Dorsai!

Throughout the Fourteen Worlds of humanity, no race is as feared and respected as the Dorsai. The ultimate warriors, they are known for their deadly rages, unbreakable honor, and fierce independence. No man rules the Dorsai, but their mastery of the art of war has made them the most valuable mercenaries in the known universe. Donal Graeme is Dorsai, taller and harder than any ordinary man. But he is different as well, with talents that maze even his fellow Dorsai. And once he ventures out into the stars, the future will never be the same....

Life on Earth is good. Disease is checked, hunger ended, and war and suffering abolished, with liberty and justice and a high standard of living for all. But Paul Formain, a strangely gifted young engineer, doesn't believe a word of it. So he comes to Walter Blunt's Chantry Guild, whose motto is "Destruct!" and whose stated goal is the end of civilization. There are Alternate Laws at work in the world, says the Chantry Guild; Walter Blunt has pledged his life to them, and to the principle of destruction as a positive force.

Men of War on the Dorsai worlds, men of Faith on the Friendly Worlds of Harmony and Association, men of Science, the Exotics of Kultis and Mara, and the Splinter cultures which had produced even stranger new talents. Those who knew said it was the Dorsai who supplied soldiers to the sixteen worlds. The Friendlies supplied cannon fodder, common soldiers who could be relied on to obey orders at all times. But even cannon fodder can sometimes produce genius.

It's obvious that Cletus Graeme - limping, mild-mannered scholarly - doesn't belong on a battle field, but instead at a desk working on his fourth book on battle strategy and tactics. But Bakhalla has more battlefields than libraries, and Graeme sees his small force of Dorsai - soldiers of fortune - as the perfect opportunity to test his theories. But if his theories or his belief in the Dorsai lead him astray, he's a dead man.

Feared and respected as the most effective soldiers humanity has ever known, the Dorsai find their reputation at risk when an invader attacks their planet, inhabited only by the Dorsai women who are left behind to defend it.

Pacifism will always be a powerful moral force, even - perhaps especially - to the Dorsai. For those of this planet of warriors born and bred are not as other men; once a Dorsai’s heart is given he holds nothing back, and does not count the cost. Even if that cost be the very planet of his birth, and he becomes a Lost Dorsai.

In The Final Encyclopedia the human race is split into three Splinter cultures: the Friendlies, fanatic in their faith; the truth-seeking Exotics; and the warrior Dorsai. But now humanity is threatened by the power-hungry Others, whose triumph would end all human progress. Hal Mayne is an orphan who was raised by three tutors: an Exotic, a Friendly, and a Dorsai. He is the only human capable of uniting humanity against the Others. But only if he is willing to accept his terrifying destiny... as savior of mankind.

A lone ship piloted by Dorsai Amanda Morgan runs the blockade of the Earth. She has come to rouse Hal Mayne from his research to go to Kultis, where the secretive Chantry Guild holds mastery over the Alternate Forces. The answers they find there may decide humanity's most critical moment.

By the workings of chance Bleys Ahrens was born the genetic equal of Hal Mayne, the hero of The Final Encyclopedia, but he was destined by nurture to a far different fate. Raised alone by his unhappy Exotic mother, Bleys was an outcast from every society until his half-brother Dahno claimed him. Disciplined by Friendlies, schooled by Exotics, Dahno was beginning to build an interplanetary network of half-breeds, who called themselves "Others". But Dahno thought only of gaining wealth and power for himself; Bleys saw an opportunity to challenge the Dorsai for control of the Human Worlds.

Bleys Ahrens is now a political power on the planet Association, home of the Friendlies. His people - his Others, not Dorsai or Friendly or Exotic, but hybrids - are in place on all the new worlds, and are ready to take his message to the greater human public. But within his inner circle is Henry McLean, Soldier of God, and a True Faith-Holder. Henry fears for the soul of his nephew Bleys, and while he guards, he also watches, and judges.

Donal Graeme was a Dorsai, a mercenary soldier, and also a mutant gifted with insight into the path forward for the human race. Through his gifts, Donal would come to bend time and live three lifetimes - and, in the process, run into problems he had not expected: first, his own flaws, and second, the existence of another mutant, Bleys Ahrens. Bleys is a man with a clear vision of the struggle in which he's involved - but an increasingly deficient sense of human values.