Stars Between

Stars Between Us by E.L. Vance

The Milky Way smells faintly of raspberries and rum. Mira Vasquez has known this since she was nine years old, and she has never stopped being hungry for what else the universe might be hiding.

As a disgraced xenobotanist facing twelve years on a prison colony, she doesn't expect her next great discovery to arrive in the form of a government ultimatum. But Commander Dax Reeve has a mission, a classified star chart, and a file on Mira that runs to seven volumes — including the napkin calculations she scribbled in a bar on Titan. Someone, it turns out, has been paying attention.

The mission is simple and impossible: reach a hidden world at the edge of known space before a corporate extraction fleet does, and make first contact with a civilisation that has spent three thousand years quietly terraforming its own planet through biology, patience, and an understanding of living systems that makes everything humanity has ever built look like guesswork.

What follows is a race across the Korath Expanse aboard Mira's beloved ship, the Luminary — complete with her wonderfully opinionated AI, a tactical officer who reads like she's having an argument with the book, a drone-conducting twenty-something, and a Velorian ambassador whose bioluminescent emotions say everything his diplomatic composure won't.

Stars Between Us is a novel about what it means to meet something genuinely new — and what kind of people you have to be to do it right. It's about slow-burn trust, the ethics of wonder, and the extraordinary things that grow when you give them enough time.

Warm, witty, and unexpectedly moving — perfect for readers who loved The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and want their space opera with heart, hope, and a ship AI who takes her crossword puzzles very seriously.