Seeker

Seeker is a science fiction novel by the American writer Jack McDevitt, published in 2005 by Ace Books. It won the Nebula Award for best novel in 2006 and is the third book of the Alex Benedict series, after A Talent for War and Polaris.

The book is set about ten thousand years in the future, when humanity has spread across countless worlds and the trade in its own history has become a business. Alex Benedict deals in antiques, and he and his partner Chase Kolpath travel to abandoned bases and derelict ships looking for objects worth selling. A woman asks Alex to value a cup marked with symbols so old that nobody can read them, and the trail leads back to the Seeker, one of the earliest faster-than-light colony ships, crewed by a faction that left an oppressive Earth in search of a world of its own. The records show that the ship made several voyages and that the colonists deliberately kept the location of their new home secret, so the cup is both a valuable object and a map with a piece missing.

McDevitt's Alex Benedict novels are quiet puzzles about archaeology and commerce in a future that has largely forgotten its own past.