Rock Star — Ian Stewart

The awesome sequel to The Living Labyrinth. It's all fun and games with syntei until they fall into the wrong hands...

Ingredients

Rock Star -- a planetless blue giant orbited by hundreds of millions of rocks forming a single vast asteroid field, subtly disobeying human laws of gravity and dynamics. An enigma concealing the greatest threat that humanity has ever encountered.

Old Earth -- polluted, damaged, all ice melted, ecosystems slowly dying. Most of its people live in the polar regions, in floating cities, or in undersea domes. Kept alive by external aid, imported down three closely guarded beanstalks.

The Concordat -- a loose-knit federation of former Old Earth colony worlds and their own colonies, wealthy beyond measure. Imposed Quarantine on the birth world of humanity 1700 years ago, denying it access to the stars, except for carefully vetted colonists. Its ultimate power is a monopoly on the means of interstellar travel.

Ira da Terra -- a person and a liberation movement. Terra-ists will stop at nothing to free Earth from Concordat dominion and repression, and open the path to the Galaxy.

Church of Cthulhu -- surviving in the remnants of drowned Manhattan, waiting for their souls to be eaten when the stars are right.

Qish -- a lost colony, rediscovered in Living Labyrinth, which has lost most human science but developed tech based on syntei.

Syntei -- matter transmitters that grow on trees. Reaching the Concordat, syntelics threaten its very basis ... even as it faces the danger from Rock Star.

Nazg -- a system with twenty-three inhabited worlds and innumerable artificial habitats. Home to Salim Sisters, the Concordat's most advanced hi-tech corporation.

Valkyrie -- an obsolete Da Silva caltrop, used to train candidates for Galactic citizenship, twice destroyed. Its impossibly resurrected crew must work with the Syntelic League to save the human race from annihilation.
Recipe

Mix ingredients thoroughly and simmer over relentlessly increasing heat.