He could just make out the landmass upon which this immense wave would break. The wave steepened, hurtling him forward. He felt the sled’s stabilizers groaning beneath his feet as he sought balance on the flat surface. He surged forward and stood as the sled began to accelerate up the face of the wave. Just as he was about to be sucked beneath the monstrous swell, he activated the sled. He imagined he could feel wind tugging at his e-field.Īrun felt a vibration through the powersled, a vast low frequency murmur, the world-ocean getting ready to kick his ass. It appeared solid, like moving metal, completely blocking the sky. He looked over his shoulder at the rising wall of liquid.

He drifted back towards the swell, slowly at first, then faster. His heart began beating faster as he clambered belly down onto the power sled. The current began to tug at his feet long before he saw the humped swell bowing the horizon upwards, a slight backward drift, accelerating slowly. He wanted to breathe and felt a fleeting instant of lizard-brain panic. His e-field distributed warmth to his body extremities from the tiny pack at the small of his back and maintained his blood oxygenation, but bobbing in the swell, alone in the vast sea, he felt cold and a little dizzy. The skyhook was the only point of reference for scale. The distant shape of a skyhook was traced out by a pearlstring of lights reaching up from the horizon and disappearing into distance haze, blinking in synchronization to suggest upwards motion. The sea undulated slowly in the low gee, about 0.6 Standard.

A host of descriptive words came to mind, but “static” was not among them.

Arun had negotiated the edgewalls of those storms more than once, setting up metahelium deep-mining rigs. Persistent storms pocked her striated surface, appearing deceptively static from thirty kiloklicks out. Athena hung just above the near, flat horizon, her rings a plaited bow spanning the purple sky. Metis was a bright diamond directly overhead. His ears were filled with the murmuring white noise of his own blood flow, intimate and oceanic, pulsing with his heartbeat. He’d blocked all his feeds and chats, public and private, and silenced his alerts. Arun floated in the ammonia swells, one arm around the buoyant powersled, waiting.

Aether vial