“Well, it looks like you are all set to go, Primrose,” the station master said as he popped the record from the computer and handed it to Rams. “Fair winds and good passage, Cap’n.”

Rams checked the ballast tank when he returned to the ship. According to the leveling mark on the wall of Primrose’s berth, she was riding low—just a little too heavy probably from the extra cargo he’d taken on. He switched on the heaters in the ballast tank. That would create enough steam pressure to drive the excess ballast out, lightening the ship. When Primrose’s bull’s-eye was almost up to the mark, he turned the heater off. In a few moments more she was floating level with the station.

“Ready to cast off!” Rams said over the intercom. He listened for the ’master to loose the clamps that held Primrose in the station’s embrace. Four loud bangs resounded through the pressure hull as the clamps released. Rams immediately felt the ship list to starboard as she drifted backwards into the fierce winds of Jupiter.

Primrose heeled as it caught the full force of the wind. Rams braced himself, checked the instruments, and then turned the ship downwind as it emerged from the lee of the station.

The station’s infrared image quickly faded as they exceeded the viewer’s range. A few seconds later the sonar return vanished as well. Only a fuzzy radar image, quickly dissolving into a cloud of electronic noise, told him where the station rode. Even that image would fade once he got more than a kilometer away. After that he’d be sailing blind.

Primrose ran with the wind as he lowered the keel. He pointedly ignored the keelmeter as the diamond mesh ribbon uncoiled from its housing. The thousand-ton weight at the keel’s end started its familiar swinging motion as the keel was unwrapped from its spindle. Primrose rocked in response to the motion. The pendulum’s swing slowed as the ribbon paid out farther and farther into the thick soup of the atmosphere.