So let me preface this by saying that I love Gladstone's Craft series, this book just fell flat. It looks like science fiction, and has space opera tropes, but it's actually an alchemaical novel, and not a good one at that.

Vivian Lao is a tech entrepreneur on the run when she's transported from Earth to a prison station orbiting a giant star, under attack from malevolent robots with scorpion bodies and ken-doll torsos. A monk rescues her, and then she frees an ancient pirate queen from prison, and is off on adventures. See, it turns out the galaxy is "ruled" by the Empress, a supremely powerful being who acts in a kind of wrath of god mode, crushing civilizations that get too advanced. If she doesn't, an implacable extra-galactic force called the Bleed eats then. The Empress is looking for a real solution to her problem, and it involves Viv. So Viv has to gather a band of unlikely allies, and then the all have to learn The Value of Friendship and the Power of Abrogating The Self.

The whole thing feels unwieldy, not so much a characters and plot as a series of explanatory lessons. There's big explosive scenes, but no precision in the bombast. Gladstone has a point, but it's both obtuse and banal.