Aliette de Bodard.
The Tea Master and the Detective.
JABberwocky. 2018
Once, the military transport mindship known as The Shadow’s Child
leapt effortlessly between stars and planets.
Until an ambush killed her crew and left her wounded and broken.
The war over, The Shadow’s Child, surviving against all odds, has no plans to go back into space. Until the arrogant scholar Long Chau comes to see her. Long Chau wants to retrieve a corpse for her scientific studies. But the corpse they find turns out to have been murdered, and the simple assignment becomes a tangled investigation—inexorably leading back to that unbearable void where The Shadow’s Child almost lost both sanity and life…