A Princess of the Aerie by John Barnes

temper and said, “I have a copy of the message. On my purse. Security stamped and everything.
     Let me send it over and you look at it. This is the last message I ever got from you, till now.”
    “Send it,” the Princess snapped.
    “Do it,” Jak murmured to his purse, which said, “Sending last message from Princess Shyf over current com link, fully secured
     version.”
    Then the screen froze again, this time with an image of Her Utmost Fury glaring out from it. The door remained locked. Dujuv’s
     left hand had stopped signaling
weird-bad
and was now just signaling,
Weird … weird …weird … ,
more tic than communication. An hour went by. Jak wished that he had stopped off at a restroom earlier.
    Jordesta Mattanga returned to the screen and said, “I am commanded to communicate apologies from Princess Shyf for the tone
     of her remarks. The message copy is clearly authentic in that its internal evidence shows it was received by you when and
     where you say it was. It is, however, an extremely good fake. This obviously raises grave questions about the Princess’s personal
     security. We would therefore like to invite you to come and stay at the Royal Palace for at least a brief period, to talk
     to our security people. We’re negotiating with Hive Intelligence, since you were nominally working for them, to see if they
     will cover the cost, one way or another, of getting you back home in a timely way.” Then she allowed herself something that
     seemed almost like a smile. “On the purely personal level, thank you for your patience in dealing with this mess. It was not
     of either of our making, to be sure, but apparently it will take both your efforts and ours to clean it up.”
    There was a clank and thud as the booth door unlocked.
    “Now, if you will just stay somewhere in Station Eight, Kawib Presgano, of the Royal Palace Guards, will be coming up to the
     gripliner station to escort you here.”
    “Thank you very much,” Myx said. “Please extend our thanks to the Princess for her courtesy.”
    After a necessary rush to the restrooms, they regrouped on the main floor of the gripliner station. The view was inverted
     from what they were used to. On the Hive, with a black hole at its center, gravity is
inward,
constant, and increases as you approach the center; on the Aerie, whose “gravity” is the centripetal force of its complicated,
     constantly-adjusted precession, gravity is outward, varying, and decreases as you approach the center. Thus on the Hive a
     gripliner out to the Ring comes and goes through the great domes in the ceiling, and the destination is “up.” Here, gripliners
     rose through the floor, and in the low grav, the three toves hopped and bounced across transparent sections. Below them, the
     nearest habitat spread a vast green, blue, and white blur of clouds, lakes, parks, and shining cities across the starry sky
     beneath their feet.
    Myx checked her purse. “That’s Hiawatha, eighteen million people, lots of lakes and canals, main businesses aqua-culture and
     truck farming.”
    As they watched, Hiawatha dimmed to darkness, and Jak pulled the earpiece connection from his purse and asked it to give him
     a quick review of the numbers about the Aerie. On the average (no two rotations were quite alike—only constant precessing
     under power kept gravity close to constant), the Aerie turned over in about three and a half hours, too short a natural day
     for comfort, especially with about a quarter-hour eclipse every noon. Hence the transparent top of each habitat could be opaqued
     at will, the undersurface of each habitat was one vast light collector/projector, and fibers carried incoming sunlight from
     the backs of habitats, where it fell uselessly, to shine from the backs of other habitats, from which it shone onto land otherwise
     dark; operating the Aerie required four thousand quarkjet engines (
Up Yours
had four) scattered around the habitat edges, thirteen trillion