The Last Manifest

THE LAST LOAD IS NOT JUST CARGO. The clean solution needs two hulls. Sarah Bishop has one. Two wrecked hulls have fused together and are drifting toward the approach that carries water to nine thousand people. The obstruction can be dealt with, but Sarah needs another hull, reliable measurements and enough time to build a solution she can defend. None of those things are becoming easier to find. Across the network, routes are narrowing, old measurements are failing and settlements are being forced to decide what still moves and what stays behind. Engineers are finishing work whose future is no longer guaranteed. Crews are measuring roads that may not remain roads for much longer. And on the ground, a manifest stops being paperwork. It becomes a record of what a community can still move, what it can afford to keep connected, and who will have to live with what is left behind. Sarah has spent years learning that a measurement is never just a number once somebody has to act on it. The Last Manifest is Book Five and the conclusion of Closed Sky, the hard science fiction arc within the Fracture Cosmology.