Charioteer by Ted Rabinowitz (Analog, January-February 2022) is essentially a re-do of Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer, except this one has a woman pilot: she is a prisoner who is racing around the sun trying to win her freedom from the tyrannical “Executive”, and someone has sabotaged her sail-ship.
Most of the story tells of how she engineers her way out of her predicament, and a lot of this is written in that jargon-filled Analog prose that makes your eyes bleed:
Now that power was flowing, the sensor net was active throughout the entire field of sail. It told her that the power spike had done more than blow out the main nodes; it had deactivated the carcerands in the sails. Each carcerand was a molecular cage trapping a second, free-spinning cluster of atoms inside. The inner cluster could be oriented by a magnetic field. Polarized in one direction, it rendered a sail opaque; in another direction, it created the brilliant mirror of a lightsail.
The power spike had fused 90 percent of those inner clusters with their carcerands. She was riding a giant disc of ashes. p. 73
That last sentence isn’t bad, but I’m pretty sure there is a more elegant way to write the paragraph that precedes it.
Ultimately (spoiler) she manages to fix things but discovers she has received a fatal dose of radiation—so she crashes her ship into the station where the politicians are watching the race.
Apart from the bad writing (mostly too much engineering jargon), the political prisoner gimmick doesn’t convince.
* (Mediocre). 3,300 words.