Daelia Hall doesn’t care about Unity, or its promises. Humanity is being offered a chance to join a great galactic confederation, administered by hyper-sentient abiota, but who has time to worry about that? It’s a distant issue—or maybe not, considering how the alien envoy is suddenly the biggest celebrity on the planet.
No, Daelia has Emily to care about. The Air Force is sending a team out to investigate the catastrophic events of the recent air show. If they don’t like what they find, Emily will be bricked, a fate worse than death for any abiota.
When Daelia gets her hands on some of the alien tech, it starts to raise other questions. Uncomfortable questions. Questions that she can’t ignore. But Unity, despite its fine words of peace, is willing to kill to protect its secrets. Will her search for answers lead to disaster?
If you enjoyed J.S. Dewes’ Divide series, or Megan O’Keefe’s Protectorate series, the Abiota series is for you. Start book 1, you won’t stop until you are through book 6. Space opera with excellent character development in the context of a contemplation on the potentially apocalyptic consequences from the emergence of sentient a.i. set in the near future. While catastrophe is the setting for most of the novel, it nonetheless exhibits a consistently optimistic view of human motivations juxtaposed with a very contemporary cynicism regarding our own general intelligence and ability to sort fact from fiction. Well done Ms. Rensing.