"Gripping. Impossible to put down."-- "Jack McDevitt" "Leave it to Edward M. Lerner to take a notion, run with it, squeeze every ramification out of it, and put it altogether in an irresistible page-turner. Dark Secret is a crackerjack novel--hard science fiction at its best."-- "Robert J. Sawyer" When the experimental ship "Clermont" is urgently recalled from a long-range test flight, neither Dana McElwain nor Blake Westford, its captain and crew, imagines that they are about to embark on a much more urgent voyage--or that this new mission will determine the fate of the human race. A gamma-ray burst--the deadly beam of radiation spawned seven thousand years earlier in the death throes of doomed neutron stars--is about to wipe the Solar System clean of all life. Only the "Clermont"'s prototype Dark Energy Drive might carry anyone, and any of humanity's legacy, to safety before that extinction. And then what? Where beyond the Solar System "is" safe? What if the price of survival is to become less ... human? "Dark Secret is a unique tale of catastrophe and survival on multiple levels, gripping and harrowing yet ultimately inspiring. Lerner shows what it might really be like to be forced from an out-of-control frying pan into a far worse fire, and how humanity might endure even if what the refugees bring with them is worse than what they find."-- "Stanley Schmidt"