Babylon's Reach. The Babylon Cycle, #2

A Navy mechanic who fell off an aircraft carrier into the Pacific Ocean. A sentient warship who pulled him out and made him her captain. And a galaxy that has been waiting four thousand years for them to arrive. Andy Becket and Seven left Earth with a heading and no certainty. What they find at the end of it is extinction. Seven's homeworld is dead, its surface wrapped in permanent storms, its cities scoured to nothing by an empire that solves problems by making them permanent.
The civilization that built her is gone. But someone left a trail in the ruins, layered and encrypted and pointing outward, and Andy has never been the kind of man who turns around when the road gets harder. The road leads into the People's Dominion, a decaying empire held together by scarcity, disappearances, and the particular cruelty of a government that has decided what its subjects need and provides less.
At its center sits Drevyn XXVIII, the original emperor cloned twenty-eight times across centuries, his image everywhere, his people dying by degrees from the genetic cost of making more of the same man. At its edges, the empire is a ghost running on the memory of what it was. Andy and Seven gather a crew from those edges. Oren, a former imperial official turned smuggler who reads rooms faster than most people register he's entered them.
Alpheus, a wandering preacher who has spent his life believing in a prophecy no one took seriously, and who sees Seven and stops needing to believe because now he knows. Lira, a young thief running from a debt that was designed to never be repaid, who boards looking for escape and stays longer than calculation can explain. The trail narrows. The crew splits. While Andy follows an ancient thread toward a secret the Velari died to protect, Oren and Alpheus move through the empire's underground and discover that a treasure hunt and a revolution can be the same thing.
Testimony travels through the same networks that carry contraband. Ghost ships crewed by no one become a fleet crewed by people who have stopped believing the empire is inevitable. And behind all of it, the emperor is watching, patient, certain that one small ship will lead him to the weapon he needs to save a civilization that is already past saving. What Andy finds at the trail's end will rewrite everything he thought he knew about where he came from.
What he does with it is the choice the whole book has been building toward. This is a story about the people who stay. Not because they have to. Because someone has to make sure what comes next is worth living under.