To look upon absolute stillness in a universe governed by motion was an unsettling, unnatural ordeal. Even the vacuum of space, for all its emptiness, was alive with the invisible currents of gravity, thermal radiation, and the slow, inexorable drift of dust.
Here, at the edge of pre-war Sector Gate Eighteen, motion simply did not exist.
The Ascendant drifted to a halt three hundred yards from the invisible boundary of the freeze line. From the bridge, the moon-sized citadel of white titanium and gold filigree loomed like an elaborate wedding cake preserved inside a block of crystal. Not a single particle of shed paint, not a single cloud of vented coolant, and not a single micro-asteroid shifted a millimeter in the dark.
