365 Days of Drabbles: Day Eighty-Eight & Eighty-Nine

[jeriendhal]

For rix_scaedu: "The far side of the moon"

* * *

"So why are we floating?" Nef wondered, after the surviving morphs had rebooted to their factory defaults and freed them. It had been close to seven hours now and no sign of rescue appearing.

"We must be free of the Ring," Tim, the sariman guessed.

"The hypertrain tube was imbedded in the ring. How could we be free of it?" Nef frowned. "Unless a really big chunk got knocked off."

"Which should never have happened." He went on, "It couldn't have been the result of a collision."

Nef floated near a small panel marked "Inspection". Opening it revealed a thick window about ten centimeters square. "Hey," she said slowly. "How fast do you think we were going when the deceleration cut off?"

"It was only for a few seconds. We were probably still going close to fifty kay when we flew free," Tim said.

"Yeah, that's about right I guess." She pulled back and motioned him towards the window. "Check it out."

Tim peered through the window, his mouth forming a silent Oh, shit as he saw the same thing she had.

The backside of the Moon, haloed by the Sun, with the Earth and its Ring rising behind it.

Comments

[rix_scaedu]

Excuse me, Groupmind, it's not possible for you to confuse hypertrain plans with interplanetary capsule and launch system plans, is it?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Generally no. I'm quite sure what happened but I'm pretty sure it's not the Groupmind's fault.

[allah-sulu.livejournal.com]

If you accept that the Ringworld is, mathematically, simply a suspension bridge with no end points, then can you not postulate that hypertrain rails are simply a launch system without endpoints?

The problem comes when you suddenly get endpoints that aren't supposed to be there...

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Exactamundo!