Starquake.pdf

One of her near eyes caught him looking at her anatomy. Instead of glaring him down as he expected,
the eye slowly and deliberately dipped down between its eyelids and back out again in a long sexy wink.
Star-Glider felt his eye-stalks stiffen as he returned his attention to the speaker.
"We will now have a briefing on the alien life forms found on the star by Captain Far-Ranger, Doctor of
Alienology," the speaker announced. Star-Glider was impressed when he heard her second title. "You
are welcome to use my taste screen," she said as she started to move through the crowd to the center.
He whispered an electronic 'Thanks," then moved onto the glowing patch in the deck where her
undertread had been. The taste screen came to life under his tread as her amplified voice boomed out
through the deck.
"When we first arrived at NS 1566 + 74, we did a mapping of the entire surface. We found no obvious
artifacts, but an artificial intelligence search routine programmed with an alien artifact interest operator
drew our attention to one of the magnetic poles." A picture flashed on the viewscreen showing an
enlarged picture of a low chain of mountains with a small cluster of hexagonal markings at the base.
'This is a small village, with individual compounds shaped like clusters of crude hexagons. We were able
to get some close-ups with our high resolution scanning array infrared antenna." An artificial-looking
picture showed up on the screen.
"The picture is presented in false colors, since we are looking in the infrared portion of the spectrum
instead of the soft X-ray visible portion. The moving objects are blurred by the scanning process, but it is
obvious that each compound is inhabited by one or two larger aliens, while the central hexagon in each
'family' grouping contains smaller aliens with an occasional larger one. Outside the compounds are low
pens that contain large numbers of very small creatures.
"Once we knew where we could get pictures, we sent in a skimmer orbiter with an X-ray camera and a
motion compensator. Despite the mountains nearby, we were able to set the periapsis of the skimmer
within less than a meter of the surface and got some excellent pictures of the aliens."
A disgusting-looking blob filled the screen. It looked like a Flow Slow in the process of being butchered.
The basic body shape was a treadless, eyeless, flattened blob like a Flow Slow,
but stripped of its protective plates. Where the plates would have been were ragged sheets of reddish
flesh. Into opposite sides of the body, about halfway up, there were stuck long sticklike objects with
knobs on the ends. The sticks had a joint at the middle and were slightly bent like the skinny sticklike
arms and legs of the humans. From around the place where the stick emerged from the blob, there came
a large number of long, wiggly tendrils. The screen flickered, and the image changed slightly.
"We were able to get five successive pictures as the skimmer orbited over this individual, so we can
recreate a crude display of motion." The five pictures were played rapidly on the screen, and the
sequence repeated a number of times. The being was rolling along the crust with the knobbed armlike
things sticking out to the sides and the tendrils pushing and pulling at the crust to move it along. The
ragged flaps of flesh changed color as they rotated up, over, around, and under the rolling body of the
alien.
"You will notice that the sticks become darker the further they are from the body, leaving the knob at the
end quite dark red. The knobs are moved backward and forward to cover the regions in front and
behind the alien, but they are never used to touch the ground, so they don't seem to be for propulsion.
Here is a close-up of one of the knobs. It seems to be a sphere with many tiny hexagonal facets. We