Apollo Burn (Pillars of Fire and Light Sci-Fi Book 2) by Ken Britz

Author:Ken Britz [Britz, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-17T23:00:00+00:00

Anora and Isolde got into her limo. She had a long drive ahead of her, so she decided she might as well get some work done. She smiled at Isolde.

Isolde rubbed her stomach. “You’re mean. Next time you don’t like advertising rubbing genitals, just say so.”

“It’s not something I like to advertise,” Anora replied.

“Been that long, huh?” Isolde smiled and let it drop. “What did you find out?”

“Maven was doing a lot of work I hadn’t been really privy to. That’s fair. He never knew what I’d done at my company, just some quantum work at the NSA. I do have an idea about what was going on with Oracle, but it doesn’t solve the problem of its being broken. And I did learn something about Longinus from his later notes.”

“Really? I thought you lost the last year of notes after Tintagel went boom.”

Anora shook her head. “That part is true, but he’d been working on Longinus since long before that with Dr. di Lago.”

“Longinus was important to him—important enough for Kai and Indiana to steal Archimedes and launch it into orbit.”

“It was foolish, really. That satellite could’ve been launched any time we wanted it to,” Anora said. She rubbed her chin and buried herself in her fur for a moment. “Still, it did tell me one thing. I’d gone over the schematics for Longinus and dragged it out of Nikolai Gastov over the threat of canceling his Archimedes project.”

“I thought you did cancel Archimedes.”

Anora smiled. “It’s business. Longinus is a prototype for a long-range grid.”

“Grid? Collector grid?” Isolde asked. “That seems ridiculous. Low orbit is, what? A hundred miles up?”

“Closer to twelve hundred miles.”

Isolde blinked. “Seriously? Grid range of twelve hundred miles? We can’t get more than a mile on our portable systems, sometimes three miles on the bigger ones we had at Tintagel. Does it work?”

Anora shrugged. “It was never tested, but I think the theory is sound. The ground collector grids are omnidirectional. Roughly spherical or cylindrical, propagating outward from the source system. Longinus is a beam. Unidirectional, pushing the grid from a projection system the size of a pencil over the surface of the Earth. The beam widens, theoretically to a size of about ten miles of coverage.”

“Jesus,” Isolde said. “Grids are an Achilles heel for Avallach. We saw that in Geneva when they were taken down and Dr. di Lago was killed.” Isolde frowned.

Anora reached over and grabbed her hand. She knew the memory pained Isolde. It had tipped the scales against her father. If Anora played her own cards right, Isolde would help her as well. “It’s a possibility, but I’m afraid to test it any time soon. I don’t think it was truly ready when Maven had it assembled. He must’ve felt some urgency when Donna was killed. He wanted some way to keep his project alive.”

Isolde nodded, playing with her necklace. “I wonder if my father had the same idea. He once said to me that I was ‘the most valuable thing in the world.

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