<Are you sure they are not mechs?> Quath felt real fear. They had vanquished the main forces, but vagrant mechs still roamed the hills.
<No, nothing so dangerous. Still—so many!>
<Move on! We have mere moments!>
<No. I sense there are more pests here. What if they have gotten into the fluxtube formers? They could spoil the Syphon.>
<Forget them. Run!> Quath lurched at full gear down a narrow ravine.
<I can pick up their thrummings now,> Nimfur’thon cried. <There are many here. They stretch in long lines.>
<Seeking food. Grazers. But you must leave that exposed plain. Now.> Chuffing, clenching, she jounced down the steep cleft.
<We must call upon the Tukar’ramin. These pests could even be inside the fluxworks—>
<Then they shall soon be scoured out. Witless one !—We cannot call the Tukar’ramin. Forgotten, have you, that we are here without mandate?>
<Ah, there—I have flamed the last. If there be more—>
<Forget them!>
<You are right. I come.>
The sky crinkled. Golden wealth spun toward them.
<Fly! Time does not allow—>
<I am. I fire—>
The sky shattered.
Quath skidded to a stop, tucked in pods, and—snick!—clapped fast her ports and shields. Rushing air sang an ionized blue.
From beyond the low hills a golden wall advanced. The glowing line had passed to the north as its revolutions increased. The grand Cosmic Circle revolved faster, its beats making a blur. The spinup had formed a steady cutting pressure. Now the wall of gold moved outward from the pole, a nearly perfect cylinder that stood and pointed through the sky.
A nearby flux station sent forth its strumming magnetic whorls, which seized the passing distant string and flung it on its way. Thousands of similar stations all tugged and pushed the spindly, rushing line on its path around the planet’s pole.
This tube of dancing light, the Syphon, bled color into the bruised sky, fed ripening pink to red to orange. Wind howled and clutched at Quath’s rim, thin fingers to tip her over. Quath tuned frantically to the brood’s channel, to call out. Instead she was flooded by the brood’s view from the far ridgeline.
The fluxtube grew straight and true from the skirt of hills. It bit the ceiling of clouds, boiling them away in a purple flash. Dark mottlings shot up, up—in an instant heat had cleared the ivory clouds.
Now the black of vacuum appeared, a spot forming high above, a target coming into being as the arrow shot through it. Stars winked new.
The upper link was forged as the tube opened on the clean vacuum of space. Quath watched writhing amber and gray motes climb, her eyes smarting, awed. The brood sent forth a chorus of applause, popping and frizzing song.
*Complete!* came the Tukar’ramin’s warm signal.
Now the Syphon hummed with new life deep in the rock. The tube walls kept back the pressing solid rock on all sides—except at the core. There immense pressures forced more metal into the tube with each revolution. Vast stresses fought along the tube walls. The strumming tube gnawed, burning a cylinder of stone free of its mother world. The top faced vacuum, while below liberated pressures pushed the freed rock upward.
*Flowing is,* the mellow, unhurried voice of the Tukar’ramin came—and the fluxtube suddenly filled.
Pearly, transparent walls of force dulled to gray. A plug of rock was streaming out.
Quath called, <Nimfur’thon!> in the roaring, pelting gale. The wind’s pebbled teeth clattered on her skin. <Nimfur’thon!>
<Here. I landed, but am exposed.>
<Hold there!>
<Blinded, we are, my monopoddy. This grimy breeze—>
A rolling blast burst over the hills. The fluxtube brightened. The cylinder filled, gold to red to white.
<The core!>
—And out it spurted.
Their lance had now struck to the treasure of this world. The tube throat was artfully shaped, fattening slightly as the whitehot metal funneled up. The gusher of molten metal rushed from the vast core pressures into the void of space. Riches squirted up and out, fleeing the groaning weight.
Quath squinted. The fluxtube walls’ glow hurt her many eyes. She submerged in the flood of the Tukar’ramin’s view.
Delicate streamers of green and amber danced—precious metals, the only hoard this wretched world boasted. The Tukar’ramin’s view tilted, following a black fleck of impurity up the glowing pipeline, starward, into sucking void, high beyond air’s clutching.
There, flexing magnetic fields peeled away streamers, finding orbits for the molten pap. The yellowing, shuddering fluid, free of gravity’s strangle, shot out into the chill. Returned to the spaces it once knew, the metal coldformed, mottled, its skin crusted brown with impurities. The birthing thread creaked and groaned in places as it unspooled. It fractured in spots, yet kept smoothly gliding along its gentle orbit.
Cooling, it grayed.
Graying, the threads wove.