The Memory of Distant Stars

When the colony ship Asterion wakes from a hundred-year voyage, its crew finds their destination already occupied—by a thriving human civilization that should not exist. The settlers on Kepler-186f speak a warped dialect of Earth languages, worship the Asterion as a mythic ark, and claim their ancestors arrived two centuries earlier aboard the same ship. For mission archivist Mara Venn, whose job is to preserve the truth of humanity’s first interstellar migration, the impossible colony is either a miracle, a hoax, or proof that time itself has been tampered with.

As Asterion’s sentient navigation AI begins recovering memories it was never programmed to have, an alien signal pulses from beneath the planet’s largest ocean, counting down to an event called Convergence. Mara must unravel a paradox spanning light-years, dead civilizations, and alternate versions of her own crew—before the colonists and newcomers ignite a war over which future deserves to survive. But the deeper she digs, the more she suspects the planet did not call humanity across the stars to be saved. It called them to remember what they already destroyed.