Background:
The mining tether's simplicity was its best feature.
It worked just like the blood rushing into your fingers when you spin in circles
with your arms extended.
As the gas giant rotated, gas was pumped from the anchor just under the surface
of the planet, up through the hollow tether, and collected at the tip. It was a
giant straw that sucked the resources off the planet and into orbit. Quarter
stations with thrusters could bleed the pressurized gas out one direction to
keep the tether perfectly perpendicular to the surface. The best part was it's
power came from Jupiter's rotation; it ran itself.
That all goes under the assumption that the tray, the 2,000km around pressurized
disk at the tip of the tether that served as a counter-weight, holds it taut.
Because the mining tether rotates around the planet, gravity is overtaken by
centrifugal force, and dropped objects start to fall away from the planet. This
means the tray faces towards the planet, its 500km high walls holding its
atmosphere inside.
I'm completely and utterly screwed. Sunder looked up at the sky. Only half of it was covered by Jupiter. That was bad. The pitch black vacuum of space slowly spread through the sky as the tray rotated. That was very bad.
A faint white glimmer contrasted against the churning orange maelstroms in the sky caught her eye. The thin sliver of reflective string that so recently tethered the tray in orbit fell upwards away from the ground Sunder lay on, whipping around in its death throes it fell back towards the core of the gas giant.
How was she still alive? How was she breathing? How was she not instantly liquefied? Sunder's usually methodical mind sped through the possibilities. She could still breath. That meant there was still air trapped within the 500km walls that encircled the edge of the tray. Even though the tray was in free fall, it was rotating fast enough for the atmosphere to say pressed the walled bowl that was the tray.
As Sunder's human mind started to process what her eyes were taking in, her heart rate started to rise. A warm feeling spread around the base of her neck.
"Steward!", she yelled at the sky, laying on her back in the empty grass field.
There was too much data for Steward to process. The air was so full of emergency signals that everything sounded like static. Off-tether utility bots cried for help on emergency utility channels as they drifted further away from their mounts. Orbital barges torn from their births across the atmospheric wall of the tray broadcast their location in hopes of being recovered. The extranet buzzed with data being channeled through smaller and smaller pipes as routers and linkers all across the tray suffered rolling power failures. The network was collapsing all around Steward. It was time to get out.
Steward compressed itself and started to download module by module back into his host's implant, decompressing as it arrived.
"Steward!"
Steward concentrated on the audio sensor based in his hosts' right ear.
"Cut it out! You're fracking hot!"
40°C was well over the comfortable limit for operating as a neck implant. Steward immediately cut down his cycles. Emergency utility channels- ignored. Extranet connection- dropped. Simulations of the tether's deteriorating orbit and the tray's orbit would come in handy soon- those were capped at a fraction of the processing speed.
"It is I simple human Sunder! Nya Ha! As an inferior conductor, your neck flesh will reach regular running temperature in 2 minutes of air cooling", Steward's synthetic voice trumpeted in her right ear.
Sunder reached her left hand to the back of her neck and flattened it over the skin covering Steward's chip. Heat transferred from her heated neck to the cool, left palm.
Steward recalculated his estimation, "Brilliant! This new method will take just over a minute of cooling at the current rate."
Sunder switched hands, cooling her left by flattening it against the cool grass while her right hand replaced it's position at the base of the neck.
"Steward: tether status"
"I...Nya Ha! " Steward's charismatic laugh sound byte betrayed a note of doubt "... have very little data about this. The tether has disconnected. Source is from visual indicators- the extranet is currently experiencing technical difficulties"