Read Online A Princess of the Aerie by John Barnes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Barnes
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Yours
was well within the whirling seventeen arms of the constantly precessing Aerie, each arm a string of twenty-five habitats,
each habitat a flat disk two hundred kilometers across, separated from its neighbors above and below by a little less than
five hundred kilometers of space.
As Jak clicked from camera to camera, sometimes cross-monitoring in two different eyepieces so that he could get a wide-angle
stereo view, he saw the many habitats moving slowly in their turning, bending columns, and the little fires on their edges
of quarkjets coming on to adjust position. The cables between them were too thin and dark to see, so the dozens of disks,
each covered with cities and forests and farmland, appeared to be flying in formation against the black of space. Near ones
would sometimes all but fill the sky and even the farthest ones were still almost twice the size of the Moon seen from Earth.
In edge on view, you dakked that the disks were truly wafers, only a few hundred meters thick with roofs not more than a kilometer
above their surfaces. Passing between the cables to go through an arm—a procedure that the guide-recording assured Jak was
safe—gave him a momentary glimpse of a wide landscape below, low-g forests retinated with streams and falls and dotted with
what could only be castles, each on a hill surrounded by a broad lawn. The near side of the battlesphere was only about five
kilometers above the clear roof, perhaps six kilometers from the treetops; from this close, you could see that it was a world,
or at least a big fragment of one, and somehow the term “habitat” felt wrong. Slowing as they were for landing, they were
moving at only about eight thousand kilometers per hour, and it took almost two minutes for the landscape to roll past beneath.
Jak checked with his purse. The place was called Scadia, and it was position ten on branch three, population seven million,
deliberately with only five small cities, principal products handicrafts, gravity averaging 13.7 percent with 30 percent variability,
average temperature twenty-two Celsius, the locally defined principal social groupings are—
He switched back to the general channel. For one awful second he’d almost been exposed to more ethnography. Now that he thought
of it, Scadia was one of Greenworld’s allies in the Confederacy of the Aerie, part of the blocking coalition that kept the
Aerie from merging into a single large polity with the potential to threaten the Hive’s hegemony. So besides the pretty castles
and park-like land between, they were toves. If he had to know what table manners to follow on a visit there, he could always
look it up. Comfortable with being exactly as ignorant as he wanted to be, Jak went back to watching
Up Yours
approach the docking body.
As they approached, the arms were closer together and they saw habitats more full on and less from the edge, so that the habitats
in Jak’s view became an ever greater part of the sky. Finally
Up Yours
coasted on her cold jets a bare few kilometers above the wide metal plain of the docking body, a sphere six hundred kilometers
across, to which all seventeen arms of the Aerie were tied. From the ship’s cameras Jak could see five inward facing habitats,
each as wide as an eighth of the sky and separated from its neighbor by a gap of star-filled sky.
Jak was so lost in the view through his goggles, sitting on the suite’s sofa next to Myx, that he actually jumped from surprise
when
Up Yours
dove through one of the fifty-kilometer-wide docking entrances on the inner sphere, dipping into the dark below the metal
surface, extending her docking pylons to meet the linducer track on the inside of the huge sphere, and at last settling into
maglev contact with the barest of discernible accelerations. “We have turned off the helm,” the captain’s voice said, “and
we are decelerating normally on the linducer track. Relative to the
was well within the whirling seventeen arms of the constantly precessing Aerie, each arm a string of twenty-five habitats,
each habitat a flat disk two hundred kilometers across, separated from its neighbors above and below by a little less than
five hundred kilometers of space.
As Jak clicked from camera to camera, sometimes cross-monitoring in two different eyepieces so that he could get a wide-angle
stereo view, he saw the many habitats moving slowly in their turning, bending columns, and the little fires on their edges
of quarkjets coming on to adjust position. The cables between them were too thin and dark to see, so the dozens of disks,
each covered with cities and forests and farmland, appeared to be flying in formation against the black of space. Near ones
would sometimes all but fill the sky and even the farthest ones were still almost twice the size of the Moon seen from Earth.
In edge on view, you dakked that the disks were truly wafers, only a few hundred meters thick with roofs not more than a kilometer
above their surfaces. Passing between the cables to go through an arm—a procedure that the guide-recording assured Jak was
safe—gave him a momentary glimpse of a wide landscape below, low-g forests retinated with streams and falls and dotted with
what could only be castles, each on a hill surrounded by a broad lawn. The near side of the battlesphere was only about five
kilometers above the clear roof, perhaps six kilometers from the treetops; from this close, you could see that it was a world,
or at least a big fragment of one, and somehow the term “habitat” felt wrong. Slowing as they were for landing, they were
moving at only about eight thousand kilometers per hour, and it took almost two minutes for the landscape to roll past beneath.
Jak checked with his purse. The place was called Scadia, and it was position ten on branch three, population seven million,
deliberately with only five small cities, principal products handicrafts, gravity averaging 13.7 percent with 30 percent variability,
average temperature twenty-two Celsius, the locally defined principal social groupings are—
He switched back to the general channel. For one awful second he’d almost been exposed to more ethnography. Now that he thought
of it, Scadia was one of Greenworld’s allies in the Confederacy of the Aerie, part of the blocking coalition that kept the
Aerie from merging into a single large polity with the potential to threaten the Hive’s hegemony. So besides the pretty castles
and park-like land between, they were toves. If he had to know what table manners to follow on a visit there, he could always
look it up. Comfortable with being exactly as ignorant as he wanted to be, Jak went back to watching
Up Yours
approach the docking body.
As they approached, the arms were closer together and they saw habitats more full on and less from the edge, so that the habitats
in Jak’s view became an ever greater part of the sky. Finally
Up Yours
coasted on her cold jets a bare few kilometers above the wide metal plain of the docking body, a sphere six hundred kilometers
across, to which all seventeen arms of the Aerie were tied. From the ship’s cameras Jak could see five inward facing habitats,
each as wide as an eighth of the sky and separated from its neighbor by a gap of star-filled sky.
Jak was so lost in the view through his goggles, sitting on the suite’s sofa next to Myx, that he actually jumped from surprise
when
Up Yours
dove through one of the fifty-kilometer-wide docking entrances on the inner sphere, dipping into the dark below the metal
surface, extending her docking pylons to meet the linducer track on the inside of the huge sphere, and at last settling into
maglev contact with the barest of discernible accelerations. “We have turned off the helm,” the captain’s voice said, “and
we are decelerating normally on the linducer track. Relative to the
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