Bad Moon Rising

Alistair Young

Feb 7, 2016 — 1 min read

(Sorry for the low activity levels, folks. It’s taking me longer than I’d like to shake off this miserable respiratory bug, and I can’t claim to be doing very much at all recently. But here, have a snippet inspired by longer-work-plotting activity.)

“She started out life as Slow Dancer, superheavy tug out of the Limerí cageworks. She didn’t have the aft superstructure at that point – just the forward grapple array, since the Consortium commissioned her to do orbital adjustments on the inner moons before the elevator could go up, sync them up with timed cable swings to make sure they’d never intersect it.

“She didn’t become Moonseeker until after the Revolt started, and the nuke got blown in one of the elevator cars. The bottom three-quarters fell down and mostly burned up, but the loss of tension sent the top quarter and Avétal with it out of its new orbit on a slow road to nowhere. Then the countermass rep paid Limerí thirty-points-over to yank the drives out of everything under construction, weld ’em onto their tug, and go chase it down.

“…well, obviously we had to get it back. You don’t let anyone blow up your moon and just install a replacement. What would people think?”

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