Free Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven Page B

station, flinching from burly hot shots who thought they could fly in these narrow confines.
    Her station was Snail Darter. She crawled through the lock and took her assigned seat. Claus Raschid followed her through. The third crewman -- "Where's Forrestier?" she rapped.
    'Tec Oliver Forrestier swung in and took his place. The three were back to back, looking into their wall displays. Oliver asked, "Think they'll launch us this time?"
    Roxanny Gauthier grinned. She liked this: herself and two males in an environment that couldn't possibly rid the air of all pheromones, in conditions too cramped to do anything beyond flirting. Claus and Oliver already found her intimidating. "We'll launch," she said. "Depending on what those ships do, we could see the Ringworld close up. We might even get down to the surface. Gird up thy loins, Legal Entities! We are going in."
     
    The ship jerked, and Louis jerked too, as everything around them shifted. Needle was out of stasis.
    Views to the side showed fearsome coronas above a black horizon of blocked-out sun. Aft was only black: the sun, receding.
    Louis couldn't see what the Hindmost's cabin displays saw. Good. If he could see graphs and false-color representations, he would feel the hull temperature rising. There was that about Pierson's puppeteers: they never ignored danger, never pretended it wasn't there. Never turned their backs on a threat except to kick.
    Ahead, arcs of glowing coronal gas streamed past. The stars were hidden in a ruby glare that might actually be Needle's invisible hull giving off black body radiation.
    The ships of the Fringe War... were not to be seen. The puppeteer had lost their pursuers by aerobraking his ship through the sun.
    They were already nearing the ring of huge rectangles that cast shadows of night across the Ringworld. The Hindmost drifted his ship behind a shadow square, then boosted to some ferocious acceleration and ran for it.
    Louis wondered idly if Tunesmith had turned off the meteor defense. Once before, the meteor defense had fired on Louis. Lying Bastard in stasis had smashed into the Ringworld floor and plowed a furrow across the land. They'd survived without a bruise... but this time Tunesmith had futzed the timing on their stasis field.
    This time the Ringworld's sun-powered superthermal laser didn't fire, or didn't fire quick enough to catch Needle.
    But the Fringe War found them. "We're being followed," Acolyte said.
    The Hindmost sang, "I'll lose them. Don't distract me."
    The Ringworld came up like a vast fly swatter. Needle dove straight toward a long strip of nightbound land. Louis could see the Other Ocean almost below, a vast diamond dotted with clusters of islands, easing off to the side as Needle came down. The Hindmost aimed at lightning-lit cloud laid out like a flattened hourglass in a pattern several times larger than the Earth.
     
    An eyestorm is the visible sign of a puncture in the Ringworld floor.
    It's the Ringworld equivalent of the hurricanes and tornados that form on planets. Air draining through the puncture produces a partial vacuum. Air flowing from spinward slows against its spin velocity; it weighs less; it wants to rise. Air from antispinward speeds up, grows heavier, wants to sink. From overhead the pattern is a sketchy flattened hourglass with a puncture at the throat. From port or starboard the storm takes the appearance of an eye, upper lid and lower lid and a horizontal tornado whorl in the center, and perhaps an eyebrow of high cirrus.
    A Ringworld protector, Tunesmith or Bram before him, would have filled in any large puncture by now. Lost air is hard to replace. The meteor crater at the heart of this storm would be a small one, and old: these storms took generations to form.
    The Hindmost dove toward the whirling throat of the hourglass, slowing hard, with one large and two smaller ships still in his wake. Then Needle plunged into the black whirlwind as if in suicidal frenzy, and out. Out through the