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Crafter likes solitude, Instigator sent mildly. To craft.
Very well. Recorder paused to let their momentary angers dissipate along the
intricate magnetic field lines. Let us go to the Cascade in a goodly spirit.
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Derisive laughter came, but in such long wavelengths that the Being-or
Beings-who sent it could not be resolved, even using the antennas of the
largest of them, Recorder. Vexing, but Recorder had suffered such insouciance
before.
Come, Recorder said. I am hungry.
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4
THE SOLAR RAMPARTS
Shanna GAZED at the pale crescent of Pluto falling behind. Its moon, Charon,
looked outsize, fat. It was, at about half Pluto's diameter. Thirty years ago,
the astronomers said, it was just an iceball. Now it brimmed with a filigree
of warming nitrogen and water, as Pluto did. Pale gas rimmed both crescents.
The source of the energy that drove this lay farther out from Pluto. And
Uziki, the shy physics type, had found out how. After Ferrari's death, the
remaining five had reshuffled duties to cover the tasks. Her original crew
position was in engineering and computers, but she had a Ph.D. in plasmas. She
had found that the energy came in subtly, as electrical currents in a thin
plasma column, pointing straight in toward the sun.
The nuclear drive rumbled hard at her back, rattling the decks.
Proserpina was now riding along that column's outer sheath. The plasma
physicists Earthside thought they could learn a lot about how the whole
mechanism worked by looking at the conditions at its boundaries, for some
reason.
Not her field of expertise, but it made sense-something was confining the
current flow, shaping it neatly toward Pluto. What lay at the other end of
this mechanism nobody had even guessed, so far. Something big and strange, for
sure.
"Picking up a lot of turbulence," Jordin said from the side couch.
"Plasma waves?"
"Yeah, a lot like the stuff coming from the bow shock zone up ahead, I'd say."
"Low frequency? Like
Voyager picked up?" About plasma physics she knew at least enough to ask
questions, but not much more.
"Sure is. Pressure waves, running down this sheath, keeping the currents
nicely aligned."
"A kind of... plasma pipe?"
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"Yep. Energy flow pipe, with Pluto-Charon at the far end of the circuit."
Jordin was intrigued, fingers working in his command gloves. He waved in the
space before him, and pretty colored displays outlined the flow patterns.
Currents arcing in, nose-diving, finally captured by the crusts of the two
worlds. The heating effect flared visibly as a dull orange glow in the icy
crusts. Filigrees ran under the blue ice sheets, melting the thinnest layers
into gossamer vapors. Clouds fumed into the gathering atmospheres.
"Damned odd," was all Shanna could think to say.
"Not an accident, no way," Jordin whispered, eyes intent on the constant play
of pattern.
"What kind of thing can set up magnetic pipes bigger than planets?"
Jordin shrugged. "I dunno. Earthside is still talking about all this as a
whole new kind of biosphere, driven from outside by currents-"
"I'll say!"
"-but natural. The astrophysicists are playing games with the bow shock
region, tying its moving into all this commotion on Pluto."
She snorted. "That just moves the problem back a step. What made the bow shock
boundary move in from 100 AU?"
"You don't get the game." Jordin grinned. "Moving the cause into their
ballpark means they get to make the pitches. Get the hurry-up funding. Make
headlines."
"So young and already so cynical."
"You expect scientists to be loftily above it all?"
She nodded grudgingly. "Okay, now you're starting to sound reasonable. Time to
up my medication."
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It took six days for
Proserpina to overtake
High Flyer.
Its exhaust burned diamond-hard against the black. Escape velocity from Pluto
was 1.1 km/sec, only a tenth of what it took to escape Earth's grasp.
Orbital speeds were low out here, too. Pluto moved at a paltry 500 m/sec, not
a whole lot faster than a jet plane. Out there in the Oort cloud, speeds got
even slower. Shanna had a momentary comic picture of herself running to catch
up with a planet...
And there it was, a bright dot rushing into the far dark.
High Flyer was a huge thing, like a skyscraper with a big bright rocket flare
stuck on one end. Most of it
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bottles of water blocking the hind drive from the living quarters.
In space geometry is the only guide to size, and even geometry needs a
measuring stick. Here the only guide to her eyes was the air lock, the bulky
structure a mere small cap near the top third of the craft.
This was a big nuke. And the first fusion rocket of major scale, built for
both speed and distance. No mere pod sitting atop a big fuel tank, which in
turn fed into the reactor. Of course, the parts had to line up that way, no
matter how ornate the subsections got, because the water in the tank shielded
the crew up front from the reactor and the plasma plume in the magnetic
nozzle.
To even see the plume, High Flyer had a rearview mirror hung amid-ship, out
ten meters to the side. The whole stack was in zero g, except the top thick
disk, which the crew seldom left. Forty meters in diameter, looking like a
dirty angel food cake, it spun lazily around to provide a full Earth g at the
outside. There the walls were meter-thick and filled with water for radiation
shielding. So were the bow walls, shaped into a Chinese hat with forward
viewing sensors. From inside, nobody could eyeball the outside except through
electronic feeds.
The whole ship was well over a hundred meters long. Built like a barrel, it
rode a blue-white flare that stretched back ten kilometers before fraying into
steamy streamers. Plasma fumed and blared along the exhaust length, ions and
electrons finding each other at last and reuniting into atoms, spitting out
the actinic glare. The blue pencil pointed dead astern, so that at the right
angle the whole scene was an exclamation point, with the sun as the dot.
Proserpina hauled up within a kilometer, and the two ships fretted over the
details of making the transfer.
In the end Shanna won out.
Proserpina was cramped and showing wear; and she wanted to see inside the
bigger ship. She, Jordin, and two other crew would come across in the shuttle.
Part of her wanted to play status games and make them come to her, but her own
curiosity won out. She wanted to see what this monster of a ship looked like,
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