The Chaos Chronicles

When John Bandicut sets out across the surface of Triton, he's hardly ready for the storm of chaos that's about to blow through his life. The alien Quarx that soon inhabits his mind is humanity's first contact with an alien life. The Quarx, part of an ancient galactic civilization that manipulates chaos theory to predict catastrophic events, seeks to prevent a cometary collision that could destroy the Earth. But it must have help. If Bandicut chooses to trust the Quarx, he must break all the rules - indeed, sacrifice his own life.

For John Bandicut, Earth is but a memory. Stranded at the edge of the galaxy in a structure populated with beings from a thousand worlds, Bandicut finds unexpected friends...only to be caught up in a cascade of forces that threaten the Shipworld itself. Confronting an entity known as the "boojum", Bandicut discovers greater peril than ever in his journey into the unknown.

John Bandicut and his company have been rewarded for their heroism in saving Shipworld. The prize: to be flung back into inhabited space — not to their home planets, as they had hoped, but to the bottom of an alien sea. Helpless and sinking, they are rescued by strange mer-creatures and brought to an undersea city, where a race of sea-people known as the Neri live in perpetual twilight. The Neri are well adapted to their world, but their survival is in jeopardy.

John Bandicut and his companions are summoned to a star-cloud called Starmaker, known to humans as the Orion Nebula, to discover what force threatens newborn stars - and possibly every world within a thousand light-years. Their journey takes them not just into the perils of a stellar nursery, but into confrontation with the Mindaru, a billion-year-old AI and adversary of life as they know it. The task is daunting. But with the aid of Deep and Dark, sentient clouds who are perhaps the strangest beings they have met yet in their exceedingly strange journey, there may be hope.

The Mindaru are dead, or so exiled Earthman John Bandicut and his alien companions believe, after their intervention to save the Orion Nebula and surrounding worlds. But now a part of this ancient and malicious AI colony is swarming toward the present from its birthplace deep in the past. Their opening: a temporal disturbance in the starstream, a hyperspatial thoroughfare used by myriad civilizations. The disturbance emanates from the planetary defenses of nearby Karellia, whose people know nothing of the starstream or the galaxy-threatening Mindaru.

The story begun in The Reefs of Time continues. The time-tides caused by Karellia’s defenses have brought the malicious Mindaru AI out of the deep past into the present, threatening Bandicut and Li-Jared, who have arrived at the backwater planet - Li-Jared’s homeworld - to find it on the brink of interplanetary war. Somehow they must forge a peace between Karellia and its neighboring world if the Mindaru threat is to be broken.