The Service of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 9) by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing
Published: 2020-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

26

It was quiet in Kelly’s office as she ran through the numbers again. It was a pretty simple equation, really. An accelerator ring required x person-years of work to construct. The LV-71-DA extraction facility represented a large-scale out-system construction endeavor by two UnArcana Worlds and had y people.

An accelerator ring built by a similar operation would take at least z years to build.

The number that fell out was…large. Even if she assumed a larger project than LV-71-DA by a factor of ten, she was still estimating decades of construction time. Even that was ignoring the fact that to build an accelerator ring outside of one of their systems, the Republic would have had to build an entirely new mining infrastructure in that system and provide laborers for that as well.

To have built a second accelerator ring in the time since the Centurion ring had been completed, someone would have needed to relocate millions of workers. Highly skilled engineers and deep-space workers, too, not the kind of people that could be bought from the never-sufficiently-damned human trafficking rings.

“Someone would have noticed,” she said aloud.

“Noticed what?” a soft voice asked from the door. “That you’re still up and awake three hours after you should be asleep?”

Kelly looked up and saw Xi Wu standing in her doorway, the Chinese Mage smiling at her.

“I mean, my desire to have you come to bed is at least a little selfish,” Xi said, “but you should rest.”

“I keep looking at the numbers and the data and I keep coming to the same answers,” Kelly admitted. “It’s not smart, I suppose, but I need an answer, Xi.”

Xi crossed the room and kissed Kelly’s forehead.

“And what answer are you seeing, my love?” she asked.

“We’re scouting empty systems and it’s a waste of our time,” Kelly said aloud. “The Centurion ring took a hundred thousand workers forty years. To build an accelerator ring in secret in less than half a century…”

She shook her head.

“If we assume the project started twenty years ago, I’m still looking at them needing to hide a station with a million people,” she concluded. “And we’d have noticed a million deep-space workers going missing.”

Xi reached over and turned off the wallscreen. As Kelly looked up at her in mild objection, her wife dropped into her lap and kissed her very thoroughly.

“So,” Xi said when they came back up for breath. “Train of thought broken. What are you finding in the pieces, Kelly?”

“Give me a moment,” Kelly said, thoroughly distracted. She ran her fingers through Xi’s lustrously long black hair and smiled softly as her wife leaned into her. “Pieces of my train of thought, huh?”

“You’re going in circles. I’m trying to break them,” the Mage replied. “That I also get to make out with you to achieve said breaking is a nice benefit.”

Kelly laughed and kissed her wife again.

Leaning back in her chair with Xi resting against her, the pieces clicked together.

“They needed somewhere with an infrastructure they could expand and a population they could draft,” Kelly murmured.

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