Under the Weight of Another Sun

Ensign Wren Reed is twenty-five and the youngest xenobiologist in the survey fleet. Sarn has spent three hundred and forty years archiving a single continental shelf on a tide-locked world, and has never once been surprised. She is assigned as his liaison. He agrees because she asks questions no one has asked before. Eight months of fieldwork later, they've learned each other's languages. What neither of them planned on is what happens next — a Veridani bonding, which reshapes a human nervous system over years, and which Sarn will not ask her to accept. When the Callisto is recalled to Earth, Sarn has to choose between a century of work and a woman who will be old before he looks up. He chooses. A slow, strange, open-door age gap sci-fi romance for readers who like their aliens ancient and their endings earned.