Captain Laurent Zai of Imperial Frigate Lynx must rescue the Child Empress, sister of immortal Emperor worshiped by 80 human worlds for 1600 years. Enemy Rix are machine-augmented humans who worship AI compound minds. Separated by light years, bound by an unlikely love, Zai and pacifist senator Nara Oxham face the Rix and hold the fate of the empire.

Scott Westerfeld, the acclaimed author of Fine Prey, Polymorph, and Evolution's Darling, reached new heights of excitement in last spring's T he Risen Empire, and left readers begging for more. Now he comes through with the dazzling payoff in book two of S uccession, The Killing of Worlds. Captain Laurent Zai of the Imperial frigate Lynx is a walking dead man. Unjustly held responsible for the death of the Child Empress, sister of the immortal Emperor, Zai has been sent to fight an unwinnable battle. The Lynx must stop a vastly superior Rix ship from reaching the planet Legis, a suicide mission that will almost certainly end in oblivion for Captain Zai and his crew. On the planet Legis below, a Rix compound mind—a massive emergent AI formed from every computer on the planet—as been isolated by their Imperial blockade. But the mind has guided a lone Rix commando, Herd, to the planet's frozen north, and will soon order a desperate attempt to seize a polar communications array and break the blockade. Herd is a single warrior against an Imperial army, but moving silently behind her is the intelligence of an entire planet. Ten light-years away, Captain Zai's true love, the psychic (some say mad) Senator Nara Oxham is engaged in a deadly game of political intrigue. From her position on the Emperor's War Council, Senator Oxham must find a way to forestall the Emperor's final solution if the blockade is a nuclear strike to destroy the compound mind, which will also kill millions of Imperial citizens. She suspects that the Emperor has a hidden weakness discovered, by the mind, a secret so dangerous to his immortal dynasty that to prevent its discovery the Emperor is willing to countenance the ultimate crime... The killing of worlds. With this powerful conclusion to the first story arc of Succession, Scott Westerfeld confirms his stature as one of the leading writers of high space opera.

Club Because the immortal Emperor can grant a form of eternal life-after-death, creating an elite known as the Risen, he has ruled the eighty worlds unchallenged for sixteen hundred years. He and his sister, the Child Empress-forever a little girl-are worshipped as living gods. No one can touch them.... ...no one but the Rix, machine-augmented humans who worship very different AI compound minds encompassing entire planets. The Rix are cool, relentless fanatics, and their only goal is to propagate such AIs throughout the galaxy. They seek to end, by any means necessary, the Emperor's prolonged rule and supplant it with a cybernetic dynasty of their own. They begin by assaulting the Imperial Palace on Legis XV-and taking hostage the Child Empress. Tasked with her rescue, brilliant tactician Captain Laurent Zai of the Imperial Frigate Lynx is well aware that failure constitutes an Error of Blood. Yet when the mission goes badly wrong, he declines to commit ritual suicide, and instead takes on a suicide stopping the next thrust of the Rix invasion with just his own ship. While combat rages among the stars, the newborn Rix compound mind expands through the global net on Legis XV and works to break the Imperial blockade. And light-years away, Captain Zai's lover, Senator Nara Oxham, suspects that the mind has discovered the Emperor's hidden a dangerous secret for which he is willing to countenance the killing of worlds.... Includes The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. Jacket art by Stephan Martiniere.