The Duke of Uranium by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes [Barnes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780446610810
Google: M5VjW5vCD3wC
Amazon: B00GH2G7UW
Barnesnoble: B00GH2G7UW
Goodreads: 1416898
Publisher: Aspect
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

7

On the Bad Side of Entropy

THE HOURS WENT BY in a blur; watching the screens was like sparring, dancing, or playing some of the more intense viv games—you couldn’t afford an instant to speck about what you had just done or what might be coming next, all of your concentration had to be on doing the right thing in the present. Jak kept his focus, aiming for that singing-on state familiar from the Disciplines, and kept working. When he had his next relief, the loop had grown from about ten kilometers’ diameter to almost thirty, and was becoming steadily better behaved.

The line of people taking relief breaks was longer now, as more people had been brought up from cargo packing, which was mostly complete. That meant everyone got a perhaps-five-minutes-longer break. The hold was now jammed to all surfaces with packed containers, and the outside of the ship was beginning to bristle with containers tied to longshore capsules, waiting to slide up the tracks onto the loop when the time came. Probably a third of the ship’s crew was working outside at the moment, lining up the containers for loop launch and keeping the rigging from fouling.

People taking a break could look directly out through a big viewport at the planet Mercury itself. They were overtaking Mercury in its orbit, moving six km per second faster than the planet itself, only about 25,000 kilometers now from their closest approach, so Mercury loomed into the space beside the outer sail, fifteen times as big as the moon from the Earth and far brighter. The straight lines of the great ore roads were visible on the daylight side; on the night side they continued as strings of lights cutting across a curve blacker than the illuminated dust around it, like a photograph cut and pasted to its own negative.

The immense Caloris Basin, one of the larger impact craters in the solar system, was about two-thirds in daylight; the third that was in dark was widely scattered with bright lights, for the processes that had shaped Caloris had provided vast, rich deposits of many kinds of ores close to the surface, and there were mines everywhere. Within the dark part of the Caloris Basin, a little sprawl of bright dots, looking as if some giant had glued the Pleiades down on the face of the planet, marked Chaudville, and north and to its left Bigpile was a cross-shaped patch of bright lights; those and the roads were the only man-made features that Jak could definitely identify.

A soft, melodic ringing from the public address system announced that it was important to listen to the next message. Everyone in line, and at every station, was silent at once. “Mercury ground control indicates that we have a substorm in our path,” the voice of the captain said. “No possibility of a course correction unless we abort. Storm is rated as slight-to-moderate in risk. I’m going to ask all personnel to come inside within ten—”

A strange, undeniable

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