Slow Zone
The slow zone's speed law abruptly contracts from ship-safe velocity to baseball speed, turning its entire human population into victims of inertial violence.
Story so far
The starless transit sphere initially permits intact vessels to move below six hundred meters per second. After violence inside Ring Station, that safety disappears. The station learns that much slower matter can threaten it and imposes a lower motion threshold throughout the region, producing the Slow Zone Catastrophe.
The effect is observed aboard the Thomas Prince as an instantaneous stop severe enough to throw unsecured bodies and tools into forward walls, abolish thrust gravity, break networks, and cripple life support. Crash couches preserve some occupants, but the event fills corridors with dead and dying people. The slow zone has therefore become an environment where even ordinary shipboard motion can be reclassified and arrested by a central intelligence.
Appearance
The black million-kilometer sphere remains visually unchanged, but ships within it have been abruptly halted or seized; their interiors hold drifting impact debris, blood, smoke, and bodies in zero gravity.
Role
The slow zone is the spatial extent of Ring Station's adaptive defense and the closed arena containing the catastrophe's still-unknown full toll.
Relationships
Sources — 3 recorded facts, by chapter
- A million-kilometer starless sphere holds 1,373 evenly spaced gates, a central station, and a field that arrests everything moving faster than 600 meters per second.
- The slow zone receives the three human fleets, captures an overfast Earth marine skiff, and turns the central station into a race for Holden.
- The slow zone's speed law abruptly contracts from ship-safe velocity to baseball speed, turning its entire human population into victims of inertial violence.