Orbem Novis by Richard Hanners

SPSFC 2023

Three centuries after the Orbem Novis colonists told off-Earth financiers who backed their voyage to stay away from their new home on a distant planet or face death, the Farside Corporation receives an unusual request. Two top-drawer agents are hired to locate the last descendants on Earth of the colonists’ leader and bring them to Orbem Novis. The mission, however, keeps changing as the agents travel 50 light-years to a new world teeming with strange life forms. When civil war breaks out among the colonists, the agents learn they are pawns not of the Farside Corporation but a more powerful force – an artificial intelligence that links their universe to another and the long lost mining ship Anaconda.