Overview

About Heart of Darkness Earthforce is locked in mortal combat with an old enemy, the ravenous Kiring, and after four successive invasion waves, Karpov wants to leap ahead and see the outcome of the war to find decisive points where he can operate to assure victory. Yet what Orion finds by making a short one year move to the year 2950 is not what the Admiral expected. Karpov is shocked. He wants to concentrate the fleet and seek a final battle to settle the war, but the Kiring simply disperse and strike at any undefended colony they can find. The asymmetric strategy of the Kiring is avoiding major engagements, and Tyrenkov learns that there will be no less than ten invasion waves before the outcome of the conflict is apparent. Everywhere the Kiring make landfall, they lay thousands of eggs that will hatch into land crawling Grubbers that emit a deadly pollen. Then, as they continue to feed, the Grubbers eventually grow to become a full size War Locust, and develop wings to make them a mobile menace that confounds the defenders and forces them into static defensive positions. Now Karpov and the General Staff of Earthforce huddle to see how they can salvage victory from what appears to be a devastating defeat. Several plans are put forward. While effective in space in set battles with the Kiring warships, once the War Locusts swarm invade another biosphere, they seem unstoppable, and Earthforce does not have the troop numbers required to hold all the colonies on the ground. While Chandros works feverishly to find an antidote to the Kiring pollen, or some means of attacking them with a pathogen, Karpov even proposes that a reprogrammed Fendi AI could use the remaining factory ships to churn out thousands of Automaton robotic soldiers. Then Fedorov has another idea, one that involves the fate of a single man who was the very first to explore Startide Beta and the Mordor Star Ridge. Fedorov asserts this man is a Prime Mover in all these events, or worse, a Free Radical, and now the General Staff lays plans to neuter his effect on the Meridian that has evolved to push Humanity to the brink of destruction, or exile. Will The Human empire fall, just as Commander Arras and his Saurian Centaurids fell before the invading swarms of the Kiring? Come and look into the Heart of Darkness...

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