hotel.
As their angle of approach changed and the sails moved and shifted in the sunlight, the tiny dot of the habitat, like a bright star, moved in and out of sails and shadows, now visible, now concealed. The viewports were filled from edge to edge with sails; the sky was nothing but the great spread of monosil; and yet the habitat itself remained a little dot.
Presently the little ferry began to bounce and bob, brief accelerations of no more than ten seconds each, as it made its arrival approach. Now the Spirit of Singing Port’s habitat was a tiny dark circle, with a distinct area, in the center of the vast brilliant expanse of her sails; they were coming in from the sun side, as ferries always did. The automated systems gradually reduced their relative velocity until they shot across the path of the oncoming sunclipper, about sixty kilometers sunward of the habitat, moving at a few kilometers per second. An instant before they aligned with the sunclipper’s loop, it caught the sun in one view camera, and Jak saw the great ribbon, just like the one on the Hive to the naked eye, but if the two had ever been able to be seen together, you’d have known at once that the one on the ship was about a third the size of the one on the Hive.
The linducer grapple closed on the track in a camera closeup. Everyone’s life, at that instant, depended on the machines successfully managing speeds measured in kilometers per second, at distances measured in millimeters. Jak toktru wished he had been nicer to his purse.
The grapple did what it was supposed to. They were slammed by over two g of weight as the linducer grapple pulled against the loop, which carried them around in a great arc, bringing their velocity to zero relative to the ship as they glided soundlessly into the receiving dock. “Everyone on board will deboard now,” the voice of the ferry said. “Relaunch is in nine minutes four seconds, repeat nine minutes four seconds, from now. Everyone off now.” Because so many people had napped through most of the trip, it flashed the lights and made a variety of annoying noises.
Jak knew that his meager bags were supposed to be waiting for him in his compartment on board, and he hadn’t taken anything out of his pockets or his jumpie, so he just slung his jumpie on and swam forward to the hatch, which led to a flextunnel, and from there into the ship’s receiving bay, a big airlock where a DNA reader took a small skin scraping to confirm that he was the person who owned the ticket. With eight terminals and fewer than twenty passengers, the process took less than ten minutes.
Now there was just the matter of seventy-eight days to fill. The two greatest concentrations of human population in the solar system, the Hive and the Aerie, are in the Earth’s orbit, at the stable L4 and L5
Lagrange libration pointsthe places where the balance of gravitational force between the Earth and the sun on any object is such that if it drifts out of position, it will be pulled back into ithence the cheapest place to be located, since fuel need not be expended for station-keeping. The L4 and L5 points form equilateral triangles with the planet and sun, so that L4, where the Aerie is, is 149 million kilometersor just about two monthsahead of the Earth in orbit, and L5, where the Hive is, is the same distance behind.
Though this saves energy and therefore money for the great majority of the human race that just wants to stay where they are, it complicates matters a great deal for the few travelers; there are few cheap or easy trajectories for going between L4, L5, and Earth. The problem would be much worse if it were not for Mercury; almost always, the cheapest way involved making a flyby of one of the libration points, using the solar sails to drop down into a low fast orbit, intercepting Mercury, then using a gravity assist, and the extra force light sails get close to the sun, to send the ship upward on a close pass by
As their angle of approach changed and the sails moved and shifted in the sunlight, the tiny dot of the habitat, like a bright star, moved in and out of sails and shadows, now visible, now concealed. The viewports were filled from edge to edge with sails; the sky was nothing but the great spread of monosil; and yet the habitat itself remained a little dot.
Presently the little ferry began to bounce and bob, brief accelerations of no more than ten seconds each, as it made its arrival approach. Now the Spirit of Singing Port’s habitat was a tiny dark circle, with a distinct area, in the center of the vast brilliant expanse of her sails; they were coming in from the sun side, as ferries always did. The automated systems gradually reduced their relative velocity until they shot across the path of the oncoming sunclipper, about sixty kilometers sunward of the habitat, moving at a few kilometers per second. An instant before they aligned with the sunclipper’s loop, it caught the sun in one view camera, and Jak saw the great ribbon, just like the one on the Hive to the naked eye, but if the two had ever been able to be seen together, you’d have known at once that the one on the ship was about a third the size of the one on the Hive.
The linducer grapple closed on the track in a camera closeup. Everyone’s life, at that instant, depended on the machines successfully managing speeds measured in kilometers per second, at distances measured in millimeters. Jak toktru wished he had been nicer to his purse.
The grapple did what it was supposed to. They were slammed by over two g of weight as the linducer grapple pulled against the loop, which carried them around in a great arc, bringing their velocity to zero relative to the ship as they glided soundlessly into the receiving dock. “Everyone on board will deboard now,” the voice of the ferry said. “Relaunch is in nine minutes four seconds, repeat nine minutes four seconds, from now. Everyone off now.” Because so many people had napped through most of the trip, it flashed the lights and made a variety of annoying noises.
Jak knew that his meager bags were supposed to be waiting for him in his compartment on board, and he hadn’t taken anything out of his pockets or his jumpie, so he just slung his jumpie on and swam forward to the hatch, which led to a flextunnel, and from there into the ship’s receiving bay, a big airlock where a DNA reader took a small skin scraping to confirm that he was the person who owned the ticket. With eight terminals and fewer than twenty passengers, the process took less than ten minutes.
Now there was just the matter of seventy-eight days to fill. The two greatest concentrations of human population in the solar system, the Hive and the Aerie, are in the Earth’s orbit, at the stable L4 and L5
Lagrange libration pointsthe places where the balance of gravitational force between the Earth and the sun on any object is such that if it drifts out of position, it will be pulled back into ithence the cheapest place to be located, since fuel need not be expended for station-keeping. The L4 and L5 points form equilateral triangles with the planet and sun, so that L4, where the Aerie is, is 149 million kilometersor just about two monthsahead of the Earth in orbit, and L5, where the Hive is, is the same distance behind.
Though this saves energy and therefore money for the great majority of the human race that just wants to stay where they are, it complicates matters a great deal for the few travelers; there are few cheap or easy trajectories for going between L4, L5, and Earth. The problem would be much worse if it were not for Mercury; almost always, the cheapest way involved making a flyby of one of the libration points, using the solar sails to drop down into a low fast orbit, intercepting Mercury, then using a gravity assist, and the extra force light sails get close to the sun, to send the ship upward on a close pass by
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