title: The Flight to Mecha
author: Kierkegaard, Rod, Jr.
description: In an arm of the galaxy barely touched by human exploration, Adam Wetherall has raised his Family according to the tenets of a barely remembered Bible in a world called Eden. But Eden has a secret: a unique ecosystem system of a single intelligent mold spore constantly mutating in the radiation of a yellow-green sun. And when old Adam dies at last and his surviving wives and children flee from the solitary paradise he made into a prison, they bear the mark of Eden with them. While the rest of the Family settle on Spartak, headquarters of the elite military force maintained by the effete Xterrans of the Neutroian Empire to protect their borders, Cain and Lilith take to space-faring, becoming the most dreaded assassins of the Spartak 'Starwolves'. Awan, Cain's sister-wife and Lilith's daughter, merges her crippled consciousness with that of Cain's ship, becoming the first person in human-mechanoid history to achieve this-thereby becoming a legend among the Mechs, the artificial intelligences humans relied on to run the galaxy. The hunt for an Xterran fugitive leads Cain and Awan to the Zinballa star system, a gambling and prostitution haven run by a cartel called the Decad. There they are dragged into a gang war, resulting in the destruction of Awan's ship, and end up on the run on a desert world named Mecha, an automated gaming planet where armies of robots and avatars battle in real time, along with a ragtag band of Mechs, human mercenaries, and a pair of mysterious Xterran prisoners. But it is Lilith, investigating reports of an outbreak of spore contagion on another border world, who first confronts the Eden Plague. A hideous ocean of radioactive spores cursed with the demented identity of the vengeful Adam, has erupted from its home star, following the Family out into the cosmos, and now threatens to overwhelm the entire galaxy. Set thousands of years in the far future, at a time when humanity has long forgotten its own Earthly origins, The Millenniad evokes the wealth of characters and sweeping narrative strokes of classic science fiction epics such as Dune and Iain M. Banks' Shining Culture series.