The Memory of Distant Suns

When humanity’s first extrasolar colony, Lumen, receives a transmission from a star that should not exist, xenolinguist Mara Venn is pulled from academic exile to decode it. The message is not words, music, or mathematics—it is a memory. More impossibly, it belongs to Mara, describing events from a future in which Lumen burns, Earth is silent, and an alien intelligence called the Choir has already judged humankind unfit to survive.

As the colony fractures between those who worship the signal and those who want it destroyed, Mara joins a sentient shipmind, a disgraced soldier, and a child born with impossible knowledge to follow the transmission beyond mapped space. There they discover the Choir is not invading from the stars, but from time itself—pruning civilizations before they become cosmic catastrophes. To save humanity, Mara must prove that a species can change its fate, even when the universe remembers its failure.