The Defensible Route

THERE IS A SAFER ROAD. NOBODY CAN PROVE IT. A settlement has to move before the route closes. The short road is degrading faster than the model says it should. The long road costs time, labour and supplies the evacuation does not have to spare. Sarah Bishop can calculate a preference. She can explain the evidence. She can tell the people loading children, equipment and everything they can carry exactly what would make her wrong. What she cannot do is turn uncertainty into certainty because six hundred people need an answer. As the corridor narrows, every decision exposes another dependency: damaged infrastructure, limited hulls, old assumptions and communities that have learned the difference between a promise and a plan. A route can be calculated. A defensible decision has to survive the people who pay for it. The Defensible Route is Book Three of Closed Sky, continuing the five-novel hard science fiction arc in the Fracture Cosmology.