Liaden Universe: Theo Waitley

Theo Waitley has lived all her young life on Delgado, a Safe World that is home to one of the galaxy's premier institutions of higher learning. Both Theo's mother, Kamele, and Kamele's onagrata Jen Sar Kiladi, are professors at the university, and they all live comfortably together, just like they have for all of Theo's life, in Jen Sar's house at the outskirts of town.Suddenly, though, Theo's life changes. Kamele leaves Jen Sar and moves herself and Theo back into faculty housing, which is not what Theo is used to.

Theo, star pilot wannabe and troubled misfit has been accepted, against all her expectations, to Anlingdin. It’s the Hogwarts of star piloting academies, and Theo has been selected to train there with the best-of-the-best. Even better - she can finally leave behind the gawky, misfit days of teenage angst her previous life so complicated before. Great Liaden star pilots are born with a bang and not a whimper - and Theo has set a course to graduate from misfit to genuine maverick.

New novel in the Liaden Universe series. Over a quarter million copies sold in this series to-date! Space ships, action, adventure – all tied together with a strong dollop of romance and family saga – make this a compelling series for a wide range of readers, from romance to military SF lovers alike.

First Class Courier Pilot Theo Waitley was already known as a nexus of violence - and then she inherited the precarious captaincy of a mysterious self-aware ship designed to serve a long dead trader. Now she has a trade route to run for Clan Korval while she convinces the near-mythic ghost ship Bechimo - and herself - that she wants to commit herself as the human side to their immensely powerful symbiosis. While her former lover battles a nanovirus that's eating him alive, she's challenged to rescue hundreds of stranded pilots and crewmen from an explosive situation in near orbit around a suddenly hostile planet.

The luck runs rough around Theo Waitley. Not only are people trying to kill her and capture the self-aware intelligent ship, Bechimo, to whom Theo is bonded, they're also trying to arrest her crew membersand throw the dignity of an important passenger, the duly constituted norbear ambassador Hevelin, into question. No wonder Theo and her crew felt the need for a break and retired to what Bechimo refers to as "safe space". Unfortunately, safe space may not be so safe anymore.

The Complex Logic Laws were the result of a war waged hundreds of years in the past, when two human powers threw massive AI navies at each other and nearly annihilated themselves. Being human, they blamed their tools for this near miss; they destroyed what was left of the sentient ships, and made it illegal to be, manufacture, or shelter an independent logic.