Landership

Landership by Gordon JohnsonHard SF, set in the near future. Mysterious happenings ranging from Earth space to the Atlantic ocean culminate in the appearance of a large vessel from the sea. And that is just the start.The vessel surreptitiously joins chat groups on the Internet, and claims to be a spaceship, starts chatting about itself in internet newsgroups and attracts the attention of an investigator in the British security services, who sparks a wider enquiry.The US navy makes contact with the object floating in the southern seas, and is bamboozled by an alien mind that talks in English and seems to know far more than it should. It has tapped into the Internet and is downloading data like crazy, learning all the time about humanity.It is clearly more advanced than anything on Earth, and claims to be on a confidential contact mission. It persuades the world's major powers to secretly provide a contact group to travel with it to its base somewhere in the solar system for discussions.But why is it so secretive? What is it hiding? What is it not telling about itself and its mysterious "base". A trilogy of interstellar meetings and warfare