Descendant Machine

OK, I got sucked into the first one in this series, and liked it well enough that I had to do this one, and... it's good. It is saved from being great by a great honking deus ex machina that struck me as a mechanism to rescue the author from a pit of his own making, in that it all happened too fast and without enough background to explain WHY it had to be that way, and....

It's still good. Powell writes really well, and universe-builds well enough that he takes you along reasonably effortlessly... until the deus pops out of the machina. I think there could have been a better ending.