For starters, the place was huge. It was roughly disk-shaped, with a rounded top and bottom, the whole thing ten kilometers across and ranging in thickness from a kilometer at the edge to three at the center. I was a little vague on my high-school geometry, but I was pretty sure that gave it at least twice the volume of a typical Quadrail station.

That was impressive enough. Even more so was the fact that a Quadrail station was mostly empty space, whereas Proteus’s living areas were sliced into three-meter-high decks. That gave the place the carrying capacity of a small nation.

But more even than its size was its sheer grandeur. I had assumed that the huge historical panoramas decorating the areas around each of the thirty-three main edge-line docking stations were simple hull paintings. In fact, they were intricate mosaics, built of five-centimeter-thick tiles no doubt designed to be resistant to micro-meteor damage. The running lights that interstellar law required on every spacegoing vessel or station had here been tweaked into a laser light show that as near as I could tell never repeated itself once during the half hour it was visible from my torchferry window.

And if that hadn’t been enough to set it apart from the rest of the galaxy’s space habitats, Proteus wasn’t just orbiting its sun, but was actually holding itself in constant, stationary position relative to the equally stationary Quadrail station by a massive, brute-force application of Shorshic vectored force thrusters. That meant that, instead of tracing out a long orbital path that might put it anywhere from two hours to four weeks away from the Tube, it was always going to be a convenient three-hour flight for new arrivals to the system.

It was, in short, a huge, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing stack of metal and plastic and ceramic.

And as I listened to the murmured oohs and aahs of our fellow passengers I felt my heart sink.