The Starship Ginsberg

Marcus Chen is fifty-three, which in the year 2387 makes him a teenager, and he has his life planned down to the second. Ranked third in his class at the Neo Francisco Space Academy, he's one checkout mission away from the career he's spent decades optimizing for. Then the Academy Algorithm hands him the Starship Ginsberg: the fleet's oddball, a ship with a saxophone welded to its antenna and a habit of sending cadets home speaking in haiku.

The Ginsberg isn't empty. Kit, a paint-stained girl who says she lives there, gives him a tour he didn't ask for, past a jazz club in the cargo bay, a greenhouse in the medical bay and a whole community of people who walked away from the Schedule. The captain was declared dead six months ago and seems fine with it. There are poems hidden in the walls. And somewhere in the navigation logs is a course Marcus was never supposed to find. He has thirty days to file a report, and every day aboard makes it harder to decide what that report should say.