The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt

 

Callie Machedo is the Captain of the White Raven, a ship that does salvage work when they aren't chasing down miscreants for the TSN.  They are headed to headquarters when they come upon an old ship, hundreds of years old, in a place where it shouldn't be.  When they board to look for salvage, they discover that one crew member is still there in cryptosleep.  They rush the survivor to their own ship where their doctor can safely return her to animation.

The survivor is Dr. Elena Oh and she immediately tells them when she awakes that her crew made first alien contact.  Her ship had left the Earth five hundred years before looking for a new world to live upon.  Instead they had found aggressive aliens who captured most of her crew.  Callie tells her that alien contact had been established many years ago with the Liars who gave Earth and others the technology that allowed easier space travel with wormholes and instant relocation through them to anywhere in the universe.  Captain Machedo also agrees to go back to where Oh's ship had been and try to rescue her crew.

Aided by a Liar the crew heads back out into space.  The Liar admits that his kind knew of the other aliens and had been enslaved by them for hundreds of years.  He is petrified of stirring them up but agrees to go along and help.  What will the crew find?

Tim Pratt is an American author who writes in the science fiction genre and has won various awards such as the Hugo.  When I started this book, I wasn't sure I would like it as it seemed like it might be a YA novel with silly love stories scattered through.  But as I read, I became engaged with the crew of the White Raven and their mission.  I liked the diversity of the crew as it contained an engineer who was my favorite character who was slowly turning himself into a cyborg and who was amusing and adventuresome.  It also contained a being composed of two humans who had been caught in a disaster and who were melded together by aliens who didn't know what humans should look like.  The adventures were interesting and there is plenty of room for more.  This novel is the first in a trilogy about the Axiom who are the evil aliens and is recommended for science fiction readers.