Tiamat's Wrath (Unabridged ed)

Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy.

In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed, and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable.

At the heart of the empire, Teresa Duarte prepares to take on the burden of her father's godlike ambition.

The sociopathic scientist Paolo Cortazar and the Mephistophelian prisoner James Holden are only two of the dangers in a palace thick with intrigue, but Teresa has a mind of her own and secrets even her father the emperor doesn't guess.