Death And Aftermath

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 20.

See On An Asteroid III.

Nkuhlu and Oliveira take samples and a sounding from the eagle's beak which is not familiar rock but intricately alloyed metal with tangled layers, encysted lumps and vacuoles. (Wiki article on "Vacuole" does not seem to match Anderson's use of the word.) Samples cut with an ion torch can generate white-hot gobbets. Sonic pulses make footing tremble. When a minicharge finds a resonance, the beak breaks and rubble kills Beynac.

His Lunarian sons plan vengeance. The expedition had traveled in an inadequately equipped ship borrowed from Fireball because the Federation forbids Lunarians to build spaceships. Their vengeance will be to defy that ban. The approaching and inevitable era of the Selenarchs has been hastened by Beynac's death.