The Echo

The loss of the Ishiguro set human spaceflight back a generation. Twenty-three years on, the Hyvonen twins have spent their entire careers on the problem: Tomas runs the mission from the ground, Mira flies it, and between them they have accounted for everything that could have gone wrong the first time.

What they find is a region of dark that instruments cannot read and that does not behave like absence. The crew go out to it. The crew come back changed, or something comes back in their place.

The second book of the Anomaly Quartet, narrated by a scientist whose confidence in his own record is the least reliable thing aboard. Smythe writes deep space as a paperwork problem gradually becoming a horror novel, and the discipline never slips.