The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [11]
Sonya was impressed with the other woman’s thoroughness. “I didn’t realize you’d look for all that,” she admitted. “I thought it would just be whether someone was lying in wait for us, or had left us a trap of some sort.”
“There’s a lot more to security than that,” Corsi pointed out. “Part of it is anticipating your opponent, which means figuring out what he, she, or they want and then how they will try to get it. And I can’t figure out what anyone could have wanted that would have caused this, unless they just hated this place and wanted to see it wrecked.”
“Great, so we might be dealing with a revenge-crazed killer.” Sonya sighed and shook her head. “Well, keep me posted.”
* * *
Fabian and Frnats were going from hole to hole, checking the readings on each one. They’d entered one of the buildings now, sidestepping a body Corsi’s team had not yet reached—Frnats paused to alert Eddy and Friesner that they’d missed one—and were entering those rooms that had been holed. The doors in this building were all blackened by phaser fire where locking mechanisms had been—Corsi’s work, most likely. Except for the one Fabian had just tried, which was undamaged.
“Stevens to Corsi.” He glanced around the room as he entered. It looked much the same as the others in this building—cabinets along the walls, their surfaces half-eaten by the corrosive air, and several workbenches strewn about with machine parts covering them. Another workroom.
“Corsi here. Go.”
Fabian wondered if he imagined the hitch in Corsi’s voice. She hadn’t spoken two words to him since their little one-nighter before the mission to Empok Nor. “Did you enter every building when you did your sweep?”
“Affirmative.”
“Did you enter every room?”
“Of course.” Now she sounded annoyed.
“Any problems getting in?”
“Only in one building—all the doors were locked. So I had to open them.”
Fabian grinned—he could hear the shrug in her voice. “And you opened them by blasting the locks?”
“Look, mister, my job is to make sure this place is safe so nobody gets hurt. If that means wrecking a few locks—”
He’d already thrown up his hands in surrender, then realized she couldn’t see the gesture. “Whoa, Commander, I’m not attacking you—you did what you had to. I’m just asking a question. I’m in that building now, and there’s one door that doesn’t have blast marks on it. I just wanted to know why.”
“Oh. Well, that door was already unlocked—no sense wasting a phaser blast on it. Anything else?”
“No, that was all I wanted. Thanks. Stevens out.”
Behind him, Frnats was chuckling as she took out her tricorder. “Core-Breach doesn’t like to waste phaser beams.”
“Or time,” Fabian said, trying to keep from laughing out loud.
“Corrosion reading shows at seventeen point five eight percent,” Frnats added, examining one of the holes.
“Same as all the others.” Fabian shook his head. “Okay, what about the temp?”
“Metal temperature along the edge of the hole reads at thirty-seven point eight nine degrees.”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. That’s point two-five degrees lower than the hole in the building facing this one. So this hole came first.” He stepped over next to her, and ran his fingers around the edge of the hole, encountering the same ridge he’d felt in every other hole. This one ran clockwise, though, and the ridge on the hole opposite had run counterclockwise.
Fabian stepped back and glanced around the room again, taking in the walls, the cabinets, the tables, the two low stools, the various parts and pieces of equipment, the tools—then he stopped and looked at the walls again.
“Frnats, take a look at this.” He put his back against the outer wall, right beneath the hole, and gestured at the wall