Voyage of the Beagle

Enri asked one good question at a guest lecture. Six months later, a letter arrives: a centuries-old android professor has remembered them, and there's a berth waiting aboard the CSV Beagle — a 150-year-old survey ship departing the Pleiades on a five-year expedition to a ruin at the edge of known space. Enri says yes before they finish reading.

Two years outbound, port by port, the Beagle's crew of humans, aliens, and machine minds becomes something like a family. Then the dig begins, and the site turns out to be less finished — and less empty — than anyone believed.

A hopeful science fiction novel about found families, patient attention, and what answers when you finally ask the right question. First in the Confederation Universe.