Starquake.pdf

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 shields.
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 shield, 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 chink, 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 snatched a roasted
eye-stub from the carcass 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 shields. 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 shields 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."