Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion

19

By the tenth day of the chase, his own interminable ride through this monstrous Frame, Brad Tenant was getting sick of it. With only Lieutenant Planter for company. Waiting for this great wheel to deliver him somewhere.

You’d think a generation-starship passenger would be used to monotonous travel. But the Lightbird had been a world in itself, if small, mobile. A place where you had a job. This was like a mobile prison, not a world. Despite the obvious distraction facilities, the virtual theatres, the gymnasiums – when you could access them.

They weren’t alone, of course. He and Lieutenant Planter. There were other passengers around, and at first Brad was intrigued by glimpses he got of bona fide civilian citizens of this strange solar system, as opposed to the command elite of the Mask.

But he soon learned that a healthy proportion of the passengers on this transport weren’t passengers at all, but residents.

Brad knew that people still lived on the planets – even a few on Earth – under the light and warmth of the lumes. But there was plenty of room to live aboard the Frame, and he started to wonder how many people did just that – spend their whole lives on the Frame, in the dull comfort of the carriages, a journey that never ended anywhere.

But then this Frame was a big construction, bigger than his imagination seemed able to cope with. It had the surface area of a thousand Earths, and now united and hosted a population that was perhaps a thousand times a once-crowded Earth’s maximum numbers. When he thought about that, about the sheer scale of the operation needed to keep all those people alive – let alone the mundane mission of taking bona fide network travellers to the right destinations – Brad’s head spun.

It was a marvel. And he was already sick of it all.

Sick of the very obvious dimming of the interior cabin lights, the so-carefully adjusted opacity of the windows over a twenty-four-hour cycle – clearly based on the turning of old Earth itself, a day-night cycle humans had evidently stuck to wherever they had gone.

Sick of having to absorb the fact that he and Lieutenant Jeo Planter had no control over their mandated pursuit. They were not going to have the slightest chance of getting hold of their prey, not until Rab and Muree alighted somewhere – because they were, evidently, in a train somewhere ahead of their pursuers, in this great Frame.

Some chase this was.

Even when they got a report that the fugitives had been spotted changing trains at a radial junction – they seemed to be heading for Mars – all Brad and Planter could do was to patiently wait until the Frame delivered them through the same journey of curves and lines in space. Trains on single lines didn’t overtake. In this chase, the pursuers had no control over the pursued.

And that was despite the monumental effort it had seemed to take to get this extraordinary mode of transport in operation in the first place.

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