Starquake.pdf

Metal-Bender had nearly dismantled the cargo and living platforms on Eagle and had reassembled them
on the crust as a walled living compound.
"Do you have the eating area made yet?" Delta-Mass asked.
"It's the first thing we built," replied Metal-Bender. "Go through the east gate in the outer wall, then
straight through to the center. That is the combined eating and meeting area."
"Great!" Delta-Mass started to lead her crew to the east gate.
"You'll enjoy the food Slink," said Metal-Bender.
"I hope you and your crew of Swifts didn't devour it all," Delta-Mass replied.
"No, the food-service crew wants to make the food Slink last, so they only give you a small piece after
you have eaten a big portion of meal-mush."
The mention of meal-mush brought groans from the treads of the crew. The artificial food generators
were quite versatile and could produce a great variety of flavors and textures, but after dozens of greats
of eating nothing but artificial food, their pouches ached for something that was different.
The antimatter drill moved rapidly through the crust, and the hole went down millimeter by millimeter as
Power-Pack's drilling crew developed a rhythm. They finally approached the magma layer. The
temperatures, pressures, and densities were so high that the outer casing of the drill began to show
evidence of transmutation by neutron drip from the surrounding near-fluid of excess neutrons.
"Lower the last section of liner and put a pressure seal on the top," said Power-Pack. "Then put an
antimatter bomb on
the end of the drill string in place of the drill and lower it. We are going to make a volcano—a tame
volcano."
The antimatter bomb was lowered to the bottom of the hole, and the drill string was removed. Set off by
a coded pulse of acoustic waves, the bomb fractured the remaining few centimeters of crust and the high
pressure neutron fluid in the mantle pushed upward to the surface. As the fluid rose into regions of lower
pressure, some of the neutrons decayed into electrons and protons, releasing energy and lowering the
density of the fluid, so that it rose even faster.
"Here it comes!" Power-Pack shouted over the deep rumble in the crust. "Open the valve to the power
generators."
The high speed, high density, high pressure, high temperature nucleonic fluid rose up through the drill
hole and whirled through the power generator where its free thermal, kinetic, and nuclear energies were
extracted. The resulting warm crust dust was piped to a nearby depression, while the power extracted
from the bowels of Egg flowed over the transmission lines to energize the machinery at the base some
twenty centimeters away.
Admiral Steel-Slicer, now Crust-Crawler, met with the senior staff. "We're on our way," he said. "But
we still have a long way to go. What is next on Cliff-Web's schedule?"
"The gravity catapult needs a power plant two dozen times more powerful than the one we just got into