Deep Space One is sent out from a deteriorating Earth to find the best candidate New Earth in a region that has several promising choices. They're a small crew, just six people, three couples, and they can all trust each other.
Surely they can all trust each other.
They're spending most of their time in deep sleep, waking for seven-day periods at long intervals, to maintain the ship, review new data, make any course adjustments, check for problems and receive mail from home. Shortly before the halfway point, when the ship will need to reverse itself and start decelerating for arrival at what is now determined to be the right planet.
Small glitches in the received transmissions prompts two members of the crew to take a much closer look at what one member of the crew in particular has been receiving.
The mission isn't what they though it was, and suddenly they can't all trust each other.
And then they receive another surprise.
This is nicely done, good plotting and good characters. Like pretty much all of Perreault's work, it has the things I liked about Golden Age science fiction, while having 21st century social mores, with racial and gender equality baked in, not worked in after the fact. There's so much Golden Age sf I can't go back and reread if I still want to have fond memories of it.
(Yes, there are other things he doesn't deal with at all, perhaps because he doesn't feel comfortable that he can handle them well.)
I really strongly recommend this and all of Perreault's work that I've read so far.
I received a free copy of this audiobook from the author, and am reviewing it voluntarily.
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