Contents
CHAPTER 23
Overview
Steel accelerates fortress construction around the starship, suppresses a deadly worker riot, and theatrically protects Jefri to preserve Amdijefri’s trust. He and the Flenser Fragment coordinate Ravna’s technical recipes, while Steel unveils a plan to envault and potentially crush both ships.
Meanwhile, Amdi and Jefri continue relaying data to Ravna, and Amdi proposes adapting radio to carry pack-thought, hinting at transformative implications.
Summary
Steel oversees rapid castle construction around Starship Hill, replacing palisades with stone and digging secret foundations. A riot erupts when worker teams, slated for later execution, rebel against whitejacket guards. With Amdijefri nearby, Steel panics over Jefri’s safety, personally shielding the boy amid the chaos and narrowly averting disaster.
Steel reframes the incident as a Woodcarver infiltration, reinforcing Amdijefri’s reliance on him. Tyrathect, the Flenser Fragment, privately chastises Steel’s wasteful brutality, but Steel reasserts dominance. They review ongoing work from Ravna’s instructions: staged recipes toward explosives, guns, and soon radios, funded with precious materials and intricate testing.
Discussing the approaching humans (in about 100–120 days), Steel reveals his larger design: to envault the landed starship within crushable stone and build a high-walled courtyard sized to “protect” Ravna’s ship—both in fact potential traps. He intends to exploit human parental sentiment and their singleton limitations, using the ships’ value and the coldsleep children as leverage, while defeating Woodcarver beforehand.
Later, in the ship’s control cabin, Amdi and Jefri receive fresh technical tables from Ravna. They translate and transmit Steel’s questions, add personal queries, and talk about Ravna. Inspired by the bandwidth tables, Amdi reasons that, since thought is sound, modified radios might couple directly to pack tympana, enabling distributed thinking across distance. They plan to propose changes as Shreck calls them to supper.
Who Appears
- SteelRuler at Starship Hill; suppresses a worker riot, protects Jefri, manipulates Amdijefri, follows Ravna’s recipes, and unveils a trap to envault both ships.
- Tyrathect (Flenser Fragment)Flenser-dominated pack; critiques Steel’s methods, helps interpret and plan technical steps from Ravna’s instructions.
- Jefri OlsndotHuman child; nearly caught in the riot, clings to Steel, maintains text contact with Ravna, collaborates with Amdi.
- AmdiBrilliant Tine pack; translates messages, excels at math, proposes adapting radio to transmit pack-thought across distance.
- ShreckSteel’s lieutenant; manages guards, escorts Amdijefri, calls them from the ship at day’s end.
- WhitejacketsSteel’s soldier packs; spark and crush the worker riot, guard the starship compound.