Starquake.pdf

On the crust of Otis, Cliff-Web watched the cargo ship pull away from the top of the Space Fountain.
Once it was clear, he flicked his eye-stubs at an engineer who was waiting at the controls. The engineer
made an adjustment, and the high-pitched whine coming through the crust started to drop in tone. Slowly
the tower grew shorter and shorter. Soon the tower was reduced to a pile of metal rings and a stack of
platforms. It might have been simpler to turn off the stream of rings and let the tower fall, but Cliff-Web
didn't want any stray projectiles orbiting around Otis and dropping on Eagle.
Their next task was to charge up the flow tubes on Eagle.
"Attach the power cables to the pumps on Tube Array 1," said Cliff-Web. Large masts rose from holes
in the crust and coupled to two dozen pumps spaced around the periphery of Eagle. The pumps hummed
to life, and the ultra-dense black-hole dust circulated faster and faster in the array of tubes. The hull of
Eagle creaked as the fluid reached relativistic velocities; still the pumps pushed. The fluid became heavier
instead of moving faster, and the gravity potentials inside the torus became so intense that they could no
longer be described by the old Einstein theory. The rate of change of flow rate had been slow, however,
so the gravity repulsion forces generated in the hole of the torus had been negligible.
Cliff-Web felt the whining of the pumps reach a peak and level off. Eagle now had one of its two
multi-tube arrays charged with energy in the form of high speed ultra-dense mass. It was time for them to
leave.
"Switch to internal power," he said. There was a hesitation in the sound as the pumps were switched
from the outside power connectors to internal stored power. The stored power to compensate for
friction and gravitational radiation losses would only last a few milliseconds, so they had to be on their
way. He watched as the huge power conductors that had energized Eagle were retracted from their
connectors on the hull and lowered down into holes in the crust. Eagle, perched on its launching pad, was
now free to fly.
Cliff-Web, his engineer's part done, stopped the normal wave motion of four of his eye-stubs and stared
at Otis-Elevator.
"Eagle ready for launch, Captain," said Cliff-Web.
Otis-Elevator waited as the motion of Otis took the dot on the tread screen beneath him along its plotted
path. The orbit would take Otis within 100 meters of the surface of Egg, where it would pass over the
surface at one-third the speed of light. There were rumblings in the crust of Otis as the tidal forces from
Egg attempted to pull the planetoid apart. Cliff-Web anxiously looked out in all directions, hoping that the
crust in this region would hold together for a few more microseconds.
Just before the planetoid reached its periapsis, the captain acted. "Launch!" commanded Otis-Elevator.
His tread moved rapidly over the touch screen beneath him and neutrino beams sent out coded signals
from Eagle to the machinery sitting around it. The power generators had been storing their power in
temporary accumulators while waiting for the launch command. When the signal came, all the stored
energy plus all the power that the generators could produce was switched into the pumps that drove the
ultra-dense dust in the bigger gravity catapult.
The pumps, shrieking from the high loads, pushed the dust in the twenty-centimeter-diameter torus at
unbelievable accelerations. The moving stream of black holes generated a rapidly increasing
gravitomagnetic field inside the torus. The increasing gravitomagnetic field in turn generated a repulsive
gravitational field at the center of the torus. Eagle was repelled upwards at many times the gravity of Egg,
but the crew felt