Reddit mentions of The Return of the Angel (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 2)

Well, let's see. I don't want to spoil stuff in case you decide you want to read it, and you can get a basic tease by reading the blurb:

https://www.amazon.com/Return-Angel-Kestrel-Chronicles-Book-ebook/dp/B014V1ABVG

(It's book 2 of an ongoing episodic series of which I have published 3 books so far.)

Following is some back-story:

The setting of these books is our solar system around 7000 AD. Human civilization has continued to advance scientifically and technologically. In particular, it's gotten very good at AI, robotics, genetic engineering, bioengineering, and nanotechnology.

It hasn't, on the other hand, learned how to travel faster than the speed of light.

Between 4 and 5 thousand years ago human civilization entered a kind of golden age. It was in the wake of a catastrophic conflict called the Mech Wars, a struggle among different factions of machine intelligences for control of the solar system. That conflict brought humanity right to the edge of extinction before it was resolved. Fortunately, the factions that won included some that strongly wished to preserve and protect humanity, and that set about rebuilding the human civilization that had nearly been lost.

In under three centuries human civilization was strong and flourishing, and it entered a period of great imagination and ambition.

Among those ambitions was a desire to explore the stars. Several starships of increasing complexity and sophistication were constructed and launched on voyages of varying levels of ambition. Some carried human crews. Some of those left on open-ended missions.

Angel of Cygnus was a large vessel that carried a human complement of 1200 in pretty spacious habitats arranged on gimbaled centrifuges around a central axis. The ship, an antimatter-catalyzed fusion torch, departed around 2800 AD bound for Kepler 11 in the constellation of Cygnus, a g4v star about 2000 light years away. Its crew of 1200 sent back regular reports for several years, then abruptly stopped.

The mission of Angel of Cygnus was an open-ended one. She was designed to visit Kepler 11 and then select a new destination star. By rights she should have continued traveling onward for thousands more years, but she was spotted re-entering the solar system in the 70th century, after over 4000 years of travel from Earth's frame of reference. She was detected by the Cold Ones, the inhabitants of Pluto and Charon, who visited the returning ship on its approach. After visiting Angel, the Cold Ones approached Rayleigh Scientific, the company that owns the torch ship Kestrel to visit the returning starship and rescue the sole human survivor.

Her return raised a host of questions: why had she returned instead of continuing with her mission? Why did she stop communicating with Earth so abruptly? What happened to the 1200 people--including families with children--who had been aboard her when she left?

Her sole survivor might be able to answer these questions. The Cold Ones reported that he was a man in his fifties or sixties--old enough, taking into account relativistic time dilation, to have been one of the original crew at Angel's launch.

According to the Cold Ones, Angel was in bad shape, and the survivor desparately needed rescue, but he would not agree to leave the ship unless met by human beings. The Cold Ones are many things, and they have a spotless reputation, but they are definitely not human. So the Cold Ones commissioned Rayleigh Scientific to be the human beings who would meet the survivor and rescue him from the ghost ship.

The book is about what happens when the captain and crew of Kestrel visit Angel of Cygnus to rescue her sole human survivor.

If you have other questions, I'll be glad to give non-spoilery answers.