No Homo Please

The year is 2800.
Humanity has a word for what they've built across two hundred star systems.
They call it civilization.
Everyone else calls it something they're no longer allowed to say out loud.
Aen is a Veth linguist working for the Bureau of Cultural Preservation - the Reach's department responsible for documenting the cultures of conquered species before the last traces disappear. It is careful, important, and respected work.
It is also, Aen has spent fourteen years not quite admitting, the polite face of erasure.
A routine assignment to Kael Station 7 changes nothing. Until it changes everything.
Deep inside the station's walls, kept alive by stolen power cells and eleven years of stubborn hope, something waits - a pre-conquest archive containing the one thing the human empire has spent two centuries trying to destroy.
The truth of how it began.
What Aen finds inside that archive will cost them everything they've built their life on. What Aen chooses to do with it will determine whether forty conquered civilizations have a future - or just increasingly well-documented pasts.