Prodigium: Rebirth (ePub)

Vengeance. A condition and need which still thrums deeply within humanity when it is denied justice. Once they escape, the levellers are bent on retribution for their millennia-long incarceration below the city of New Athens on the world of Galileo. The Silva must pay for their sins, and dearly. Equally so, Alexis Romachenko seeks to avenge the loss of everything he formerly possessed: his wealth, his vaulted position at the apex of Old Earth, and his ambitions for his world and for himself. He will kill Jude LeClaire for her betrayal and do his utmost to destroy the Silva.

Franca Nujon, a twisted individual and member of the Ashina, the secret security arm of the Silva, has been similarly thwarted in fulfilling her orders to kill Jude. She has now captured Serge Branco, a Master Technicist who was previously working alongside the prodigic teenager as she laboured to bring a new means of wormhole transportation into existence. To sooth her own fractured and seething soul, Franca intends to torture Serge in hopes of discovering where Jude is and thereby complete her mission.

Jude is not alone in being targeted for death. The Federation Navy has ordered Lieutenant Ser Kirktum to use his friendship with Bree Matthews, a prodigy in himself, to locate and then kill him: an act of swift justice for allegedly creating an artificial intelligence. And similarly, Paolo Fortes and Fraz Darrow, level brothers from the seventy-eighth level, who also once befriended Bree, have been convinced that Bree betrayed his oaths to them and are searching for him as well. Their first attempt to kill him failed due to the intervention of Feodor Stanikizic, but they have not given up.

Feodor, one of the two people who originally created the current version of wormhole technology, is the leader of the people of Oasis who continue to secretly work to free the levellers on Galileo, for the imprisoned people below New Athens are their own distant relatives. Semah Delorian, known as The One to those in the Silva who are aware of her existence, was Feodor's former partner and shared in the development of the wormhole generator he devised. As with him, Semah has extended her life through the use of cloning and other forbidden technologies. She acts as the hidden leader of the Silva, guiding them to fulfill her objectives for their organization, of which the imprisonment of the levellers is the continuing principle one. For when Feodor disagreed with her and turned against her, she aspired to seek her own vengeance against him and all of what he has cared for. The majority of his followers and their future descendants were forced underground to live in despair and privation. So it has been for the last two millennia and she is determined that it remain so. She will not allow Feodor to succeed in freeing the levellers and is plotting to thwart his every effort through the use of damaged people like Franca Nujon.

However Franca may never have her chance, for Jude, so riven with despair, discovering that Bree has already fallen in love with another woman, walks into the blue waters of Oasis seeking to put an end to her wretched and abused life.

And so it would also appear in terms of Bree's aspirations to employ Jude's new theories related to the reality of the sub-quantum world to create a new means of wormhole transport. It just might change everything in the Federation and its people...just as Sabio Pontes, the aged savant on Old Earth, has always hoped.