2023 SF, first of its series. Cherry Pendit has told nobody about her
oracular gift, but it's been yelling into her mind that she needs to
find the man hiding on this particular abandoned space station and
help keep him hidden…
Schwartz is not the best of writers, but she always manages to
surprise me, usually in a good way. This series is a sequel to The
Adventures of a Xeno-Archaeologist, but deals less with court
politics and more with ethics.
At the end of that other series, the people of the six-world Human
Sector had found a way back into contact with their parent
civilisation. As this book opens, the expedition is picking over the
first place it found, an abandoned space station. It seems that the
parent civilisation has retrenched, then at least partly collapsed,
and this is all tied up with a genocidal war against crab-like aliens,
the katang.
The man hiding on the station is from that civilisation, but he's
travelling with his adopted son, a juvenile katang—whom the rest of
his people would kill on sight. None of our heroes really knows much
about what's going on, but clearly they're going to have to find out.
This is mostly a book of slow discovery, but with a strong side note
of how you work out the right thing to do with desperately incomplete
information. (And "get more information" is only part of the
answer.) There are still many unanswered questions, but there are also
two more books to come in the series, so that's fair enough. (And as
usual the book is quite short; all three together would probably make
up a typically fat modern SF novel.)