The Fleet That Came Back

Twenty-seven years ago, a fleet of twenty-seven ships vanished on the outbound leg. Last month, every one of them came home.Nobody aboard has aged a day. And every single person on those ships can prove exactly who they are.That is the problem.Ellis Rourke has spent twelve years at the Identity Bureau learning to distrust a subject who agrees with the record too easily. A properly run verification takes ninety minutes, because eighty of them are spent arguing with a discrepancy. On his first full day aboard the returned Vantage Expedition he clears forty people in six hours. Claim matches record on the first pass. There is no gap to close.Four thousand and eleven people, and not one of them is lying.Rourke did not come to catch an impostor. He came to find out why a fleet came back correct.What he finds is a bulkhead in a stripped messhall, dished like a stone step worn hollow by four hundred years of feet. Scored, ground back, and scored again, by somebody who needed a record that could not be quietly edited. Tally marks cut in thirty-nine columns. A hand-ruled casualty list filed against each one.And at the head of thirty-eight of those lists, written out by a stranger who could not possibly have known he would ever be aboard, his own name.The thirty-ninth list is ruled and headed. The cause column is empty.Elsewhere in the fleet, a navigator who does not make counting errors is photographing a locker she has no authority to open. A surgeon is finding measurements in bone that no living body should be able to produce, and writing them down in the same steady hand she uses for everything else. And a man who has held the same appointment for twenty-seven years is waiting for one of them to ask him the right question. He decided a long time ago what he would say when they did.One hundred and nine people are dead. Every one of them had touched a record.The fleet is holding station under a navigational hazard finding. Ninety days on the clock, and the only thing the clock buys them is the one thing they cannot spend.The Fleet That Came Back is a science fiction mystery for readers who want their impossibilities stated plainly and their clues made of metal, paper and bone. No hand-waving. No convenient technology. No rescue arriving from off the page. Every answer is a physical object that somebody left behind on purpose, at a cost, hoping a stranger would be careful enough to find it.Somebody has been doing this for a very long time.They have gotten better at it.