As I mentioned last week, I purchased this series with gift cards from my bosses at work. It's not a bad series at all, though I don't think Tchaikovsky lives up to the hype I've seen elsewhere.

The Architects--inscrutable, invulnerable, inevitable. They came from the the depths of unspace to remake inhabited planets, twisting them into bizarre, otherwordly, yet also beautiful artworks. Earth was only one of their most recent victims--ten billion souls wiped out in just a few hours as an Architect turned our beautiful blue jewel of a planet inside out. Nothing could stop them. Until one woman was able to form a psychic connection with an Architect to ask it one simple question: "Why?" Then they disappeared for over fifty years, while the rest of the galaxy recovered from the onslaught.

Now they are back and only one man, a broken remnant from the Intermediary program that stopped the Architects in their tracks, may hold the key to stopping them again. Unfortunately, every faction in the galaxy--both human and alien--now wants Idris on their side, as they know he's one of the very few people in history to survive an attack from an Architect. His mysterious gifts within unspace allow him deep insight into the Architects' mad schemes for reforming the galaxy on their terms.

Idris and his companion Solace have stopped an Architect once again, at the same distant planet where they destroyed an Architect before. The Architects haven't forgotten. The Essiel Hegemony, once thought to be the only race capable of guarding planets against an Architect's attack have been proven to be as impotent as the rest of the galaxy. The Architects have also revealed a tiny weakness, a chink in their near-invincible armor that Idris and his companions hope to exploit to understand the Architects' overall goal and perhaps save the remaining human colonies. Unfortunately, galaxy has devolved into a bickering shooting war over trivial nonsense, instead of uniting to face the new threats.