Adrian was tired. Not as tired as he had been sometimes along the way, but tired.
The volcanic activity on the planet beneath the station he stood in hadn't settled down yet. If anything, it was still increasing, in what the specialists were reporting as 'reassuring' waves. Apparently the wider spread to the eruptions meant that they were less violent than they could have been.
Far outside of the Central region, security on the existing gravitational impellers had been increased. Each crew had been assigned from among the most trusted officers that he and Brennant had worked with in the last decade, and they now circled the solar system in a defensive ring. The emptier regions of the sphere of space around their sun held only the automated stations that maintained relatively stationary positions.