Book One of the Starfarers Quartet.
The starship Starfarer is poised for our first voyage to another star system. The Alien Contact Team - physicist Victoria Fraser MacKenzie, geneticist Stephen Thomas Gregory, geographer Satoshi Lono, and alien contact specialist J.D. Sauvage - and the rest of the faculty and staff prepare for humanity's most ambitious exploratory expedition.
But the world has changed. A new regime orders the vessel to be abandoned. It will be turned into an instrument of war.
What do the Starfarers do?
They do what any red-blooded Alien Contact Team would do.
They steal the starship.