The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter

most of that time he would simply cruise, unpowered.
    And asleep.
    â€œMakemake, Srinagar . This is Falcon. I’m signing off—I expect to wake in about six hundred hours. Tell Doctor Dhoni her patient is taking excellent care of himself.”
    Falcon cast one final glance back at Makemake, backlit by the sun. It occurred to him that all the worlds on which people had ever walked now lay in his line of sight, snug in their warm and cosy orbits; for an instant he felt the ancient and familiar unease of travellers across the ages, as their courses took them into the unknown. But the moment passed, and Falcon readied himself for sleep. He dreamed briefly of ballooning over the sunlit Himalayas with Geoff Webster and Hope Dhoni—with an irritated simp in the rigging, threatening to sabotage the heater . . .
    And then there were no dreams at all.

13
    Twenty-five days of oblivion followed. Then Srinagar ’s automatic systems roused its pilot.
    Once he’d ensured he was fully functional himself, Falcon checked the status of Srinagar . The little craft had weathered its crossing well.
    Then he checked his position. Just as planned his destination lay only a few hours of flight ahead, allowing for a final deceleration phase. He flipped the ship around to point its tail at his target, activated the fusor and began to whittle down his speed further.
    Other than the confirmation provided by his own navigational systems, there was nothing to suggest that Falcon had now travelled far across the Kuiper Belt. Nothing obvious lay ahead of him, save for blackness and a scattering of stars. The same was true in all directions except when he looked back towards the sun, now even smaller than when he had viewed it from Makemake, its light twice as feeble again. Although the Kuiper Belt was a vast swarm of icy bodies, the distances between them was still immense enough that each seemed to float in perfect isolation.
    Only one Kuiper Belt Object was of immediate concern to him, however, and with his cameras at maximum range, he could already pick out some details of it. The KBO was a misshapen lump of dirty ice, considerablysmaller than Makemake but of fundamentally the same composition and origin. It was a comet—or rather, what would become a comet, if a gravitational encounter with another body ever sent it falling towards the sun. Chances were, however, that this particular lump would remain in the Kuiper Belt until the sun itself reached the end of its lifetime.
    But this KBO had been disturbed. Now, jutting out from the surface of the ice lump, and extending far into space, he saw a line as thin and straight as a laser beam.
    Falcon concentrated his sensors on this artificial structure, tracking along its length. One end of it was firmly anchored to the KBO. The other end—four thousand kilometres away—consisted of open latticework that flared out like the mouth of a trumpet. Along most of its length the structure was only fifty metres across, a latticework tube assembled from incredibly thin but rigid spars.
    The KBO was turning slowly in space, completing, he knew, one rotation every eight hours. The structure—which Falcon knew was called a “flinger”—swept around like the hand of a clock. Ordinarily, that eight-hour rotation would have been much too slow to be obvious to the eye, even with the benefit of Srinagar ’s sensors. But at the extremity of the flinger, the motion was quite perceptible.
    The purpose of this device was to hurl comet ice into the inner solar system. Ice was water: the most precious commodity in the universe.
    Madri Kedar had been able to brief him about the accident that had seemed to trigger Adam’s silence, but only in general terms. What was known was that something had gone badly wrong with the flinger itself, as he could now see for himself. Although the basic shape of the trumpet was still intact, Falcon could see where the latticework had