Curiosity

Eight thousand light years away, something is transmitting. Nobody on Earth wants to answer it.

Jennifer Starzek lost her ship and two hundred and fifty-three of her crew, and has spent two years learning how to be a civilian. The United Earth Agency does not want her back. What it wants is somebody deniable - somebody who can take a twenty-five-year-old research vessel to the far side of the galaxy and find out who is calling.

The crew she assembles is nobody's first choice. A civil servant who has never left his desk. A linguist wanted for treason for building a machine that lets humans talk to the enemy. A pilot with a habit she is hiding. A doctor who ran from her own colony. An engineer who has already survived one reactor breach and does not intend to survive another.

They have fifty-three days to cross. Behind them, the outpost they left falls to pirates - and the one person who might decode the signal is trapped inside it, with a nine-year-old girl.

What is waiting at WR 104 has been calling for two centuries. It has already decided what to do about humanity. And when the Curiosity finally arrives, it does not negotiate.

It asks for one of them by name.

Curiosity: The Crossing is the first book of a two-part series. Book Two, Curiosity: The Descent, is available now.