Starquake.pdf

"All you need to do is shrink the hundred light-years until it is but a tread-length long," Far-Ranger said.
"Bright's Oath, my pouch is dry. How about some juice before turnfeast?"
"Good idea," Star-Glider said. "I have a few bags of West Pole Double-Distilled in my locker at my
quarters."
"Great!" she said, her nearest eye giving him a long, slow, wink. "You spread the field lines and I'll follow
along behind."
He lead the way to his cabin, the moving bulk of his conducting body spreading the weak magnetic field
lines stringing through the space-station plates. They were nowhere near as strong as the trillion-gauss
fields on Egg so there was no need for him to act as pathbreaker, but he didn't mind having her snuggled
up to his trailing edge. As they moved down the roofless corridor, a few of his eyes looked up into the
sky to watch the formation of six asteroids pass over once again. Around each glowing mass were tiny
specks that glared periodically. They were the herder rockets that kept the condensed asteroids in their
proper position around Dragon Slayer. If these ever failed, the humans would be torn apart by the
ferocious tides of Egg. He suddenly stopped and all his eyes turned upward.
"What is the matter?" Far-Ranger asked.
'The pattern is wrong," Star-Glider replied. "The pulses are coming at the wrong times. Something has
happened to the Eyes of Bright!" For a blink he panicked at the thought of those large objects falling
down on him. Then reason reminded him they were in orbit. They wouldn't fall, but something was
definitely wrong. He flowed around Far-Ranger and headed back up the corridor to the command deck
at full tread-ripple.
"The humans are in trouble!" he said. "Follow me!"
06:50:06 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE2050
Danger
Outside Dragon Slayer, the six dense compensator masses circled, nudged this way and that by the
powerful herder rockets. The rockets could not be allowed to get too close to the destructive tides of the
ultra-dense masses, so each rocket pushed at a distance using the magnetic fields generated by a
collection of magnetic monopoles in its bulbous nose. As each compensator mass reached one side of the
ring, a yellow flare of a jet could be seen from a herder rocket, adjusting the orbit of the mass to keep it
in its proper path. As the compensator mass came around to the other side of the ring, the opposite
herder rocket would fire, pushing the dense asteroid back the other way. The scene repeated thirty times
each second, once every two dothturns to the watchers on Egg below.