The Echo

The Ishiguro was lost, and human spaceflight lost a generation with it. Twenty-three years later, the Hyvonen twins have given their whole careers to getting it right. Tomas directs the mission from the ground, and Mira flies it. Together they have planned for every failure that sank the first attempt.

What the crew reaches is a region of dark that instruments cannot read. It does not act like an empty patch of space. The crew goes out to it, and the people who return are altered, or something else has come back wearing them.

The narrator is a scientist, and his certainty about his own record is the least dependable thing on board. That makes every report he gives worth questioning.

This is the second book of the Anomaly Quartet. It is science fiction with a horror turn: deep space starts out as a matter of procedure and checklists, then slides by degrees into dread. The tone stays controlled throughout. The open question is whether the twins' preparation counts for anything against a dark that cannot be measured.