Even after more than two years since its debut at The Game Awards, Archetype Entertainment’s sci-fi action RPG Exodus remains one of the industry’s most intriguing mysteries.
Between cinematic trailers, a steady drip-feed of gameplay teases, and a full gameplay reveal expected soon, the former BioWare developers behind the project have only just begun to reveal the scope of the ambitious science fiction universe they’re building.
While we’ve seen glimpses of that world, some of the deepest insights so far have come through a series of official novels written by acclaimed sci-fi author Peter F. Hamilton. And, ahead of the release of the second book in that series, IGN can exclusively reveal an extract from “Exodus: The Helium Sea”.
Exodus: The Helium Sea
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Best known for acclaimed space opera series including The Commonwealth Saga and The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, Hamilton has played a key role in shaping the broader Exodus universe, contributing to its world-building and lore while also expanding the setting through a duology of novels set within the Centauri Cluster.
The first book, “Exodus: The Archimedes Engine”, introduced readers to the political conflicts, ancient mysteries, and powerful factions that shape the setting. Its sequel, “Exodus: The Helium Sea”, arrives on June 16 and continues the story as tensions across the galaxy begin to reach a breaking point.
Set thousands of years into a fragile era of peace, “The Helium Sea” follows a galaxy on the brink of upheaval as a long-exiled faction emerges from beyond the Helium Sea seeking revenge against the ruling Celestials.
With humanity caught in the middle of a conflict that could reshape the Crown Dominion forever, its protagonists must uncover powerful ancient artefacts while navigating a deadly political battlefield.
Below, you can read an exclusive excerpt from Hamiltion’s “The Helium Sea”, offering another glimpse into the mysterious, and expanding, Exodus universe.
Pre-orders available now in both the US and UK.
Exodus: The Helium Sea – Exclusive Excerpt
Exodus: The Helium Sea – Peter F. Hamilton – Credit: Tor
Excerpted by permission of Tor. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
IT HAD TAKEN Chief Octain and his small team of engineers a frantic thirty minutes to load a worn-out remote maintenance pod with modules from other ancillary craft. Even as the old pod was ejected from the Diligent’s hangar, they were still running diagnostics, praying the kludge would work—at least for a while.
It drifted away from the kilometer-long starship, cold gas thrusters burping to stabilize its slow tumble. Sensors started to scan around. On one side of the pod was a broad circle of darkness where the lonely Gate of Heaven blotted out the shimmering multicolored clouds of the Poseidon Nebula, which surrounded the Kelowan system.
The Diligent’s green-and-orange navigation strobes were visible against it as the ancient starship glided in toward the center of the colossal Elohim machine. On the opposite side, where Kelowan’s star gleamed warmly, the pod’s onboard network identified the thirteen bright lightpoints of the habitable planets.
Hexagonal panes, jutting out from the pod’s fuselage like a set of dark asymmetric sails, changed their array phasing to focus on those distant gleams of life. There was also an omnidirectional broadcast, boosted by additional power cells, that the technicians hoped would last long enough as they handled voltage levels far beyond their intended limits.
The transmission began. Like the pod itself, it was a hastily contrived message that the human societies of the Kelowan system would come to call The Sibling Plea.
Finbar Jalgori-Tobu sat on a chair in the Diligent’s command and control center, looking worn to the point of illness as he stared unflinchingly into the camera. He was flanked by his sisters. One, Otylia, was his twin—now separated by forty years biological aging from the cost of time dilation, but their similarity still obvious nonetheless.
The other was his elder sister, Zelinda, the ex-marchioness of Santa Rosa, whose reign lasted less than an hour after her mother had been killed.
That death was the culmination of events whose firestorm of memories were plaguing Finn’s mind at a debilitating level. Ever since he’d bought the Diligent in exchange for Hafnir—a broad tract of coastal land he owned, so the passengers could settle there—he’d had one objective.
He was going to be a Traveler: one of the humans who had their own starships, unearthing technological Celestial treasure from Remnant Era worlds, and bringing it home to help humans live with dignity in star systems whose Celestial overlords were implacably hostile—when they could actually be bothered to even acknowledge humans.
Owning the Diligent had given him a unique opportunity to strike a blow for human freedom. His erstwhile friend, and fellow Traveler, Gyvoy Enfoe, had provided them with a chance to strike a real blow for the humans of the Kelowan system.
Millennia ago, Celestials had started moving Dolod, a gas giant from another star system, using one of their Archimedes Engines to fly it to Kelowan. Dolod was a strange world even by the standards of the Centauri Cluster: an iron exotic, which, if it was steered into orbit close enough to a star, would literally rain iron. The metal could be harvested from the atmosphere at a cost far lower than humans mining it from the ground on a solid world—a change that would impoverish the human economy. Gyvoy’s plan was enticingly simple.
Instead of allowing the Archimedes Engine to bring Dolod neatly into orbit, they could send it back out into interstellar space, leaving the economy of the Kelowan system unchanged. All they had to do was find a copy of the Archimedes Engine’s operating system, which would allow a uranic human to change Dolod’s course. Gyvoy, naturally, knew where to find a copy of the operating system; and Finn was a uranic human, one whose DNA had been altered so he could interface directly with Celestial technology.
It was, Finn decided at the time, the wish of the Goddess Asteria Herself that had brought them all together. Then, when the Diligent returned to the Kelowan system, he found his homeworld of Gondiar was under Celestial martial law.
His parents had been killed, and his siblings were running for their lives. In his grief and outrage, he saw an opportunity to strike back against the Celestial monsters, and instead of using the Archimedes Engine to slingshot Dolod out of the Kelowan system, he used the momentum transfer to fling Boksrock—a small lifeless world—directly at the capital planet where hundreds of millions of Imperial Celestials lived.
Only after he’d done that did he discover that he’d been played by Gyvoy, who wasn’t even human. The socalled Traveler was actually an Imperial Celestial agent, whose organization had their own very different agenda. Not only had Finn been completely fooled into committing what was essentially a declaration of war between humans and Celestials, Gyvoy had somehow managed to vanish, making Finn look even more guilty.
The Diligent had no choice but to flee to another star system, confirming their guilt—although Zelinda had said they had a last chance to try and mitigate what’d happened by an appeal to the Empress of the Crown Dominion. Finn thought it a useless gesture, but by then he knew his ability to make any sort of decision had been swept away by misery and guilt, so he just agreed to everything she suggested.
“I would like to address this message directly to the empress herself,” Zelinda said with perfect composure. “Majesty, my family has been in service to you since the time humans first arrived in the Crown Dominion. We have served faithfully for all that time, and still consider ourselves loyal to you.
“Empress, we also have information that confirms that the so-called rebellion that occurred on Gondiar, which General Avone-Valerio now seeks to suppress, was also manufactured by a foreign dominion.
“Humans have been manipulated by an archon. He is a Celestial currently disguised as Gyvoy Enfoe, and we believe he has somehow escaped Dolod.
“In this assumed form, he’s been using some kind of neural compulsion to control various humans, including my brother Finbar. I’m sure you must realize by now that it is not possible for a human—even uranics like us—to alter the operation of an Archimedes Engine. We are not responsible for Boksrock’s orbit being changed, nor is this atrocity the result of some group of human malcontents attacking Kelowan. Humans benefit enormously from our allegiance to the Crown Dominion, and we do not want that to change.”
Otylia cleared her throat. “The broadcasts from my ex-husband, Josias Aponi, are fake, cooked up by a CI routine. The Goddess alone knows, Josias is not a perfect man, but he is not stupid. More than all of us, he understands the insanity of a collapsing society, for he has witnessed it firsthand. He has walked on Old Earth, and he fled Sol because of what he saw there. That is not him in the messages agitating for further disobedience, so don’t fall for it, I implore you.”
“I was on the Archimedes Engine station,” Finn confessed at last, his eyes filling with moisture. “The archon pretending to be Gyvoy put me there. In Kingsnest, he gave me the technical knowledge of the engine’s operating system. He twisted my mind so that I had to do what he wanted—to kill Kelowan. I don’t know which dominion he comes from, but I know he left me there and flew to another station; I don’t know which one.
“Empress, I urge you and all your forces to find him. Find out who he really is and what he wants. So many people will suffer and die until he is caught and stopped. I am so sorry for what’s happened. I wasn’t . . . It wasn’t me that did this. I would never . . .” His lips pressed together and he turned from the camera, his distress obvious. Otylia’s hand came down on his shoulder, squeezing reassuringly.
“We have nothing to gain from telling you this, Empress,” Zelinda said. “So I hope you will at least consider what we have told you.” She inclined her head respectfully. “The Jalgori-Tobu family remain your loyal subjects.”
The message ended and began to repeat. Another kind of light illuminated the modified pod as the Diligent entered the ingress Gate—a ring of bright radiance that flared around the machine’s rim and flowed fast down the concave surface until it was a single point at the center. The Diligent formed a small dark speck within the glare, then vanished, flung along the line of quintessence to Capo Frois by a science no human would ever understand.
Left behind, the pod continued to play the message continually for the next three and a half hours until a Celestial cargo starship arrived at the Gate. It fired a single maser cannon shot at the pod, vaporizing it. The starship sailed onward with cosmic indifference, to be embraced by the Gate and dispatched across interstellar space.
THE DREADNOUGHT DRACAENAE, flagship of the Royal Wynid fleet, had been accelerating at three gees ever since Boksrock’s trajectory became apparent. It was surrounded by the rest of the fleet’s warships, arrayed in a neat spherical formation across six thousand kilometers. They were heading directly for Kelowan, with Thyra announcing in a systemwide broadcast that they were going to oversee the planet’s evacuation.
She’d spent most of that time on the bridge, with brief sojourns to the admiral’s day lounge next door for meetings with senior fleet intelligence analysts and department heads. It had taken what remained of the court on Kelowan five hours after the destruction of Carolien-Amaia’s fast-evacuation craft to message the Dracaenae with the admission that the empress was dead.
Verak’s security office claimed that somehow the Human Liberation movement had managed to sabotage the emergency vehicle Carolien-Amaia was using to reach orbit and the safety of her dreadnought. She’d launched from the palace as soon as the news broke that the humans on the Diligent had managed to fling Boksrock at Kelowan. Worse than the anguish of that outrage was that the Verak security office didn’t understand how they’d done it. Their best—in fact only—theory was that some unknown Remnant Era weapon had been used.
Three hours after the official notification, Thyra had received an ultra-secure message from Queen Luus-Marcela. She was quietly pleased to note her sister queen’s usual mien of superiority had been vanquished by shock. It didn’t take a neural connection to know exactly what Luus-Marcela was thinking. If they can kill the empress . . .
“I’m heading straight for Kelowan,” Luus-Marcela said. “We’re going to need all the engine power we can muster to get the habitats clear of the georing. You’ll be thinking the same, so we’ll exchange real-time comms when we’re in range.” She hesitated, drawing a breath. “Dearest Helena-Thyra, I acknowledge you are now Empress of the Crown Dominion. I hope the other two queens will be civil about this, because we’re on the brink here. We’ll have to rewrite the Accord to reflect what’s happened, of course. Whoever these shits are, they took out poor Carolien’s princesses as well, so it’s the end of her line. First priority is to save Kelowan’s population—got to love the irony in that, eh? And, Empress, you have to prioritize finding out which goddess-cursed dominion did this. It’s a declaration of war. They’ll come for all of us now. We have to strike back so hard the whole cluster will think we’ve resurrected the Remnant Era.”
Her image vanished.
Thyra turned to Lord Bekket, her father, and Iuntin, who was masquerading as Ualana-Shoigu in order to pass as her chief archon. No one else was in the day lounge. The three of them gripped hands to give themselves a secure neural connection.
“I see her sympathetic side immediately put in an appearance,” Bekket sneered. “That talk of losing the princesses: she’ll want to carve up Verak between the remaining queens.”
“Naturally,” Iuntin said. “There is a strong precedent, as this is what happened to Kelowan after the Accord invasion. Mind you, they did kill every member of your grandmother’s family.” His lips rose to a thin smirk. “Or so they thought.”
“Indeed,” Thyra said. “Right now, I’m more concerned with those goddess-bedamned Jalgori-Tobus. Everybody in this system has accessed their message. There are going to be questions—especially once Ramona-Nuk and Inessa-Marwa arrive with their fleets, which is going to be any day now. How the hell did they find out Uncle Dagon’s an Imperial Celestial?”
“Don’t worry about your uncle,” Iuntin said. “He and your aunt can take care of themselves. Hell, they’ve been around almost as long as me.”
“Everyone is going to be looking for him.”
“So? He’ll just morph out of his current form when the time is right. His body was modified to do just that.”
Thyra gave him a careful look, keeping her own thoughts level. “You said you transferred your personality into this Shoigu host. Are you also simultaneously in your own body?”
“Yes,” he said flatly.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw her father’s surprise, the briefest flinch, but she knew he was as startled as she was. But like her, his thoughts remained unruffled. She experienced a flutter of apprehension as another of those rogue thoughts snuck into her mind: So what else is Iuntin keeping from me? “So which is really you?”
“We both are. I will merge our memories as soon as this is over, and Shoigu’s body will be disposed of.”
“I see,” Thyra replied neutrally.
“Dagon can’t change his appearance just yet,” Bekket said. “We need the two human mercenaries he and Liliana are using to complete their part of the plan. The annexation of Capo Frois has to happen so we can isolate the three remaining queens. Once they’re out of the way, you can start to amalgamate the Crown Dominion star systems ready for Khepri’s rule.”
Iuntin shrugged. “However, Thyra is correct about the Jalgori-Tobu message being unfortunate. It makes ongoing operations difficult for Dagon. And people will also doubt any further proclamations from Josias.”
“Dagon can handle a few humans,” Bekket said. “But denouncing the Josias broadcasts as CI fakes is a slippery slope. Once you start decrying your opponents as unreal, you open yourself up to the same question. Was the Jalgori-Tobus’ message a fake, too? If so, who made it? Why? The Jalgori-Tobu siblings have made an elementary political mistake by flaunting their honesty and earnest integrity.”
“Maybe,” Iuntin said uncertainly. “But it was Otylia, his own wife, who exposed the deceit.”
“Was it? We know that, but doubt will grow across the Kelowan system. Conspiracy theories are a treacherous mind virus; they never stop feeding on themselves to multiply—the only true example of perpetual energy. My agents will release a plethora of counter theories progressively growing more extreme. Ultimately, this first spark of uncertainty the Jalgori-Tobus have unleashed will kindle a firestorm. Nobody will know what to believe.”
“We have to address this head-on,” Thyra said. “Every archon in the Kelowan system is now desperate to find Uncle Dagon. I will have to sound plausible when I meet the other queens.”
“You will simply agree with them that finding the Gyvoy character is of paramount importance,” Iuntin ventured. “People will accept that this hunt will probably take years. And if opinion shifts that this is not just a human rebellion, so what? Then everyone will start obsessing over which dominion is behind it. The human rebellion was always a diversion for our benefit. If anything, the Jalgori-Tobus denouncing Josias and Gyvoy only adds to the intrigue of foreign intrusion. Dagon is safe in the Arcadia’s Moon. It’s a good ship—strange, but more than capable. Not that anyone knows that’s where he is. They’re stealthed and presumably already on their way to the Capo Frois ingress Gate. I advise you not worrying about Dagon.”
“Very well.” Thyra gave a reluctant nod. “But we do have to take care of the Diligent.”
“It will be destroyed,” Iuntin said. “Squadron Twenty-Three will make sure of that. Our triumph is inevitable.”
“I appreciate your optimism,” Thyra said. After the first thrill of meeting Iuntin, she wasn’t sure she approved of him; he always gave the impression he was talking down to her.
The dreadnought’s network alerted her that Queen Inessa Marwa’s fleet had begun to arrive through the Cheluli egress Gate. She brightened. “Ah, some politics to deal with. Let’s see how quickly my dear sister queen falls into line.”
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