Embers of War

Trouble Dog is a sentient warship, built for violence and fresh from a brutal war. She is disgusted by what she did in a genocide, and she has had her weapons removed. To atone, she joins the House of Reclamation, an organisation that rescues ships in distress.

Her first assignment arrives when a civilian ship vanishes in a disputed system. Trouble Dog sails to find it with a new crew of loners under Captain Sal Konstanz. Far away, intelligence officer Ashton Childe is given a separate task: to locate the poet Ona Sudak, a passenger on the missing vessel.

Childe does not know that Sudak is not who she seems. What looks like a simple rescue turns into something far more dangerous, and Trouble Dog, Konstanz and Childe end up at the centre of a conflict that could spread across the whole galaxy.

This is science fiction in space opera territory, told through several viewpoints that include the ship herself. A pacifist warship has to decide whether to take up the fight again to protect her crew, and that tension runs through the book. A sequel, Fleet of Knives, follows.