Ascending

Sequel to author's first book, Expendable in which Oar had supposedly plunged to her death from an 80-story building. But, as she herself will tell you in Ascending, Oar is very much alive.

In the four years since her fall, she has been recuperating in a programmed care facility designed for elders with Tired Brains - a strange condition that afflicts her people at age 50, exhausting their interest in life and leaving them in a senile stupor.

Now, a very un-Tired Oar has awaked, to find a strange, orange-skinned alien standing near her. Uclod is on Oar's world collecting evidence to nail the Technocracy's highest ranking admirals for past misdeeds, including the marooning on Melaquin of human Expendables like Festina Ramos.

As a firsthand witness, Oar is evidence some people want dead. Opting not to wait until wicked navy persons murder her on sight (nor wishing to spend the rest of her life in hibernations), Oar heads for New Earth inside the belly of Uclod's bioneural space creature Starbiter. And that's when the fun begins.

Escaping two attackers - the alien Shaddill and the Technocracy itself - Oar finds herself face to face with a new annoyance. The Pollisand, a haughty, headless, rhino-like alien who only shows up for disasters, makes a proposition: if she helps him wipe out the Shaddill, he'll make sure her brain never gets Tired.

But why would the Shaddill, who generously offer wondrous gifts of technology to less evolved races, need killing? Joining a chance-met Festina, Oar and her friends soon learn that hese supposedly benevolent aliens are concealing a fiendish secret - and that the future of civilizations throughout the galazy, including Oar's own, depends on stopping them once and for all.