Alastiar Reynolds

The Inquisitor’s private aircraft could have made extremely short shrift of the journey to Solnhofen, but she decided to make the final leg of the trip by surface transport, having the plane drop her off at the nearest reasonably sized community to her destination.

The place was called Audubon, a sprawl of depots, shacks and domes pierced by slev rails, cargo pipelines and highways. From the perimeter, the fine-filigreed fingers of dirigible docking masts poked into the slate-grey northern sky. But there were no airships moored today and no sign that any had come in lately.

The plane had dropped her off on a patch of concreted ground between two depots. The concrete was scabbed and rutted. She walked across it swiftly, her booted feet scuffing the bristlelike tufts of Resurgam-tolerant grass that ripped through the concrete here and there. With some trepidation she watched the plane arc back towards Cuvier, ready to serve some other government official until she requested that it take her back home.