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To all of those who expressed interest and support for Baen's Bar in recent weeks, we are happy to announce it is back on-line, though with some changes. Baen is handing the Bar over to its users, and will henceforth be run by SFF Forums, LLC, and may be found at https://www.baensbar.net. Returning users will be able to use the Bar as usual, but new members will have to make a purchase at baen.com before they can log in. (Note: New users will not have to buy a book; there is a Bar tipjar option so they may contribute to the maintenance of the forum).

—Toni Weisskopf for SFF Forums

This story is set within the universe of upcoming SF novel The Godel Operation. James L. Cambias is a writer and game designer, and the cofounder of Zygote Games. He has been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the 2001 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Adya Elso sat in a comfortable chair and turned mauve with excitement as the ship soared through Saturn's atmosphere. Pelagia, the ship, refused to follow a straight vector approach, preferring to bank and swoop through the clouds as if she was dodging imaginary missile barrages.

Adya's comfy chair was in Pelagia's "control room"—which had all-around viewscreens so that Adya seemed to be alone among the ammonia clouds. There were no actual controls: the name was purely traditional. Pelagia's augmented puzzle brain did all the flying from an armored support tank, and wanted no interference.

"There it is," said Pelagia. "I knew it was around here somewhere." Ahead, between two columns of cloud a thousand miles high, Adya could just make out a tiny pink bubble: the aerostat city Paoshi, one of thousands floating in Saturn's atmosphere.

The little bubble seemed just a short distance away in the clear hydrogen atmosphere, but even at the speed of sound Pelagia needed the better part of an hour to reach it. Adya struggled to comprehend the scale of the cloud mountains around them. Her homeworld Miranda was five hundred kilometers across—and some of the storm cells in Saturn's atmosphere were twice as big. Clouds as big as moons: the thought made Adya's skin shift from mauve to tangerine.

"How much time must we waste here?" asked Vasi, entering the control room. Vasi was a human-shaped mech who worked for Adya's family. On this trip it served as a combination tutor, bodyguard, trainer, and financial manager—but its primary role was spy for Adya's parents. As members of Miranda's oligarch class, the Elso family did not allow their daughter to roam the Solar System unescorted and unwatched.

Jim Beall (BS-Math, MBA, PE) has been a nuclear engineer for over forty years, a war gamer for over fifty, and an avid reader of science fiction for even longer. His experience in nuclear engineering and power systems began as a naval officer. Experience after the USN includes design, construction, inspection, enforcement, and assessment with a nuclear utility, an architect engineering firm, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).

Stars recycle and so must we if we are to travel between them.

Stars have practiced recycling from near the beginning

The ordinary matter of the early universe was mostly hydrogen with some helium. Population III stars formed out of that primordial mix (with trace amounts of lithium and beryllium) and fused more hydrogen into helium. Those stars had comparatively short lifespans ending in supernovas (or other stellar events such as becoming black holes) and spreading heavier elements into space where they—along with hydrogen—became part of Population II stars.

Contest Jointly Sponsored by Baen Books and The National Space Society Honors Positive Fictional Takes on Space Exploration