Resurgence by Charles Sheffield

Author:Charles Sheffield [Sheffield, Charles]
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 0-7434-3567-2
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
Published: 2002-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Tally on down.

E.C. Tally was not built to feel surprise; the sensation of novelty, yes. Also a certain feeling of satisfaction, coupled with a heightened need for self-preservation, whenever a truly different experience presented itself.

As it was presenting itself now.

Entry to a Builder transport vortex always offered an element of uncertainty. You might feel that you were there for a split second, a minute, or no time at all. And to E.C., even that split second was a long period of subjective consciousness. He had therefore done the logical thing and placed himself in intermediate stand-by mode a microsecond before his embodied form encountered the swirling darkness at the center of the planetoid.

Now he emerged and returned to normal cycle speed. The absence of acceleration on his body already told him that he was again in free-fall, but that was not enough to tell him where.

He looked about him. That "where" would surely have justified surprise, had he possessed the capacity for it.

He was in space. More than that, he was in orbit. Below him, filling the sky, floated a substantial planet, all grays and muted greens. And this was more than just any old orbit, it was a low orbit. His suited body was racing forward, fast enough that he could see the planetary surface skimming past. His instant mental calculation told him that his orbital period was no more than an hour and a half. The Builder transport vortex had dumped him close to grazing altitude, not far above the limit of the atmosphere. He knew that there must be an atmosphere, because the ground below was hazy in places. Even now he was passing over a clouded region.

E.C. looked in the opposite direction, above his head. Another great world hung there, almost as big in apparent size as the one that he orbited but much farther away. He could see banded patterns of green, white, and orange around its middle. The superb eyes of his embodiment detected a slight broadening at the planet's middle. The other world was in rapid rotation, and from its appearance it was almost certainly a gas-giant.

One hemisphere of that great world was in shadow. E.C. looked to his left, seeking the source of illumination for both that planet and the one he was close to. There it was, a shrunken but fiercely brilliant disk of greenish-yellow. His external sensors and internal geometric algorithms combined to tell him a few things almost instantly. That sun was too distant, with its tiny disk, to provide life-giving warmth to any planet. Yet the one around which he moved was clearly a living world, with the telltale evidence of green photosynthesis. The banded planet, farther off, was not merely warm. It was hot. He detected emitted radiation in the thermal infrared, consistent with a temperature close to eight hundred degrees. Therefore, although the sun formed the primary source of light for the whole system, the heat that warmed the world below came from the gas-giant's thermal radiation.

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