Sunday August 25, 2013
Book 14: Broken Wind — Part II: Can Full of Sky

Transcript

NARRATOR: Eina-Afa surface, in front of an overgrown baffle...

MURTAUGH: "Godwall" is pretty good.

EBBY: "Baffle" didn't say enough.

NARRATOR: Bristlecone Command Deck, near the Eina-Afa spindle...

KATHRYN: See, our employers are basically constructs.

TAGON: Wait, what?

EBBY: Okay, Sergeant... your turn.  Peel back that forest and see what's under it.

KATHRYN: That oafan ship?  The old one?  The prabstdi found it, derelict.

It had been drifting for millions, maybe tens of millions of years.

EBBY: Try not to start another fire.

KATHRYN: Despite eons of decay the prabstdi were able to reverse-engineer the race that crewed that ship.  They excel at that kind of challenge.

Every oafa alive today is descended from that project, which began about five hundred years ago.

SFX: THOOOM

KATHRYN: Most of the data on that ship was in storage mediums which, when you measure time in mega-years, were volatile.

SCHLOCK: It's raining.  I'm pretty sure that'll go out.

KATHRYN: Eina-Afa, this super-habitat, was mentioned in those data fragments.  It took the prabstdi almost five hundred years just to find it.

TAGON: And it took us all of five minutes to set fire to it.  That's the kind of challenge we excel at.