Part II: Alchera
Chapter 6: The Asteroid
Five months earlier—
Mykol Ranglen embarked on a dangerous and highly illegal personal experiment.
It happened because he was angry.
While traveling alone in his small spaceship he saw in the forward observation port the newly built habitat-in-space called Annulus, rising in a rainbow arc from the hazy debris swirling around a newborn star.
It was almost complete now, its gently sloping dish-rim over 300 kilometers wide and glowing in colorful concentric rings—reddish desert, yellow prairie, an inner rim of green forest and blue lakes. Built from an asteroid by the Airafane nanotechnology that originated with the third Clip, it would soon become an incredible living space for human colonists.
And the sight of it should have thrilled Ranglen,
