Crystal Shards Online Omnibus 1 by Rick Scott

Author:Rick Scott [Scott, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-07T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27: The Short Straw

“Bruce, you’re going to want to come see this.”

Bruce Peters stiffened and stared blankly at the sonar technician standing in the doorway to his office. When you were the man in charge, hearing those words could mean only one thing: problems. Just how big a problem usually depended on who it was uttering the doom-impending phrase, and coming from the sonar tech, Bruce’s stomach was already queasy with anxiety.

He managed to give the tech—Carl—a nod. “What’ve you got?”

Carl, a slim black man in his thirties, with close cut hair and a full beard, shook his head slowly. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Perfect. “All right. Show me.”

Leaving his office within the stasis observation lounge, Bruce followed Carl to the lift. There, he waited as they traveled down twenty levels to the lowest floor in Citadel. Bruce prepared himself as the elevator car slowed. This far down, the ambient heat was unbearable, made even more so by the energy converters that fed upon it. The elevator doors opened, and he was hit by a blast of oven-hot air. It had to be well over fifty degrees Celsius down here.

It was completely dark, too, save for the dull red glow that came from the energy converters that hummed below them. Set in an array that stretched across the half-kilometer-wide floor, the converters were each the size and shape of a small building, with massive cooling fins that made them resemble giant electrical transformers. The converters used cells that turned thermal heat directly into electrical energy at an efficiency rate of 80%. With the limitless heat this far below the Earth’s surface, their energy needs would always be met. So long as they had the nanites to keep the cells rejuvenated, of course.

Carl stepped out into the heat, clearly used to it, and clambered down the gangway that hung a couple of stories above the field of converter banks.

“Remember not to touch the rails,” Carl said as he headed toward a habitat box set up at the end of the gangway.

Bruce was thankful for the reminder and tucked his hands into his pockets for safekeeping. Touching bare metal in this place would likely leave a second-degree burn. The hab was only a few hundred meters from the elevator, but by the time they reached it, Bruce’s coveralls were soaked through with sweat.

A small airlock ushered in a blast of cool air as they entered, and then the inner door opened to allow them entrance into the RV-sized control station that housed the brains for the external detection equipment. Bruce went from sweating to freezing as the way-too-cold air chilled his damp clothes.

Carl took a seat at the command station in the center of the room and fired up the old holographic screens. As head of maintenance and engineering, Bruce knew the sonar system well. It was standalone, totally separate from the online servers that ran Crystal Shards Online, and was perhaps one of the oldest systems in existence, aside from the energy banks outside.

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