Where All Things End: Part

By DAVID HILL

Bellatrix looks nothing like the first skinny, pointed, rocket-blasting spacecraft. It's a spiderweb of titanium, beryllium and other metals. A spiderweb stronger than diamond and bigger than some moons, flitting across space and revolving slowly to make its own gravity.

When it left overcrowded Earth 400 years ago, Bellatrix was just two sectors. The others have been built since then. They hold factories, home blocks, bio-light farms. They use ideas from the other great Star-Reachers that Earth, Mars and the Moon Colonies have sent out since.

I've never seen Earth, except on vids. I've seen other planets, though. A few might support life in the future; Bellatrix went into orbit round them, mapped them, then moved on. I sometimes wish I lived on Sagittarius, the Star-Reacher heading towards the centre of the Milky Way. It picked up strangely regular radio waves from a nebula three years ago, and it's now speeding in that direction.

Publisher: Puffin

Price: $16.95

Age group: 8-14 years


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