Cheela - Starquake Part 15

A series of explosions from inside the Maze Temple caused the advancing warriors to hesitate and look all around for danger. They saw nothing, then died, as heavy weights struck at them from out of the sky and pierced them from topside to tread. The limber-swords swinging about Ferocious-Eyes were still flas.h.i.+ng the "attack" pattern, so they pressed on.

"They are now in the range of the flame throwers," reported Weber-Gauss.

Jets of violet-hot flame came from some of the eye-level portholes and swept back and forth, leaving pools of flaming liquid and screaming blistered warriors. One warrior who man- aged to reach the wall between two portholes slid a s.h.i.+eld over a flame hole between bursts. The flame thrower backfired and an explosion behind the wall sent flames and pieces of bodies flying through the sky. The speckled one moved in front of the porthole and repeatedly jabbed the end of a pike in the hole to keep it from being reused. One after another, the flame throwers fell silent as porthole after porthole was blocked by a crust-rock or pike guarded by a singed, sliced, and angry speckled warrior.

Only six of Falling-Quirrl's warriors made it to the entrance. She sent two each into three of the corridors, then she entered the fourth alone.

"The pressure sensors indicate seven targets." Mega-Bar was monitoring the indicators on the maze map in the west wall control room. "There are two each in the dead-end corridors and one entered the main maze trail."

"Let them pa.s.s over the first traps, then reactivate those behind them," said Neutron-Gas. "That way we can get them coming or going."

Falling-Quirrl moved slowly along the narrow corridor. She jabbed a p.r.i.c.ker into every porthole before pa.s.sing and looked carefully for traps. The point of her short sword poked hard into the crust in front of her before she put her tread on it. When she reached the striped section of corridor, she was especially careful. She prodded the ground and walls with her sword and pushed her s.h.i.+eld ahead of her with the front portion of her tread weighing it down. Nothing happened, and she pa.s.sed over.

In the distance she heard a crackle and a scream. It sounded like Nasty-Scar. Almost immediately there was a sharp explosion and another scream. She came to another striped area and started across it using her s.h.i.+eld under her tread again. There was a loud explosion and a dented s.h.i.+eld flew up from under her shocked tread. The s.h.i.+eld came down on top of the wall, pushed down on the magnetic barrier until it glowed and hummed, then fell back down into the corridor, nearly hitting her.

Ferocious-Eyes waited and waited for Falling-Quirrl and her warriors to emerge. Finally they did, their bodies pushed one-by-one out of the entrance by a little machine that just fit neatly between the narrow corridor walls. Three had been burned by a strange flame that cooked holes through their bod- ies, and three had deadly puncture wounds that went from tread to topside.

The last one pushed out was Falling-Quirrl. Ferocious-Eyes sent the butchers to pick up the body, but they brought her to him, for she was still alive despite the large oozing holes in her. Two-thirds of her body was paralyzed from damage to her brain-knot, but she was able to talk with the rest of her tread.

"They have traps that they can turn on and off. I pa.s.sed over one on the way in. It got me on the way out. I played dead. They stabbed me only a few times through a hole in the wall, then left me. They are weaklings, unused to killing. I would have made sure with a thrust to my brain-knot." She held out her dented s.h.i.+eld.

"My s.h.i.+eld struck the 'magnetic barrier' and was not burned. Maybe with many s.h.i.+elds or one large one, we can keep the barrier from burning us."

Ferocious-Eyes tried her s.h.i.+eld on the magnetic barriers in the open areas outside the wall. He found that he could indeed pa.s.s over it if he narrowed his body down so that it stayed on the s.h.i.+eld. Other s.h.i.+elds didn't work, however. They interrogated some of their new slaves from the local clans and found out that what was needed was a special metal called a "superconductor." The slaves were sent into Bright's Heaven to scavenge sheets of this "superconductor" to make into s.h.i.+elds.

Turnfeast came, and it was time to feed the warriors and their mounts. There was plenty of meat for the warriors, as the butchers had been busy after the battle. The Swifts didn't get cheela meat, however. It was too good to waste on them, and besides, it wouldn't do for them to learn that their riders were so tasty. The Swifts got Flow Slow meat from the herd that traveled with the army.

Ferocious-Eyes was bored, so he decided to kill the Flow Slow himself instead of letting the butchers do it. One of the butchers scampered up the trailing edge of the animal to the top and drove the Flow Slow straight at his leader.

Ferocious-Eyes, pike sticking straight up, waited as the Flow Slow moved ponderously toward him. It was a huge one, twice as tall as the walls around the Maze Temple. He watched carefully as the square plates of bony armor, each as large as a s.h.i.+eld, flowed over the top of the creature and down. He fixed on a weak spot between the moving plates, rushed forward to insert the pike into the c.h.i.n.k, then reversed tread to get out from under as the Flow Slow impaled itself on the pike and flowed.

Ferocious-Eyes left the butchers to their work. As he moved away, his eye-stubs were waving slowly in deep thought. Instead of joining his warriors feasting on their comrades, he merely s.n.a.t.c.hed a roasted eye-stub from the carca.s.s of Falling-Quirrl and sucked on the eye-ball as he made his way to the area where the slaves were working on producing superconducting s.h.i.+elds. He stopped and looked in disappointment at the eye-stub. He had unfortunately grabbed the eye-stub with the crushed eye-ball, so the eye-ball hadn't squirted juice out into his eating pouch when he had sucked on it.

Ferocious-Eyes was in a bad humor when he arrived at the slave pens. He called the slave in charge of the armory away from his meager turnfeast.

"Do you see that large Flow Slow over there?" he asked the slave, his eye-stubs pointing to a herd grazing nearby. "The big female."

"Yes, O Terrible One," the slave replied.

"Instead of making s.h.i.+elds out of the 'superconductor' metal, I want you to make metal covers for the plates on that Flow Slow."

"Don't ask me to do that, Terrible One," said the slave. "A Flow Slow is dangerous if it is angry, and it will surely be angry if we try to nail plates to it."

"You have three turns," said Ferocious-Eyes. "After that it will be an eye for each turn you are late." He tossed the disappointing eye-stub to the crust and returned to the turnfeast to get another. The slave picked up the discarded food, but somehow the eye-stub didn't taste as good as he had thought it would.

"It has been five turns and he still doesn't do anything," said Qui-Qui. "The warriors circle around out of range of the Terror-Tops, keeping anyone from going out or coming in, but they don't attack. They must be planning something, but what? Levitate me with the gravity machine. Maybe I can see something."

"We will have to turn off the power to the defenses to activate the machine," said Weber-Gauss. "But we should be safe enough if we make it short."

A dothturn later, the speckled warriors surrounding the Maze Temple went on alert as a deep humming started in the crust. The hum rose to a whine, and out of the middle of the Temple the G.o.d of Youth and Knowledge ascended. She went up ten centimeters and stopped. Coming toward her from the outskirts of Bright's Heaven was what looked like a huge robot. No. It was a Flow Slow, covered with metal. On top was a tiny speckled creature.

Following the armored Flow Slow was the Speckled Horde, recuperated from their wounds and back at full strength. Qui-Qui felt her spirits sink along with her body as the gravity machine brought her back down again.

Ferocious-Eyes wasted no time with preliminaries. Either the Flow Slow would conquer the Maze Temple for him or it would fail. Riding on its topside, he rippled backward as the metal-covered plates moved forward underneath him. His two bodyguards kept the Flow Slow moving and on course with occasional p.r.i.c.ks between the armored plates. They moved over the outer magnetic barrier with ease, the crust giving off bolts of electricity as the coils failed under the increased magnetic pressure.

He waited while his warriors silenced the flame throwers along a section of wall, then urged his gigantic metal mount forward. The falling plates of superconductor, backed by the ma.s.sive weight of the Flow Slow, pressed against the ultra-strong magnetic barrier along the top of the outer wall. The coils of wire hummed as the barrier resisted the pressure, then the atmosphere sparked with energy as the coils collapsed.

Bellowing from the p.r.i.c.ks of the tiny ones riding on its topside, the armored Flow Slow pushed over the outer wall, toppling it into the next wall of the maze. The Flow Slow continued on and entered a secret room, reachable only by a subterranean tunnel. It was one of the control rooms for the outer maze defenses. Quirrls from the bodyguards on either side of Ferocious-Eyes pinned the acolytes to the crust.

The Flow Slow moved over the bodies and crashed through another wall, heading for the center of the Maze Temple. One bodyguard was struck by a falling weight that had been fired upward from a tube in the corridor through which they pa.s.sed. The strong thread tied to the weight dragged her off the top of the Flow Slow. She fell to the crust and burst.

Ferocious-Eyes p.r.i.c.ked the Flow Slow to drive it harder as it breeched the next wall. They were now in a large inner room that held a number of acolytes. He could hear their treads talking rapidly, but they didn't seem to be speaking to one another.

A flickering image of a strangely bloated cheela floated in the center of a magic window embedded in the floor.

"Attila has managed to ride a Flow Slow right over the walls. He is penetrating deep into themaze." The speaker looked up as the wall came down. "Attila is here! We are lost!" He started to run, but was trapped and crushed along with the others as they tried to flee through the one exit from the communications room.

Three more walls and the Flow Slow reached the center of the complex. Ferocious-Eyes stopped the Flow Slow and looked around. In the center of the room were a jumble of boxes connected with heavy tubes. Against one wall was the most beautiful female cheela Ferocious-Eyes had ever seen. She was carrying a pike and what looked like a p.r.i.c.ker, but it was hard for his eyes to make out something that small.

"You must be Qui-Qui," Ferocious-Eyes said. "The cheela who never dies." He inserted a quirrl into a specially trained throwing pouch. "Let's see if your magic can protect you from a quirrl." The quirrl flashed down through the air and buried itself deep in the crust just in front of Qui-Qui. He started to reload, when she rushed forward to slash him with her pike. He brushed back his bodyguard, twirled his whip-sword forward and cut the end off the pike. The return flick cut a slash across Qui-Qui's topside.

She didn't feel it.

With her pike gone, Qui-Qui retreated to the jumble of pipes and valves that made up the central power distribution system for the maze complex. The power generator itself was hidden in the old underground laboratory of Zero-Gauss.

She tried to goad Attila off his nearly invincible perch.

"And you must be Attila-the-Speckled," she said. "I hear you are called 'Ferocious-Eyes.' 'Weak-Eyes'

would be more like it after missing big targets like these." She flapped her lower eyeflaps at him. "Come and get me, my little speckled hatchling child."

The insult of being called a "child" nearly made Ferocious-Eyes lose control, but he calmed himself down. Whip-sword flickering in front of him, he prodded the Flow Slow from behind and forced it into the jumble of tubes and boxes. Qui-Qui clambered away. The Flow Slow mounted a box. The large valve inside gave way and gigantic surges of power burned through the huge body. The Flow Slow died and spread out, breaking other power connections. The automatic defenses of the Maze Temple collapsed and the Speckled Horde rushed in.

Qui-Qui was crushed against the wall by the spreading body of the Flow Slow.

Ferocious-Eyes slid down off the dying Flow Slow and approached Qui-Qui. Suddenly a section of the wall slid aside and a dome-shaped metal object appeared. It moved and talked and seemed to be alive.

"Are you ready to undergo rejuvenation?" the robot asked.

"No!" shouted Qui-Qui, her tread m.u.f.fled by the crus.h.i.+ng body of the Flow Slow. "Don't talk to him!

Reset! Stop! Deactivate circuits!"

"I cannot obey that command," the robot replied. "I must keep the rejuvenation machinery running."

Qui-Qui didn't answer. The robot moved over to her and examined her body with its sensors.

"She is dead. She waited too long for rejuvenation." The robot turned toward Ferocious-Eyes. It moved around him, sensors in operation.

"You are in excellent muscle tone, ready for instant rejuvenation," said the robot. "Would you like a young new body?"

"Yes!" Ferocious-Eyes kept his eyes on the moving, talking magic dome of metal.

"First we must prepare the records for the Combined Clans Rejuvenation Board." The robot pulled a scroll out of a compartment. "Name?"

Ferocious-Eyes thought for a moment. A new body deserved a new name. A name like no other.

"Attila," he stated proudly.

10:13:14 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050.

The s.p.a.ce Council met in a compound that had the bright globe of Egg hanging directly overhead. The glow from Egg no longer had any warmth in it.

"We have lost a good friend and a great teacher and engineer," said Cliff-Web.

"And our only contact with the surface," Admiral Steel-Slicer added. "It looks as if we are stuck up here until Attila loses control. If only there were some way to kill him, like dropping something on him."

"We could deorbit a projectile easily enough," Cliff-Web said. "But once the projectile built up speed, the magnetic field of Egg would tear it apart into a cloud of plasma that would dissipate before it got to the surface. To do any damage we would have to deorbit a large ma.s.s. We don't have the ma.s.s and we don't have the energy to deorbit it. Besides, we would be killing whole clans of innocent slaves just to get one person."

"It's going to be a long, long time before civilization is rebuilt again to the point where they can bring us down," Steel-Slicer said, resigned.

"We will just have to figure out a way to get down to the surface without their help," Cliff-Web said.

"It's going to be tough," Steel-Slicer said. "None of the s.p.a.cecraft that we have was designed for landing on the surface. Is there some way to fix up some kind of atmospheric or magnetic drag brake?"

"Egg doesn't have enough atmosphere to help much," Cliff-Web replied. "I could design a magnetic drag brake using metal of the right conductivity; but unlike atmospheric braking, the kinetic energy gets turned into heat inside the metal brake. At high deceleration levels the brake would melt. At low deceleration levels we have the problem of supplying gravity for the crew. Besides, magnetic braking becomes less effective at lower velocities. Braking can take some of the energy out of the vehicle, but it would still be going much too fast to land."

"How about adding some sort of propulsion for the final phases?" Steel-Slicer asked.

"The inertia drives on the scout s.h.i.+ps are energy efficient, but their thrust-to-weight is so low they can't be used for landing," Cliff-Web replied. "One of the jumpcraft could conceivably be modified to use old-fas.h.i.+oned antimatter rockets for the landing phase. But even if we could make the tons of antimatter needed to heat the propellant, we just don't have the hundreds of tons of propellant needed to land a jumpcraft with its heavy gravity generators. We are ma.s.s limited."

"We will just have to find some ma.s.s somewhere. Would it help to sacrifice one of our s.p.a.ce stations?"

"I'm working on another idea. We could use one of the compensator ma.s.ses around the human s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. They could make do with just five. The idea is somehow to use one of those ma.s.ses as a 'first stage' for our lander. We can store the energy we need on the ma.s.s so we don't have to carry it on the lander, then transfer the energy to the lander through some kind of launcher."

"Are you thinking of a launcher like a jump loop?" asked Steel-Slicer.

"They are too long to fit on the ma.s.s," said Cliff-Web. "I was thinking of a large gravity catapult sitting on the ma.s.s. We would somehow put the ma.s.s in an elliptical orbit around Egg that would take it down almost to the surface. Just at periapsis, the gravity catapult would launch the landing vehicle in the direction opposite to the orbital trajectory and leave the lander stopped, stationary, a few meters above the surface."

"It would be an easy landing from there!" said Steel-Slicer. "We could land a crew of engineers and then build our own gravity catapult so the rest of us could come down."

"I was hoping to get two berries off a singleberry bush," Cliff-Web said. "I think we can design things so that our landeris the gravity catapult. Saves time."

"You can't fly a gravity catapult! A gravity catapult only generates gravity forces when the ultra-dense ma.s.s currents are increasing. How are you going to drive the pumps? A long power line back to the ma.s.s?"

"You also get gravity forces when the ma.s.s currents are decreasing," Cliff-Web said. "But you shouldn't really think about the changes in the ma.s.s currents. What really makes the gravity field is the increase or decrease of the gravitomagnetic field inside the torus. I think we can design a gravity catapult that requires no outside power to operate. It will have changes in the fields without changing the speed of the ma.s.s currents, just their direction. In fact, this sounds like a good project for my new gravitational engineering seminar." He went off to meet his cla.s.s.

10:13:26 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050.

"It is time for the team reports again, cla.s.s," said Cliff-Web. "How is the design for the lander coming?

Who is Team Leader for the lander?"

One of the students in the back spoke up. "The basic design is finished. We will have two long, thin multi-channel tubes that wind around the torus in multiple layers to make the interior field more uniform.

The lander will take off with one tube empty and the other fully charged with high speed black-hole dust that will produce a gravitomagnetic field at maximum strength counterclockwise. Then when we want gravity repul- sion force we use a diverter valve to switch some of the ma.s.s current from the channels in the first tube into the second tube, but going in the opposite direction. The reverse current will cancel some of the gravitomagnetic field inside, which is equivalent to decreasing its strength. The decreasing gravitomagnetic field will make a gravity repulsor field that will keep the lander levitated above Egg."

"What is the hover time?" Cliff-Web asked.

"Only three methturns, so far," the Lander Team Leader replied. "Now that we have the basic design, we are going back and cutting weight. Our goal is six methturns levitation time, which should give us nearly a grethturn for a landing."

"Keep working," said Cliff-Web. "Launcher Team?"

"We had the easy job," another student reported. "The launcher is basically like the gravity catapults on Egg, but bigger. Our real effort has been on making the gravity repulsion field at the center as uniform as possible to minimize strains on the lander during launch. The size became awfully large though, twenty centimeters. I don't think we are going to be able to put it on one of the human compensator ma.s.ses. We will need the larger deorbiter ma.s.s. I think the humans call it 'Otis' after the human that built the first s.p.a.ce fountain."

"It wasn't a s.p.a.ce fountain, it was an elevator," Cliff-Web explained.

"What is an elevator?" asked the student.

"Never mind. Launch Base Team?"

"While the launcher keeps getting bigger, the base keeps getting smaller," said a third student. "We've formed a joint study team with an astrophysics cla.s.s taught by Plasma-Sheath, Doctor of Astrophysics.

We are learning the realities of particle and plasma physics, while they are learning the fun of being a gravitational engineer. Our team now has the name 'Planet Busters.' We went out in a scout s.h.i.+p and took a look at Otis. The surface is too far down in the fuzz. We are going to have to use monopoles to shrink it and make it denser. Fortunately, the humans kept their monopole factory running, so they have plenty in storage."

"You are all doing good work," said Cliff-Web. "You have 24 more turns to finish your team report, then I think Plasma-Sheath and I had better talk to the humans before we go any further."

10:13:32 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050.

"We have a call from East Pole s.p.a.ce Station, Pierre," said Jean. "It's Cliff-Web and an astrophysicist named Plasma-Sheath. They are dumping some detailed information through a data channel, but they also want to speak with you."

Pierre stopped his checkout of the s.h.i.+p's computer and switched his screen to the communications channel, where two cheela appeared on the screen. Cliff-Web was the smaller, although large for a male.

The other wore badges on her hide with a starburst in the center. Pierre was becoming better at identifying the s.e.xes, although Plasma-Sheath made it easy with her big lower eyeflaps.

"We have found a way to get back down to Egg," Cliff-Web began without preliminaries. "Since we are very short of everything in s.p.a.ce, we would have to borrow some ma.s.s and monopoles from you.

Unfortunately, your ring ma.s.ses are too small; only the deorbiter ma.s.s would do. We would shrink it with monopoles until it turns into a miniature neutron star, then use that as a base to construct the lander and its launcher."