Starquake.pdf

portions. Safely on the other side, he rolled a nut back across the path. An explosion from a tube buried
in the crust at the middle of the striped pattern sent a heavy weight up into the sky, trailing a thin, tough
fiber. The weight fell back down, just to one side of the firing tube. It sank deep into the crust, carrying
the end of the fiber with it. The sides of the hole glowed from the impact.
Qui-Qui looked at the two holes in the crust connected by a tough fiber, then looked at Quick-Writer.
"Those Zebu barriers are all through the compound," said Quick-Writer. "Only the outer ones are
activated all the time. If the high speed weight doesn't damage your brain-knot, then the fiber will stitch
you to the crust until we get there to cut you loose."
Quick-Writer deactivated the barrier, and Qui-Qui tried to cross with the required exaggerated ripple.
She made it across with only one buzz from the training monitor.
Before they left, Qui-Qui took the flyer up on a high trajectory to look around. There were some large
herds off in the distance to the north, but no danger nearby. Coulomb-Force obviously enjoyed the
experience of flying, but Newton-Einstein came down with all twelve eye-balls tucked under pale
eyeflaps.
Leaving Quick-Writer in charge of the compound, Qui-Qui, Newton-Einstein, and Coulomb-Force set
off for the West Pole, gliding just above the crust. One of the gravity catapults was not far from White
Rock City. Qui-Qui had been taken to the catapult site for a visit when she was in creche-school.
As they approached the site, Coulomb-Force had Qui-Qui stop. "There is a major power conduit
running alongside the road. The conduit joined the road just a meter or so back. I think it came from that
power plant over next to those foothills." He flicked his eye-stubs to the north.
"We might as well look at it while we are here," said Qui-Qui. She turned the flyer to the north, raised
the elevation to a few centimeters so she would pass easily over the deserted homes and office
compounds, and headed for the artificial mound off in the distance.
The power plant was in surprisingly good shape. During the starquake, the crust motions had bounced
back and forth through the chaotic pattern of mountain roots at the West Pole and had nearly cancelled
out at the site of the plant Qui-Qui was so pleased with their find that she went back to the food lockers
in her flyer and brought out a bag of sparkling wine to help pass away the time while they waited for the
West Pole Space Station to respond. While they were traveling over the surface, Cliff-Web had orbited
to the West Pole Space Station to keep the communications delay down.
"I'm glad to hear that most of the power equipment looks in good shape," Cliff-Web said. "The first thing
to do is to connect the power circuits of the flyer to the control console. Hopefully we will find some
power units that were shut down by the safety monitors before the units were damaged by the starquake.
Let me know what the status board says and what you plan to do before you activate anything. We don't
have any ground power experts up here, but our spaceship power plant engineers may have some
suggestions."
It took most of the rest of the turn to maneuver the flyer into the power plant compound and activate the
control console. There were a few blinking bright blue-hot lights that indicated
unit failures, but most of the board glowed a cool red under the wordREADY.
'The pressure readings on four of the power wells are above minimum," Coulomb-Force reported. "The