Robert L. Forward - Starquake

My thanks to my many friends who contributed ideas and helped me in several technical areas. In addition to those who helped in making the neutron star world of Dragon's Egg more believable, I want to thank Paul Blass, Rod Hyde, Keith Lofstrom, David Lynch, Lester del Rey, and Mark Zimmer-mann for additional help on this sequel.

My special thanks to Eve for generating new names for the many generations of cheela that lived, fought, and died on the following pages and to Martha for putting up with a husband constantly off in a brown study

06:50:06 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050

Outside Dragon Slayer, the six dense compensator masses circled, nudged this way and that by the powerful herder rockets. The rockets could not be allowed to get too close to the destructive tides of the ultra-dense masses, so each rocket pushed at a distance using the magnetic fields generated by a collection of magnetic monopoles in its bulbous nose. As each compensator mass reached one side of the ring, a yellow flare of a jet could be seen from a herder rocket, adjusting the orbit of the mass to keep it in its proper path. As the compensator mass came around to the other side of the ring, the opposite herder rocket would fire, pushing the dense asteroid back the other way. The scene repeated thirty times each second, once every two dothturns to the watchers on Egg below.

A jet on one of the herder rockets faltered as a meteorite tore through the fuel feed section, taking out two of the three triply-redundant fuel valves and damaging the third. A fifth of a second later the jet functioned correctly, but the next time it sputtered once again. The compensator mass that the herder rocket was supposed to control started to wander out of its place in the ring. Soon all the masses were wavering slightly as their rockets tried to maintain some semblance of order.

"Emergency!!" Dragon Slayer's computer sounded the alarm through the loudspeakers. "A meteorite has damaged one of the herder rockets!"

Amalita was returning from checking the upper tank when the strong gravity tides of the neutron star grabbed her and

pulled her back down the passageway where she collided with Jean, who was putting on her suit. The next fraction of a second the two women were separated and jerked toward the outer wall of their spherical spacecraft.

Amalita grabbed a stanchion and held on. "What's the matter?" she yelled at Pierre. Pierre cinched up the belt on his console chair and activated his console.

"A rocket has malfunctioned," he said.

Jean, floating free near Pierre, was slammed again into the outer wall, then flew inward toward the center of the ship, where she held onto the back of a chair. The next part of the cycle her legs were pulled outward again as if she were on a rapidly spinning merry-go-round.

"Can you fix it?" Pierre asked the computer.

"No. The stress crack in the remaining fuel valve is growing," the computer reported. "You have a maximum of five minutes."

"We'll be torn apart by the tides," Jean screamed as the forces pushed and pulled on her body. They became stronger, ripped her from her precarious handhold and slammed her unconscious against the outer wall. At the next cycle, her limp body came flying inward again.

"Got her!" said Amalita, moving quickly from one handhold to another in the lulls between the forces.

"Put her in an acceleration tank!" Pierre hollered. Meanwhile, Doc Wong had made his way around the central column and helped Amalita open one of the circular hatches in the wall. They stuffed Jean into the spherical tank. Jean roused a little as they were putting her in, and Doc managed to get her mask on before they shut the door.

"Air OK?" Doc hollered over the intercom. The figure inside gave a dazed nod, and Doc noted her chest expand in a deep breath. He activated the tank and water droplets splashed over the portholes as the soothing liquid covered the bruised body.

The cheela communication console lit up. The robotic cheela, Sky-Teacher, was back on the screen. Flitting about him in the background, blurred images of live cheela were busily responding to the catastrophe.

"A rocket is failing," Sky-Teacher said. "Are you in danger?"

Pierre spoke quickly to the robotic image as the gravitational forces jerked him about in his harness.

"We've had it," he said. "I'm afraid you'll have to retransmit that last HoloMem directly to St. George.... Goodbye."

Pierre noticed a hesitation in Sky-Teacher's response and stopped. He could see a clustering of live cheela bodies to one side of the robot. The eyes and tendrils on that side of the robotic body accelerated into a blur as Sky-Teacher talked to the live cheela at near-normal cheela speeds. A fraction of a second later, the hesitation in Sky-Teacher's eye wave pattern was replaced by its normal rhythm.

"WAIT!"Sky-Teacher cried. "We will rescue you!"

"In five minutes?" Pierre shook his head. "Impossible!" Timing the gravity strains, he dove down to the library console to change the rate for data transfer to emergency mode.

06:51:05 TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050

The young post-doctoral student swayed back and forth as the senior engineer put the final touches on the machine. Although he had gotten his doctorate in tempology and was not a bad engineer himself, Time-Circle knew that making a magnetized and electrified black hole this big was not something to be left to mere scientists. Fortunately, his grant from the Basic Science Foundation had been large enough so he could afford to hire the best engineer on Egg, Cliff-Web.