Starquake.pdf

kilohertz gravitational radiation that whipped Amalita's body back and forth, breaking three joints and
snapping her spinal cord at the neck. The last memory stored in Amalita's dying brain was of the stinging
pain in her eyes.
Qui-Qui was still recuperating from her regeneration and was taking it easy at West Pole mountain
resort. She was playing with her new toy, a custom built, high powered, personal flyer. There was less
than a dozen on all of Egg, for they cost much more to operate than intercity glide-cars and weren't any
faster. A glide-car, however, couldn't goup.
The flyer had a gravity repulsion drive for operation near the surface, an inertia drive for high altitude,
and superconducting wings for gliding on the magnetic field of Egg. It was expensive, it was extravagant,
but it was fun!
She took off from the resort and jumped over some nearby foothills to find a small deserted valley. She
took the flyer up to speed on the gravity drive and hit one-twelfth light-speed before she had to switch to
inertia drive and zoom up over the mountain at the end of the valley. Turning off the repulsor drive and
flipping out the wings, she put it into climb on the inertia drive and watched the energy reserves in her
accumulators drop. Her manager would complain about the recharging bill, but she had plenty of stars
saved, and there would be lots more now that she was young again.
Qui-Qui was at 25 meters altitude when the starquake hit. Fortunately, she had been looking up at the
West Pole Space Station when the atmosphere lit up. As it was, before she could pull them in under her
eyeflaps, two of her eyes had spots that didn't go away for nearly a turn.
She had trouble believing the altimeter when it varied from 24 to 26 meters every few methturns. All the
communicator channels were silent with the exception of some lonely navigation beacon somewhere that
proved that her set was working. She knew it was a crustquake because of the glow in the atmosphere,
but it must have been a huge one and it was still going strong.
She would be safe as long as she stayed up out of the atmo-
sphere while the crust was moving. She set the flyer on autopilot with a minimum power trajectory. The
plane slid out its superconducting wings and started gliding slowly down the magnetic field lines,
extracting lift when it could from the slow variations in the fields as they followed the motion of the rolling
crust below.
The jumpcraft carrying Admiral Steel-Slicer was starting its jump to orbit when the starquake pulled the
support structure out from under the Jump Loop. High-speed ribbon sliced through the outskirts of
Bright's Heaven as the pilot fought the jumpcraft clear. The jumpcraft didn't have enough energy to make
it into orbit and arced over into a trajectory that ended in the middle of the West Pole mountains. One by
one the pilot lost the sight in eight of his twelve eyes from the X-ray glare as he tried to find the West
Pole JumpLoop for an emergency landing. It wasn't there. He snapped out his superconducting wings
and, using the last of his onboard emergency propulsion reserves, managed to bounce the jumpcraft off
the West Pole magnetic field into an elliptical orbit.
"Periapsis 5 meters and apoapsis 90 meters, Captain Light-Streak," the copilot, Slippery-Wing,
reported. "Coming up on periapsis now."