He stuck one eye out for a quick look upwards. In the seared after-image he saw three long streams and a lot of dots drifting off to one side. The larger dots had the hexagonal shapes of the 10 kilometer level platforms, but some were the
triangular lift platforms. The tiny dots he didn't want to identify.
He risked another look with a second eye to where Level 20 should have been. The X-ray glare was brighter now. As he pulled the painful eye back in under its eye-flap, he resigned himself to having the image burnt into that eye-ball permanently. The three down-streams were definitely shorter, but he should be able to make it to the surface. It was a good thing he had risked a look, for one of the two streams he was using was bent and ragged toward the top.
He used both down-streams for another methturn, then just before Level 10 switched to the one good stream. Rotating the platform around the good stream so it was out of the way of the ragged tail on the second stream, he continued down to the surface. When the altitude indicator showed he had a meter to go, he slowed down. He sacrificed another eye in a look over the side to see a glaring mountain of rings piled up where Base Level had been. There wasn't much time left, so he dropped quickly down the last few centimeters, hit the pile of rings, and slid down and away from the rest of the incoming stream. The lift platform coasted to the bottom of the pile of rings and stopped.
He was alive! And nothing worse than a couple of seared eyeballs. For a long time he stayed on the platform, his eyes tucked under their eye-flaps. After the crust movement had slowed down a little, he peeked out to find that the atmosphere was still flickering with X-rays, but it wasn't too bad this high up in the East Pole mountains. He made his way across the slippery rings until he had his tread once again on firm crust.
He looked up and found the tiny spots that were the East Pole Space Station and the Topside Platform. Topside, having lost its support from the fountain, had drifted off into its own elliptical orbit. Heavy-Egg was wondering what was happening to the people on Topside now that they were in free fall with no black holes to provide gravity. It must be horrible to go that way. He was glad he was on Egg where he was safe.
A strong aftershock rumbled up from beneath the East Pole mountains. The shock became more concentrated as it reached the peak of the mountain. Traveling with the shock was a sheet of X-ray flame. Growing brighter every meter, the flame roared up the valley and burned Heavy-Egg's eyes off.
* * *
Both Cliff-Web and the chief engineer paused as their treads noticed the change in the everpresent hum in the deck.
"Crustquake," said the chief engineer. "I thought I noticed an increase in the light reflected from the East Pole Space Station a little while ago."
They continued their discussion while the hum slowly varied in pitch as the ring-streams compensated for the motion of the crust below. The variations had almost faded from their attention when the pitch changed again. The note dropped lower and lower and kept dropping. All their eye-stubs came to alert as they felt the platform start to drop out from under them. A staccato of muffled bangs from an overload of pushouts sent them both out the door and across the deck toward the elevator to the machine deck below. Topside Platform wobbled as it lost the upward force that had been holding it in place. The noise from below became louder. Then, through the deck in front of them shot a deadly stream of high-speed metal rings.
"Get everyone to the launch area and on a shuttle!" Cliff-Web shouted. The chief engineer pulled out an emergency communicator from a pouch, placed it on the deck and put his tread over it. His amplified voice blasted its way throughout all three levels.
"Everyone to the launch area. Topside is going into free fall. Repeat. Everyone to the launch area and onto a shuttlecraft."
"All three up-streams are out of control." Cliff-Web looked around as his creation was sliced into pieces by the errant streams.
Treads gripping the rough spots on the deck, they made their way to the launch area. The atmosphere above the deck was already full of tiny flakes of dirt that were coming apart and expanding into tenuous plasma. Three shuttlecraft waited in their launch cradles, and some of them already had a few workers on top of their curved surfaces. Cliff-Web's eye-balls were starting to itch as he moved up the slippery curved ramp to the safety of the shuttlecraft with its black hole gravity field.
"Shall I lift off, Boss?" the shuttlecraft pilot asked. "There's all kinds of junk starting to fall off Topside onto us."
"Not yet," said Cliff-Web. "We're in no danger of falling, and it will be a long time before Topside decomposes into non-degenerate matter. Who's missing?"
"Nearly everyone from the lower decks," the chief engineer replied. "Wait, here comes the elevator!"
Through the deck the distant whine of motors could be
heard. Way off in the distance a crowded elevator rose through the center of the platform. A cursing flood of roustabouts swarmed from the elevator toward the launch deck. Driven by the itching madness in their disintegrating hides and daring only to poke out an occasional eye from under their eye-flaps, they rushed blindly toward the launch deck.
"Stop! Sto ... !" the first one cried as she became aware of the gaping slash that blocked their way. Her tread tried to reverse on the slippery surface of the decomposing deck, but the pressure from behind was too much. Her cry stopped abruptly as she slid into space.
Instead of falling, however, she free-falled across the gap; and her voice returned, louder and cursing, as her mangled tread clung tenaciously to the jagged metal on the other side.
"Jump!" Cliff-Web shouted to the others who were milling nervously on the other side of the chasm. "You will just float over."
The itching grew worse as flakes of skin billowed in a cloud around the stranded crew as they tried to overcome a lifetime of habit and deliberately throw themselves over a precipitous cliff.
"I'll do it if you will," Hard-Way told Shiny-Tread.
"Last one over eats Tiny Shell ploops." Shiny-Tread moved away from the crack, then tucked his eyes under their flaps, smoothly rippled up to speed on the increasingly slippery deck, and launched himself into orbit. Hard-Way followed right behind. She was larger and stronger than he was, and her greater strength gave her a longer leap over the void.
Once he had jumped, Shiny-Tread felt an amazing sense of well-being, as if he were back in his egg. His body contracted into a ball, distorted by the muscular tread that still twitched as it tried fitfully to make contact with something solid. The itching of his hide grew more intense. He pushed out an eye-ball to look. He could see the platform floating by below him, Hard-Way balled up high above him, and the crowded shuttlecraft ahead. He would have passed over the shuttlecraft and out into space, but the gravity of the black hole in the shuttlecraft reached out and pulled him in. He landed heavily on the topside of the chief engineer.
"I'm sorry, Chief," Shiny-Tread mumbled as he clumsily climbed down off his boss's topside onto the curved deck. But no one paid him any attention. Even the chief engineer's eyes
were turned upward as sorrowful sounds murmured through the deck. Shiny-Tread looked up.
"Hard-Way!" Shiny-Tread shouted. "Come back! COME BACK!!"
They watched in silence as Hard-Way sailed high over the launch area and off into the distance. They saw one of her eyes pop out for a look, then her tread start to move futilely in an attempt to return. The cloud of particles floating around Hard-Way increased and cut off their view.
"You will have to jump slower or go around ..." Cliff-Web told the crew.
"We'll have no hide left if we try to go around," said Many-Rings, a new shift supervisor. "We've got to cross." She formed manipulators and grabbed onto three of her crew nearby.
"Hold on, you lumps of flab," she said. "I'm going to play jump loop." She brought out most of her eyes and, concentrating carefully, stretched her body out into a long bridge and grabbed the opposite side. She moved her rear manipulators off her crew and attached them to the edge
of the deck. Then she pulled in her eyes and tried not to think of what she was doing.
"Get across, you Tiny-Shell-brained offspring of a Flow Slow!" her trailing tread roared. The crew gingerly crossed over on the makeshift bridge, pulled their valiant supervisor over to safety and soon were all crowded in the protective gravity of the shuttlecraft. Some of the crew had lost so much hide they were starting to ooze through the muscle tissue underneath.
There was a rumble from below, and the deck lurched as Topside Platform started to break up.
"Raise shuttle," Cliff-Web ordered. "And take us up to the East Pole Space Station. We'll have to take a jumpcraft or catapult-lift down and start helping get things restored back on Egg."
Captain Far-Ranger was discussing her warpfeast plans with the chef on East Pole Space Station when Egg flared up. When the light became too bright to look at, she knew there was trouble and headed for the Command Deck. Once there, she stayed in the background and let the station commander, Admiral Hohmann-Transfer, run things.
"Communications Officer, any transmissions from the surface yet?" Hohmann-Transfer asked.
"None from the surface except a single navigation beacon," Lieutenant Giga-Byte replied. "But two vehicles are sending transmissions. One is the jumpcraft in the abort orbit. The other is a personal flyer at the West Pole. The West Pole Space Station has been unable to make contact with the flyer. They don't have transmitters for the flyer band."
"How is the jumpcraft orbit?" Hohmann-Transfer asked.
"The pilot was able to circularize the orbit. But they are running low on power to operate the gravity generators."
"How much time do they have?"
"Less than a turn," said the Comm Officer.
"If only we had a vehicle that didn't depend on a ground launcher for the energy to get up and down," said the admiral.
"We do," Far-Ranger interrupted. "My interstellar scout ship is designed to operate around neutron stars. It can't land and take off, but I should be able to drop down, match orbits with that jumpcraft, then make it back out to synchronous orbit on my drives."
"That will save at least three of them. Maybe more if we can crowd them in."
"If we empty the food lockers and cargo hold, I can probably carry a whole jumpcraft load," said Far-Ranger. "I'm sure the passengers wouldn't mind a dothturn or two in the freezer."
"First Officer!" roared Hohmann-Transfer. "Get a crew and empty that scout ship! Navigator! Prepare a trajectory and dump it in the scout ship computer!"
"I'll have plenty of time for calculating my trajectory myself while my ship is being off-loaded," Far-Ranger politely reminded her.
"Of course," said Admiral Hohmann-Transfer. "My apologies."
06:58:07.1 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050
A half-turn later Far-Ranger threw her scout ship at the horizon of Egg. Pushing her inertia drive to its limits, she matched orbits with the slowly sinking jumpcraft.
"If I didn't need my last four eyes to watch my instruments," Pilot Light-Streak said over the communications link. "I'd say, 'It's good to see you.' Any ideas on how to transfer the passengers?"
"Your artificial gravity is planar, while my black hole grav-
ity is spherical," Far-Ranger said. "An osculating tangent is the only solution."
Far-Ranger slowly lowered her orbit until her spherical scout ship was above the orbiting jumpcraft. The copilot Slippery-Wing and two of the passengers had removed a section of the magnetic shielding that covered the passenger section of the jumpcraft, and Far-Ranger put her scout ship just above the hole. One by one, the passengers were hoisted, prodded, or pushed up from the flat deck of the jumpcraft to land, upside down, on the curved deck of the scout ship.
"Up you go!" said Admiral Steel-Slicer, who had been tossing his fellow passengers up to Slippery-Wing above. He reached for the next available body and found he had the pilot of the jumpcraft.
"Thank you for your help, Admiral," said Light-Streak. "But you are next."
"But your eyes ..." Steel-Slicer protested.
"I am captain of this jumpcraft," Light-Streak responded, "and I will be the last one off her."
"Of course," said Steel-Slicer. "My apologies. You take the end of the safety line then." Having had plenty of low gravity experience, he bunched one half of his tread around a fixture, used that purchase to slap the other half on the deck, and somersaulted from one ship to the other. Using his four remaining eyes, Light-Streak watched the performance with amazement.
With the admiral gone from the deck, Light-Streak was cut off from conversation. He looked up at the admiral and Slippery-Wing on the curved deck above him. The admiral was pulling insistently on the safety line, while Slippery-Wing was gesturing to him and curling up the edges of her tread. Then Light-Streak finally let loose his tread from the deck and felt himself being drawn upward to safety on the overcrowded deck.
Admiral Steel-Slicer flowed into the jammed control deck of the scout ship and slid in back of the busy scout ship pilot.
"Am I late for the warpfeast?" he asked.
"Admiral Hohmann-Transfer commandeered all the food." One of Far-Ranger's eyes gave a slow wink. "But I saved a few bags of West Pole Double-Distilled." She touched the screen under her tread, and the scout ship shot up into the black of space.
"You sure look good in that new body," whispered Far-Ranger.
"I could say the same about you," he whispered back.
"Somebody is going to have to go out and take the bad news to the rest of the exploration fleet," she said. "And since I have the only scout ship at Egg, it looks like it's my job. I can't take my regular crew. The journey will take too long and they are too old. Know anything about navigation?"
"When I was a cadet I could outnavigate anyone," Steel-Slicer replied.
"We'll see," said Far-Ranger.
06:58:07.2 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050
"I don't see how things could be any more disastrous," said Admiral Hohmann-Transfer as she started off the meeting in the main meeting room. It was just after turnfeast, and Cliff-Web was still sucking on a Tiny Shell, trying to get the last morsel out from the spiral cavity. The commander had immediately ordered half-rations when she heard they had been marooned in space.
"We first have a report from Captain Fixed-Star, Space Operations, East," Hohmann-Transfer announced. An aging captain moved to the speaker's treadle and activated a display on everyone's taste screen.
"Our total space force consists of three space stations—East Pole, West Pole, and Polar Orbiting. Nominal permanent crew is twenty-four each. We lost a number of those who happened to be on the ground during the starquake. With no contact from Space Operations Headquarters on Egg, and with retired Admiral Steel-Slicer off on the call-back mission with Captain Far-Ranger, Admiral Hohmann-Transfer, as ranking active officer, is Acting Commander of all Space Operations.
"In addition to the assigned space force personnel, we have 16 civilians on East Pole Station who are refugees from the Space Fountain. There are six explorer ships, four cargo snips, and eleven scout ships out in deep space on exploration missions. Our total inventory is 287 personnel, three space stations, six explorer ships, six cargo ships, twelve scout ships, four jumpcraft with no jump loops to jump to, two catapult-lifts with no catapult to drop to, and three shuttlecraft with no Space Fountain to shuttle to."
"Don't forget the humans," said Cliff-Web. "They are only a quarter-orbit away."
"The Slow Ones will certainly be of no help in our present crisis," warned Admiral Hohmann-Transfer.
"They were once," Cliff-Web said. "And they may be again. For instance. Do our technical libraries on the space stations contain the construction plans for a gravity catapult?"
A young ensign high in the rear spoke shrilly into his vibration pickup. "I doubt it, sir. That technology has been obsolete for dozens of generations."
'The humans have that information, and other 'obsolete' information stored away in their memory crystals. I w
ould count them as part of the 'inventory' if I were you, even if they are slow."
"Then it is 287 people and six humans," Fixed-Star said, in obvious annoyance.
"That is 293 'people' worried about what has happened on Egg," Cliff-Web insisted. "I'm worried too. What has happened on Egg?"
"Our next report is from Lieutenant Staring-Sensor, Egg Resources Monitor," said Admiral Hohmann-Transfer.
"According to Doctor of Crustallogy Shear-Wave, our expert on crustquakes, what happened on Egg was not a crustquake, but a much more severely damaging phenomenon called a 'starquake' by the humans. Such a thing occurs only rarely-even at human timescales—so we never expected it to happen to Egg. During a starquake, if the ground movement doesn't kill you, the electromagnetic heating will, and for those still left alive, the gamma-ray radiation levels are lethal."
Staring-Sensor moved his tread, and a map appeared on everyone's screen.
"We have carried out a preliminary survey of the surface of Egg. All major structures are down, including all jump loops, gravity catapults, and the Space Fountain."
"It will take a half-dozen greats to get a jump loop or space fountain built," said Cliff-Web. "When do the authorities think they'll be able to get the gravity catapults back in operation?"
"We are trying to contact the pilot of the flyer," said Lieutenant Shannon-Capacity. "Other than the flyer, we have detected no signs of life on Egg."
Qui-Qui had brought her flyer down to a soft landing outside West Pole Mountain Resort. When she had first come to
the resort, she had made arrangements to berth the flyer at a local repair garage for the resort's robotic glide-cars. The mechanic was not there to attach the tie-bolts that kept the flyer from sliding around during crustquakes, so she had to do that chore herself. She found the mechanic inside his machine shop, impaled on a sharp piece of heavy equipment. She moved away in horror and went to the video link to call the butchers. The link was dead.
Starquake Page 13
