Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since--until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us.

Who you do send to meet the alien

when the alien doesn't want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities carved surgically into her brain. You send

a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultra-

sound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You

send a pacifist warrior whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. You

send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called

vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics

and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist — an

informational topologist with half his mind gone — as an

interface between here and there, a conduit through

which the Dead Center might hope to understand

the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you

can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world.

You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've

been sent to find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you

only knew what was waiting for them...

Peter Watts lives in Toronto, Canada.

http://www.rifters.com/index.htm