Gil’s World by James Murdo

After a relentless war ravaged the galaxy for hundreds of millions of years, an insidious enemy was finally subdued by the events of the Great Conflation – although not defeated. With the pre-Conflation empires in ruins and the Ascended Biologicals wiped out, the decimated galactic community struggled to rebuild itself from the ashes, and the machine-led Wanderer civilisation rose to prominence.

A lone Wanderer craft-lect – a sentient machine intelligence – has found something on an innocuous world it had marked for routine decontamination. Something that may aid it in finally discovering answers about their formidable enemy.

Gil, a young woman from an isolated commune, realises that her abilities far surpass anything she had suspected, but do they come at a price? She battles to save the future of her commune against mysterious, ancient rivals, and possibly much more.