Fluency adds little to the dense genre of first-contact scifi, with a story that betrays its premise and the broader potential of contact across world. Since the Roswell crash in 1947, the government has been concealing an immense secret: there is an alien space ship orbiting in the asteroid belt. Now in the near present, NASA has two shots to send a manned mission to the derelict ship before an asteroid impact destroys it.

Dr. Jane Holloway is a top linguist and is shot out in a primitive capsule to the big alien ship. They discover that it is still alive, and Jane makes contact with the alien Navigator that control the ship. What follows is a mess of mandatory action sequences involving slug and scorpion-like space pests, info dumps about a galactic community of pacifistic humanoids seeded by a vanished precursor race under attack from an insectile swarm, and a romance that I would describe as ham-handed, except then I'd need another adjective to describe the book over all. Jane and Berg are perfect complements, the linguist and the engineer, and they'd be perfect for each other except that they can't admit how perfect they'd be for each other. Walsh, the cautious ex-military man, is mostly defined as villainous by how much he doesn't love our heroine.

Holloway is a linguist, but she only manages to decipher open and close buttons on a door before the Navigator telepathically hands her the works. No one else seems to make much of an effort at wonder or investigation of a ship that has artificial gravity as the least of its tricks. The ship isn't the small worldlet of Rama or a densely packed opaque cultural artifact to be explored; it's a mundane vehicle populated by 70 years of rubber-mask "aliens."

On the upside, the book reads pretty easy, but I can't see any reason to read it. Hard pass.