed to her from various worlds. Slowly she realizes that in all the memory editing she has done over the centuries she used to have a family before her modified DNA allowed her to leave Earth and travel the stars after the death of her family.
The messages are convincing her to help someone she knew in the past to overthrow the aliens that are working with the AI ships to keep humans stagnate on each of their worlds. The story is told ending first and then how it all started so the first chapter is a bit jarring. I really enjoyed the book and wonder if there will be more in this setting.


Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss

[kevn57-163679 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love space opera based around trade, probably because of Cyrano Jones. This was particularly interesting because a whole galaxy of humans were secretly enslaved by an alien race. I was glad that even though the A.I.'s were doing the subtle enslaving it wasn't something that they wanted. The A.I.'s being controlled by the aliens.

[spaceandsorcery · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A work written in cooperation by Peter Hamilton and Gareth Powell was bound to pique my curiosity, so as soon as this novella became available I had to read it: it was a strange experience - in a good way, of course - because it offered many tantalizing glimpses into what might have been a broader, much more layered narrative, while telling a compact, circumscribed story whose arc encompasses only a handful of pages.The titular Light Chaser is Amahle, a lone traveler who is almost immortal: genetic modifications and the time-dilation factor of her ship’s near-lightspeed velocity allowed her to live for millennia as she completes her unchanging circuit through a number of planets where her visits are hailed as extraordinary events. Her employers, Ever Life, are the alien creatures called the Exalted and living on Glisten, the final port of call of each circuit: in the course of her stopovers Amahle retrieves her employers’ memory collars from the planets’ dwellers and leaves new ones for the next generations - these are artifacts that record a person’s life experiences for the vicarious enjoyment of the Exalted and are considered a great honor for the individuals so entrusted, who pass them on as precious heirlooms to the family’s various members.Amahle herself experiences these lives as a form of pastime during the long journeys from one planet to the other, when her only companionship on the Mnemosyne comes from the highly advanced ship’s AI. Someday though, a man addresses the Light Chaser directly in one of those recordings, stating that his real name is Carloman, that they share a common history and - more important - that she should not trust the onboard AI. I prefer to leave the synopsis at that, because the story is so short that more details would certainly spoil your enjoyment…Memory is indeed the front and center theme in Light Chaser - and the ship’s name is certainly not a random choice, given that in Greek mythology Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory: the concept of the memory collars is an intriguing one, at first looking like a way of monitoring the evolutionary situation on the many planets in Amahle’s circuit - places that range from medieval societies to more technologically advanced ones - but then taking on a sinister connotation as the Light Chaser is made aware of the reality behind the clever smokescreen. This change in perspective transforms the story into a puzzle-solving quest first and a history-changing mission later, with Amahle having to literally find herself again thanks to the mysterious Carloman’s clues scattered throughout other people’s memories and encounters she searches for in her collection of collars.Given the novella’s shortness and its strong reliance on plot, characters are somehow left by the wayside, particularly where Amahle is concerned: I could never fully connect with her even though I was invested in her journey, but I guess this depends on the fact that she is detached from herself as well. In order to fulfill her ages-long mission, and to keep experiencing those vicarious memories, she must purge her own from time to time, in a way discarding the old to make room for the new: this entails losing pieces of herself and of her past, something that she struggles to reconnect with thanks to Carloman’s influence and the clues offered through his various appearances in the stored memories.In the end, I came to understand that my lack of connection with Amahle was the result of her lack of connection with herself, of her loss of everything that made her the person she originally was: giving up the memories of her own past (and at some point we understand the reason she would choose to take that path, either consciously or not) she let herself drift aimlessly through space and time losing any power of choice - at some point Amahle likens herself to a comet: A frozen wanderer sidling in from the darkness to briefly warm myself by the light of the sun, before being flung back out on the next lap of my long, solitary orbit.It’s only with the appearance of the enigmatic Carloman that she is able to regain that power as she reconnects piece by piece with the memories of who she was and who Carloman was to her. And to finally choose to break out of the unending cycle that kept her prisoner for so long while she believed she was the one in control…If I have to find any fault in this story it might be in the way many details are left vague and incomplete: we get short peeks at those planetary societies Amahle visits and as soon as we become invested in their peculiar layout we are taken away by the Mnemosyne as it departs for another station of its circuit; or again we are kept wondering how Carloman - once his real identity is revealed - was able to do what he did (apologies for the ambiguity but I want to avoid spoilers here) time and again. On hindsight, this novella looks like a trailer for a much longer, much more layered novel that could have taken on the scope of a sweeping space opera - still, for all its shortness, Light Chaser works well offering an intriguing, and often suspenseful, story and some food for thought about identity and memory and the meaning of life.It will be interesting to see if these two authors team up again and what they might come up with next…