Alastiar Reynolds

REDEMPTION ARK

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Ace Books by Alstair Reynolds

REVELATION SPACE

CHASM CITY
REDEMPTION ARK

REDEMPTION ARK

Alastair Reynolds

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

REDEMPTION ARK

An Ace Book

Published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Copyright © 2002 by Alastair Reynolds.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

First American edition: June

Previously published in Great Britain in 2002 by Gollancz.

ISBN 0-441-01058-X

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PROLOGUE

The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty.

Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s attention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sickness.