Dragon's Egg (Cheela 1) by Robert L. Forward

Author:Robert L. Forward [Forward, Robert L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: english, High Tech, Action & Adventure, Neutron stars, Fiction, Science Fiction, Adventure, General
ISBN: 9780345435293
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2000-02-29T06:08:26+00:00

Trek

TIME: 07:54:43 GMT MONDAY 20JUNE 2050

Commander Swift-Killer fixed her attention out toward the horizon. Each of her eight watch eyes reported back that the shallow arc of a needlelike dragon tooth could still be seen, held at guard position by one of the perimeter guards. She left the watch eyes at their automatic duty and scanned her other eyes around the camp where the rest of her troopers were relaxing. Most were still eating, but a few had paired off and were now enjoying each other over in one corner of the camp. She looked at them enviously and was tempted to pass over the watch to her second-in-command, go get her favorite fun-partner and join them, but the last contact with the barbarians had only been a turn ago, and they must stay at full alert.Frustrated in bodily pleasures, Swift-Killer turned to her other personal form of recreation-trying to figure out why things work. She paused, concentrated for a moment, and her body pushed out some pseudopods. She then grew some articulated crystallium bones under the protrusions of tough, muscular skin to form manipulators. The bones in the manipulators were small, not like the ones that she grew to hold her shield and sword in battle. Still keeping her watch eyes on the horizon, Swift-Killer glanced with the remaining eyes at the four extremities, made a minor change to one of them, then reached through the sphincter of a carrying pouch in her body and pulled out her "experiments."

One experiment was an old one that she had come upon in the last campaign. Their pursuit of the barbarians had taken them into strange territory where the crust was not smooth, but had suffered a recent shaking. In that region, the crust did not have its usual fibrous plasticity, but was almost as hard as dragon crystal. The quake had shattered the crust into many flat plates, their cleaved surfaces glinting with the reflected image of the God Bright that hung motionless over the south pole. Her mind always active, Swift-Killer had collected several plates and had played with them, turning them first one way, then the other, to bring the image of Bright to each of her eyes in turn. She had even held one well up above normal eye level (it had taken most of her bone-forming crystallium to support the plate against Egg's tremendous gravity pull) and had actually looked at her own topside. It looked weird to her, what with the deep red color, the reddish-yellow lump of her brain nodule near the middle, and the smaller lump of a forming egg next to it. She had hastily withdrawn the plate and had glanced around quickly to reassure herself that no one had seen her examining her own topside. Unless it was your lover trying to get you in the mood, no one ever talked about one's topside, much less looked at it.

As a troop commander, she had found an excellent use for the mirror plates. A "glancer" was now standard battle equipment on the eastern front.

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