Echoes of the Ancients

Lutéa is a stowaway on the cruise liner Tenzenai’s Gift. She’s also a robot, programmed for obedience, made with an expiration date, and desperate to see something of the greater universe before she goes. But she has to hide her nature, because her very existence is against the religion of many sapients. Lutéa is a sapient being who wasn’t made by the Stargods, the source of all life in the galaxy, from the “quar” species that Lutéa resembles, to sapient slime molds, to dragons in the coronas of suns.
After a chance encounter with a vicious socialite leaves her helpless, Lutéa is rescued by Tal—a tall, hairless biped from a species said to be nearly extinct, a species known locally as the Wanderers. Tal is a stowaway just like Lutéa, but he’s on a mission, and that mission turns deadly as hostile forces divert Tenzenai’s Gift toward the dwarf planet Shoroha.
Roshka and Mrin are lovers, despite their respective species being adversaries. Roshka is the one who worries; Mrin is a deadly member of a species famed for their unpredictability. Caught in a grim port town under a dark red sky, the only way they can keep their starship is by selling themselves to a criminal—until they meet a peculiar Wanderer. He will pay off their debts, with only one condition: they have to take him to Shoroha.
Under the ice of Shoroha, scientists have discovered something too radical and volatile for the universe to know. Tal and the others must find it, and decide what to do with it, or empires will tear themselves apart over civilization’s most abiding question: who are the true heirs to the Stargods?