Refraction Index

Riding the rings is a wild flight from one snowball to another, sometimes scraping frost from the surface of a significant mass as you sling-shot past to gain momentum. There's light in the sky, and gravity to ride, with Saturn tugging at your back to keep you close. It's easy to see what's ahead, if you don't mind getting close to the ice.

It's like some mad refraction index, where the events from the ride are happening a bit behind everything else that happened that day. Add the Three Brains and their Submind designs, and it feels like one of those haunted planetoid stories Grampa J. used to tell me.

Before Submind came along with grav-touch, I hated riding the rings. A trip to Frost River Station would have been the most tedious and frightening vac-suit flight I'd taken in years, even though it's only six hours from Fort Falling's current orbital position.

It wasn't long ago that I preferred thrusters over Submind gravity tricks, but those ion wings give an entire third dimension to vac-suit flight. The wings made me forget about grav-touch until we stopped half way there. Using grav-touch makes it a bit harder to navigate, but it's worth it.

Then when I got there, the Three Brains gave me their gravity sled to try. When I locked into the nav-system, I could feel the ice spinning all around me. The tidal variations showed up as an overlay on the main flight screen--like small hills and wide trails. Everything disappeared but those trails and the downhill slop, and I didn't even know I had been riding Relativity until I got to Fort Falling.

Now Buddy says they are working on a lightning diver for Tesla Cee. I didn't ask what it was, but knowing Tesla, it probably has something to do with those storms on Saturn. I won't be testing that one.