The Night's Dawn
Trilogy
By Peter F. Hamilton
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Plot Summary of The Night’s Dawn Trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction | The Neutronium Alchemist | The Naked God
Emergence
Dexter Quinn, a member of the illegal God’s Brother Cult on Earth, is exiled to the colony planet Lalonde as an Ivet (prisoner laborer), where he begins recruiting his fellow Ivets to his cult. Meanwhile, Joshua Calvert makes his fortune by excavating artifacts from the ruins of the long-extinct alien race known as the Laymil in the Ruin Ring. He uses his money to repair the damaged Lady Macbeth that his father left to him upon his death and becomes an independent trader and mercenary.
The growth of the Edenist voidhawk Oenon and its captain, Syrinx, are described from their conception up to the present, in which they are volunteering their services to the Confederation Navy.
The evolution of the race known as the Ly-Cilph, which has culminated in a
transcendent form of existence, is described. One of these bodiless
creatures is exploring the universe and examines Lalonde as Dexter is in the
process of mutilating a colonist, which opens a gateway into the Beyond
as the man approaches death.
The
Ly-Cilph enters this gateway in hopes of exploring what lies beyond it, but
is instead forced to retreat into a hibernation-like state when he is
attacked by other consciousnesses inside. These consciousnesses are the
souls of dead humans, and several escape the Beyond through the rift that
the Ly-Cilph opened and possess the bodies of the Ivets, including Quinn.
The Possessed then mentally and physically torture colonists into
accepting possession so that more souls will be able to claim bodies.
Expansion
The possession of Lalonde’s colonists quietly grows at an exponential rate in the planet's jungle settlements as more and more fall victim to the Possessed. Unaware of the crisis on the planet, Joshua Calvert provides Dexter, or rather, the soul in possession of Dexter’s body, transportation off Lalonde, beginning the process of infecting other planets. Once alerted to the threat, the Confederation embassy on Lalonde dispatches a team of Marines that capture one of the Possessed and transport her off-planet in order to study her.
When the Lalonde Development Corporation, the company that owns Lalonde and
is facilitating its colonization, realizes the magnitude, if not the nature,
of the threat that faces them, they recruit an army of “combat boosted”
cyborg mercenaries and a navy of independent trading vessels, including the
Lady Macbeth, to fight the Possessed. Nearly all the ground forces
are killed and many space vessels are taken over by the Possessed, who are
able to manipulate energy as a weapon, but the Lady Macbeth manages
to escape. On the planet, a priest named Horst Elwes and a group of
children have been spared by the Possessed. They are found by a team of
mercenaries that have survived, and both groups are taken off the planet
when the Lady Macbeth returns to retrieve the members of the
mercenary team that it landed on the planet and whom Calvert promised he
would not abandon.
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Consolidation
Al Capone returns from the Beyond and uses fellow Possessed to take over the planet New California. He becomes a large scale threat when he gains access to antimatter, a prohibited fuel/weapon that allows his navy to rival that of the Confederation.
Not all the possessed are comfortable with their possession of others’
bodies. 
Though unwilling to give up their own possessed bodies, a group of
well-intentioned Possessed on the planet Ombey safeguards a group of
children even as an army of Edenist biological constructs attempts to
reclaim the planet.
Meanwhile, the sentient habitat Valisk attempts to fight off the Possessed who, under the leadership of Kiera Saltar, have infiltrated it. Kiera is building an army by advertising Valisk under Possessed rule as a utopia to misunderstood and underprivileged youths throughout the galaxy, and so they secretly make their way to the habitat and are possessed.
Conflict
A weapon that can destroy a star, known as the Alchemist, has been discovered, and Capone’s forces and the Confederation race to get to it first by following its creator, Dr. Alkad Mzu, to the location where it had been hidden decades earlier. The Confederation, strapped for resources and manpower, dispatches Joshua Calvert and the Lady Macbeth to apprehend Mzu and retrieve the weapon. In order to escape his Possessed pursuers, Calvert detonates the weapon in a gas giant, thereby eliminating the threat of having a super weapon in the hands of the Possessed.
Quinn Dexter, who has regained control of his body but now has the energy manipulation abilities of the Possessed, returns to Earth, where he attempts to build an army of Possessed in order to take over the planet and take vengeance on those members of the God’s Brother Cult that set him up to be exiled.
On Ombey, an army of biological constructs imbued with the consciousnesses
of dead Edenists that had been existing in the neural strata of habitats,
attempts to retake areas controlled by the Possessed and oust them from
their bodies by subjecting them to zero tau (suspended animation).
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Flight
The Confederation begins to dissolve into anarchy as Al Capone’s navy seeds more and more planets with Possessed. The Possessed have been using their ability to manipulate energy to move whole planets into different universes where they believe they will be safe, but they are finding that the planets and their own bodies are deteriorating in the conditions they have created for themselves.
On Earth, Dexter has managed to infect much of the globe despite the
measures taken by the authorities.
The Lady Macbeth and Oenon are sent on a mission to find the Sleeping God of the Tyrathca, an alien race who believe that this entity, which they encountered in deep space thousands of years earlier, can protect them from the Possessed. Another solution is being researched by Confederation scientists that, through the medium of virus-like thought patterns, would enter the Beyond and destroy all the consciousnesses in it. They decide that such a weapon will only be used as an absolute last resort, as it is genocide on the grandest scale ever known.
Faith
Al Capone, now deprived of antimatter and strategically outmaneuvered by the Confederation Navy, surrenders his armed forces and voluntarily leaves his host to return to the Beyond, feeling confident that he can find another way out of it.
Syrinx and Calvert find the home-system of the Tyrathca and, by using
records recovered there, find the Sleeping God. It is actually an
entity that was created by an ancient and advanced alien race in order to
propel their entire population into a different dimension. It can manipulate space-time
and interaction between universes. It explains that the Beyond is not the
ultimate afterlife, but a limbo where those who do not have the confidence
to leave their universe behind upon death go so they are still able observe
some actions that occur in the physical realm. The Sleeping God acts as a
Deus ex machine, returning all the planets that the Possessed have
removed from the universe back where they belong, expelling all the
Possessed from their host bodies, and using Quinn Dexter’s “soul” as a
medium to transport all the consciousnesses trapped in the Beyond to the
ultimate afterlife.
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