Chapter Three: Annulus and Henry
Ranglen stepped from the transport shuttle and saw the arc of Annulus in the sky. An old wonder—and an old anger—filled him then. Annulus was his world. But it had been taken away.
Shaped like the outer edge of a shallow dish, the ring-shaped surface of the habitat rose 15 degrees from its inner rim, whose diameter was 260 kilometers with the outer rim at 380, producing an area on the upper surface almost that of Wyoming back on Earth. It was composed of a circle of accelero-gravity plates that interlocked and produced attraction fields. An alien blueprint—discovered by Ranglen—said to find a newly created asteroid, to follow instructions and let the resulting nanotechnology transform the moon into this ring of plates with a sculpted surface.
The annular
