The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [17]
“Look there, that’s the actual marking.” Bart pointed out the lines within the larger swirl. “Also circular—they don’t have sharp angles themselves, so they think in circular patterns instead. My God, the sheer amount of information they can fit on one page—it’s staggering!”
Bart set to work, and it was only after he looked up and saw that Carol was gone that he realized that she’d left.
Making a mental note to apologize to her later, knowing full well he’d forget to, he dove back into the work.
* * *
“It’s a journal, all right,” Bart explained a few hours later. They were all back in the briefing room again, and the slight linguist was standing for once, looking like nothing so much as a professor Sonya had had back at the Academy. “Once Carol and I figured out how their language worked, it wasn’t that hard to isolate symbols and break them into patterns. The cover symbol is his name, V’reet D’t Madl’r—it means ‘Swimmer in Deep Waters,’ by the way. That gave me a key to work from. Each swirl is an entire thought made up of smaller swirls for sentences, which have smaller ones still for words or objects or actions.” Kieran rolled his eyes. Bart noticed the response and smiled. “Sorry. I get a little excited. Anyway, Madl’r was a scientist-miner, and he was working on a new device to help find dilithium more easily. It’s a sensor, really—it’s attracted to dilithium right through the rock.”
“So why wasn’t it drawn to the power station in the camp?” Kieran asked.
“It was,” Fabian said. “But Madl’r was smart.” He gestured at his roommate. “Once Bart cracked the language, he translated those diagrams for us, too. They tell the real story.” He looked at Bart, who sat and gestured for him to continue. “Madl’r’s device is round, with sensors inset on all sides, and self-propelled. It’s built to rotate at high speeds, like a drill—leave it to a race that thinks in circles to design something like that. Dilithium is hard to find because it tends to be deep underground, and that much rock interferes with sensor readings, and it’s worse here because of the ionized atmosphere. So you’ve got to get closer, almost right on top of it, before you know it’s there. Madl’r’s device has all these sensors linked in together to create a stronger array. It can pick up dilithium a little farther away than most, and it’s built specifically to work through rock and metal. What happens is the device locates a dilithium deposit and zeroes in on it. It drills its way right through the surrounding rock—not a big hole, we all saw the size, but enough to put equipment through and enough that miners could easily expand them into real tunnels. It rings the deposit, but doesn’t touch it—that could risk an explosion, which could lead to a series of bigger ones. So the device is programmed to skirt the dilithium itself, and just make tunnels close by. It’s small enough and fast enough that it can switch direction quickly, so it’s got ample time to change course and avoid hitting the deposit. It was meant as a labor-saving device.”
“How’s the design?” That was Gold asking, and Sonya hid a smile as Fabian, Kieran, and Pattie grinned at each other. Give an engineer a diagram and he’d show it to other engineers, so they could all pore over it together—she’d wanted to take a crack at the thing herself.
Pattie actually answered the captain’s question. “Very good, actually. There are many failsafes, several redundancies, and the sensor array is clever, as is the general design. He managed to protect the sensors from damage while making the device strong enough to drill through solid