The weapon they found wasn't built to destroy. It was built to process. Eight weeks after humanity's fleet arrived at the Graveyard of Stars—the most ancient structure in explored space—the alien archive has fired its weapon without command. The entities the fleet called Devourers have retreated into positions inside the weapon network. And Admiral Aeryn Solthane is beginning to understand that everything she thought she was fighting was wrong. The Devourers are not invaders. They are system components. Part of a nine-million-year-old processing cycle that has been running since before humanity existed. A cycle that preserves civilizations—not to save them, but to record them. Every species the archive has ever contained was incorporated. Archived. Made part of something larger. And the fleet is next. Adaptive Response is the second book in Nick Bradley's landmark hard science fiction series The Silence War a story about first contact, ancient machines, and what it means to be part of something you cannot stop. As the system learns to use them, the fleet must decide: Fight a machine that has been running for nine million years Cooperate with a process that is consuming them ship by ship Reach the Core—and choose whether it continues Meanwhile, the Graveyard itself is failing. Its builders vanished eleven thousand years ago. Its infrastructure is incomplete. And the only thing keeping it running is the fleet—integrated so deeply into its architecture that their ships are becoming its pathways, their crews are becoming its nodes, and something that was never meant to be a maintenance crew is discovering that it has become one. Then a signal arrives from outside the Graveyard's boundary. Something beyond the system has noticed the fleet's decision. Something is answering. Perfect for readers of Alastair Reynolds, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Peter Watts, and Greg Bear. A hard SF epic that takes the alien seriously—not as a monster to be defeated, but as a system too old and too large to be understood from inside it. The Silence War series can be read independently, but readers new to the series may wish to begin with Book One: Graveyard of Stars.