Starquake.pdf

"Attila," he stated proudly.
10:13:14 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050
The Space 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 mass. We
don't have the mass 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 spacecraft 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 ships 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-fashioned 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 mass limited."
"We will just have to find some mass somewhere. Would it help to sacrifice one of our space stations?"
"I'm working on another idea. We could use one of the compensator masses around the human
spaceship. They could make do with just five. The idea is somehow to use one of those masses as a 'first