Vacant Skies by Drek Kontny
Check out this debut novel from a local author!
Keve Rivens is a Captain of an Akatora Navy Vessel. His job, although mundane for the most part, is to guard the star systems near the edge of human space. Since no alien species had ever been discovered, it is a mostly thankless and mind-numbing assignment. After a chance encounter with pirates however, he is forced to perform an unguided emergency jump. As he exits the jump with his ship barely intact, he crashes onto a world teeming with extraterrestrial life. Through his journey he must thread a fine line between his own exploration and the cultural contamination of a newly-discovered civilization.-Goodreads