Flare by Roger Zelazny & Thomas T. Thomas

Author:Roger Zelazny & Thomas T. Thomas [Zelazny, Roger & Thomas, Thomas T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781555940041
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1993-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

257.125 km/s

257.189 km/s

257.262 km/s

257.351 km/s

Titan Developments, Inc., Manhattan, GNYC,

March 21, 12:52 p.m. EST

The computer screen in front of Einar Floding clicked off the speed increases with the regularity of a metronome beat. The president of the corporation which held a controlling interest in the Titan Cartel was not at all embarrassed to admit that a communications network valued at half a million after-tax dollars every quarter was dedicated to that little cascade of numbers. One of the cybertechs from the lower floors had once explained the sum to him: rental on a radar dish in lunar orbit, per diems for keeping open a six-relay line-of-sight laser beam from the dish down to New York, and proration on the one-time cost of the microcomputer and custom software that massaged the signal, calculated the speed, and displayed the results on his desk.

Floding kept it there for gloating purposes. It was a constant criticism of that circle of vice presidents who had told him solar sails would be too clumsy to handle, too antiquated to be reliable, too slow to carry their product efficiently.

By God, as soon as this first transfer cycle was completed, Floding was going to scrap the radar dish and have them install him a telescope. Let it keep an eye on the disk-shaped sail of Ouroboros—damned funny name that was; one of the scientist-types had picked it—next time the ship looped out past Saturn. By then the sunjammer would probably be going a good five hundred klicks, maybe even more. The same tech who'd explained the laser link-up had told him that a telescope would pick up the bright reflection off the sail easily, even among the outer planets. So it would show him the money both coming and going.

The secret of running an automated sunjammer from the orbit of Saturn was you never slowed it down. That way, its speed grew continuously, pushed by solar photons and its own inertia on the outbound leg, pulled by gravity and steered by reflected photons on the inbound leg. You ran a perpetual loop, anchored at one end by the mass of Saturn, at the other by the Earth-Moon system. And at each end the Cartel's specially built tugboats rushed out to match velocity with the passing sail, take off its attached cargo pods, and hook on new ones bound for the other end.

Ouroboros' maiden voyage had started thirteen months ago, fresh out of the packing crates at Saturn's own orbital speed of only nine-point-six-four kilometers per second. At that end of the loop, out where it was half-dark most of the day and automated machines did all of the real work, the tugs had given her the only push she'd ever need. They also attached three spherical tanks, each with a hundred-meter radius, each containing four-point-two million cubic meters of methane gas fresh from the Titan cramships, centrifugally refined and packed in its naturally liquid, low-temperature state. That cluster of tankage represented seven and a half billion cubic meters of product in a gaseous state.

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