The Duke Of Uranium by John Barnes Page A

superconducting material only three centimeters wide and two millimeters thick, spun up to just over one rpm; the loop surface itself moved at about 40,000 km/hour. In principle Jak might have been nervous about that massive ribbon moving at tremendous speed passing within a few meters of him; if a human in a space suit touched it, the human would be converted instantly to bloody rags on a long orbit around the sun, and indeed that had happened a few times in suicides and in careless accidents during outside climbing. But Jak had never heard of any accident involving a ferry, and despite the fact that it was enclosing a superconducting ribbon moving at rocket speeds, rather than an ordinary powered rail, the linducer grapple, visible on one of the many screens in the cabin, seemed ordinary enough. It fastened around the band soundlessly, and the automated voice said, in a bored tone, “We are grappled and waiting for departure on an optimal window in thirty seconds

twentyfive seconds
    ” and so on down to the words familiar and associated with human spaceflight since before Standard had even been a language—”Five, four, three, two, one, boost!”
    As the linducer powered up, it became increasingly magnetically coupled to the band passing through it, transferring an ever-increasing small fraction of the loop’s momentum to the ferry. The ferry accelerated along the outside of the loop at about four g, traveling more than three hundred kilometers as it whipped halfway round the loop, crushing the passengers into their seats for about two minutes. “Release in five, four, three, two, one, gone,” the mechanical voice said. The linducer grapple opened, the loop fell instantly from camera view, and they were moving in space at five kilometers per second relative to the
     
    Hive, in free fall.
    Free fall lasted a few seconds, and then the engines cut in for about a minute, putting the ferry on trajectory to intercept the sunclipper. The engine cut out and now they would be in free fall for the next twenty hours.
    Jak had seen sunclippers pass the viewports of the Hive many times—the Hive was the busiest port in the solar system, and perhaps three dozen sunclippers passed per year. Since their solar sails were tens of thousands of kilometers across, one could hardly miss them—but they passed at distances of anywhere from a quarter million to a million kilometers, so though their spectacular spread of brightly lit curves, vaults, and bows took up vast parts of the sky for the few hours when they were close by, they had seemed like a comprehensible enough thing, like the pictures of planets from close-in satellites, only a few times bigger than the Earth in the familiar pictures taken from its moon.
    But as they neared the Spirit of Singing Port, Jak found himself swept away in awe. His seatmate had pulled on sleeping shades and plugged in a skull jack and was now off in some dreamworld. Jak could hardly imagine how anyone could voluntarily miss this. Though the sails were big enough to wrap Venus and the Earth with enough left over for most of Mars, they were only microns thick and hung on monosil cables too thin to be visible to the naked eye; look at a sail edgewise and it vanished, but seen flat on, it was far brighter than the face of Earth’s moon.
    Yet among all these great planes and gentle curves of white light, it was almost impossible to pick out the tiny bright dot of the ship itself. Barely a kilometer across, the little sphere at the center of the sunclipper was its whole reason for being, the place where several thousand human souls were born, grew up, had children, and died, where all the working and thinking happened, holding the precious tenth of a cubic kilometer that was all the inside cargo space, plus the tight little complex of chambers, corridors, shops, and workrooms for the permanent crew and the passengers—the space given over to human beings was less than what might be found in a giant