Vigilant

Vigilant is a science fiction novel by the Canadian writer James Alan Gardner, published in 1999 under the Eos imprint of HarperCollins. It is the third book in the League of Peoples sequence, after Commitment Hour, and it takes place on a colony world rather than among the elder species that govern the setting.

By the mid twenty-fifth century humanity belongs to a pan-galactic League of Peoples whose rule is simple and absolute: any sentient being who does not sufficiently respect life loses the right to travel between the stars. Member species enjoy terraforming, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and practical interstellar flight, and Demoth is one of the worlds where humans and the flying squirrel-like Oolom live side by side.

Faye Smallwood was an adolescent when a plague nearly wiped out the Oolom and she worked in her father's hospital tending the dying, an experience that left her with the survivor's guilt that eventually drives her, at forty, to join the Vigil, the planet's order of ombudsmen. The Vigil links its members to the datasphere that manages Demoth, and through that connection Faye receives a vision of peace and healing which the authorities would rather not have reported. Murderous androids and a cache of biological weapons lie behind it.