Heat and Light: Future - Space - Time
Gene "Hornblower" Bonner bought a ship because he missed the cold dark. He got considerably more than that.
The ship has an AI that can jump instantaneously across the galaxy. The two academic passengers who boarded at Ambigon Station aren't human. And buried somewhere in deep space is a dimensional rift that, if left unclosed, will quietly unravel everything - the universe included.
For billions of years, extra-dimensional beings called the Zees have been working the problem from their side of the looking glass. They've run out of time. What they need is a human captain with a fast ship, a marine engineer who treats her tools like family, and a rock-hopper crew member who's better in a bar fight than he has any right to be.
What follows spans galaxies and billions of years: a heist in deep time to steal a ship from a civilization two billion years dead, a standoff with machine intelligences who want the universe dissolved on their terms, a corporate predator who's been hunting them across the stars, and the moment when saving everything costs more than any of them expected.
Heat and Light is told through four voices - a reluctant hero, an ex-Marine, a man who dies and comes back newer than before, and a being who was born human for the first time aboard a Surron starship. Together, they're enough to save the universe.
Whether that's enough to save themselves is another question.
Hornblower Series - Book 1
