The Smoke Ring

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THE PLANET BELOW HIM WAS HIDDEN TO ALL OF SHARLS’ senses save for the Neutrino Screen, the Neudar. What had been a gas giant planet a billion years ago was still a world two and a half times the size of the Earth: an egg of rock and nickel-iron hidden in world-sized storms. The storms spread out into a cloudy ring occupying the entirety of Goldblatt’s World’s orbit around the neutron star.

Sharls watched storms spin outward from the gas giant.

Streams of fog and cloud and dust ran slow near the Smoke Ring’s outer rim, faster at the Smoke Ring median, faster yet as they neared Levoy’s Star; and everywhere there were flattened whorls of hurricane. The gravity gradient was savage this near the ancient neutron star. The innermost limits of the Smoke Ring circled Levoy’s Star every two hours.

The Smoke Ring was tinged with green — it had its own billion-year-old ecology — and somewhere in that cloud were men.

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