Building Victoria: A Military Science Fiction Space Opera Epic: Aeon 14 (The Intrepid Saga Book 3) by M.D. Cooper

Author:M.D. Cooper [Cooper, M.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

“Tanis!” Sarah said with surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“Thought I’d come take a look at our homicidal drilling rig here.”

The drilling machine lay at the end of a mile-long horizontal shaft. Drilling with an MDC was quite a feat. The control required to ensure the field maintained the desired shape and strength was beyond most engineers. It certainly was not done with this level of finesse—nor near habitations—back in Sol.

The tunnel had straight sides and an arched ceiling. Likewise, the floor was perfectly level and clear of debris. The unit itself also appeared undamaged, though its emitter appeared to be fully open and it was still aimed toward the town hall’s atrium.

There the tunnel wall had a wide hole in it. Tanis’s nano were well ahead of her and she flipped her vision to see the picture they provided. The hole was wide and flat, the edges were sharp at first, but then they became jagged and diffuse as the field had spread.

Three hundred meters in, the stone was solid, though fractured through and through.

<That field was well calibrated to travel through two kilometers of rock, before taking out the supports around your little picnic,> Angela observed.

<Let me know what you find in the rig’s core. No part of this looks like an accident,> Tanis said.

“No one died, did they?” Sarah’s shock response to Tanis’s earlier statement brought her attention back to the physical world around her.

“Sorry, no. Not homicidal then, perhaps just very angry,” Tanis replied.

“The crew reports that there was a short in the emitter array that fed back into the control circuits. They shut it down as quickly as they could. I’m glad no one died,” Sarah replied.

Tanis looked at Sarah with every sense she had. The woman’s skin was moist and her heart rate was elevated. The flick of her eyes and fingers told Tanis that Sarah was hiding something. She didn’t have the tells of someone directly implicated, but she knew something.

“I don’t believe this was an accident,” Tanis said.

<Subtle as ever,> Angela commented.

“What makes you think that?” Sarah asked, her voice rising in pitch ever so slightly.

“I know a few things about MDCs. Angela knows more. The chances of an emitter making just the right field to pass through all that rock is very, very unlikely. In fact, I would have said it was well-nigh impossible if I hadn’t been on the receiving end of it.”

Sarah sighed. “Not everything that goes wrong is a plot, Governor Richards. Some things just happen.”

“Some things do,” Tanis nodded. “But this did not.”

<Um… I’m coming up empty,> Angela interrupted.

<How is that possible?> Tanis asked. <This would be one in a million if it were an accident.>

<Less likely than that, but whoever did this covered their tracks well.>

<That means he was here in person,> Tanis turned, surveying the crews in the tunnel. <He did this locally.>

“I don’t know who you think did this,” Sarah’s face was pulled into a scowl. “But none of our people would do it. You’re the ones with a history of sabotage and subversion.

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