Unfathomed (The Locus Series Book 1) by Ralph Kern

Author:Ralph Kern [Kern, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ralph Kern
Published: 2016-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29 – Day 12

Letting the rake drop to the floor, Grayson placed his hands in the small of his back and felt his shoulders pop.

“I’m going to take my thirty minutes,” he called over to the foreman, who merely grunted in response as he broke a patch of sun-hardened ground with a pick. The weathered old man seemed to have resigned himself to the fact that the soft folk from Atlantica had to be eased into hard labor gently.

Grabbing his rucksack from the edge of the field, he slung it over his shoulder and began walking toward the shade of a copse of the weird-looking palm trees, well away from the field.

Entering the shadows, Grayson glanced around, checking to see if anyone was within earshot. No one was.

Reaching into his rucksack, he pulled out his CB radio and turned the dial on the top, switching it on, and was greeted by a crackle of static.

“Rain,” Grayson wasn’t expecting a response. The watch boats were well away from Nest Island to prevent detection by the Ignatius, which made it even more surprising when he heard the countersign.

“Desert,” Bautista’s familiar accented voice responded.

Hunkering down behind a tree, Grayson hissed into the radio, “Urbano, what the fuck am I still doing here? Get me extracted.”

“Karl, we will get you away as soon as we can, but for now I have a job for you. I need you to meet me at the northern tip of the island, where there’s a small peninsula. 11 pm tonight. Out.”

“Fuck!” Grayson scowled at the radio, before switching it off and slipping in back into his rucksack.

He glanced back at the work party. Giving a shrug, he stretched out his feet, leaning against the trunk of the tree.

If I’m not getting out of here, I may as well take my full thirty minutes.

***

The industrial-scale 3D printers were set in a room deep in the hull of Atlantica. They ranged in size from a microwave to a chest freezer, and were there to produce everything from replacement engine components to the sometimes-bizarre item requests the stewards received from passengers. It was one of the many innovations Crystal Ocean Lines had equipped Atlantica with in order to make the ship that much more efficient.

The problem was, what they wanted wasn’t in the ship’s design catalogue, which was why Tricia Farelly had spent the afternoon on the computer-aided design—CAD—console, following Donovan’s specifications—effectively designing the camera module from scratch. But finally, she was ready.

“Right, we’re building this thing from ceramic. It’s not going to be exactly space-age stuff, but it will do the job,” Farelly said, then finished quietly, “I hope.”

“Okay, shall we... get started then?” Donovan croaked. The air in the room was incredibly dry. They had placed several dehumidifier units in it, sucking every piece of moisture out of the air they could. It had occurred to Donovan that they would need to prevent condensation from forming on the lens cover when it was in the cold of space, and that meant working in as arid an environment as possible.

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