**The launch of a new science fiction adventure series--by the New York
Times-best selling author of the Safehold series and the Honor
Harrington series
**
The Galactic Hegemony has been around a long time, and it likes
stability--the kind of stability that member species like the
aggressive, carnivorous Shongairi tend to disturb. So when the Hegemony
Survey Force encountered a world whose so-called sentients--humans, they
called themselves--were almost as bad as the Shongairi themselves, it
seemed reasonable to use the Shongairi to neutralize them before they
could become a second threat to galactic peace. And if the Shongairi
took a few knocks in the process, all the better.
Now, Earth is conquered. The Shongairi have arrived in force, and
humanity's cities lie in radioactive ruins. In mere minutes, more than
half the human race has died.
Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky, who thought he was being rotated home
from his latest tour in Afghanistan, finds himself instead prowling the
back country of the Balkans, dodging alien patrols and trying to
organize scattered survivors without getting killed. And in the
southeastern US, firearms instructor and former Marine Dave Dvorak finds
himself at the center of a growing network of resistance--putting his
extended family at lethal risk, but what else can you do?
On the face of it, Buchevsky's and Dvorak's chances look bleak, as do
prospects for the rest of the surviving human race. But it may well be
that Shongairi and the Hegemony alike have underestimated the
inhabitants of that strange planet called Earth... in David Weber's Out
of the Dark.
