The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [18]
“So what went wrong?”
The change in the room was obvious. Gold had, sensibly, let the engineers finish going through their explanation, knowing that he wouldn’t get anything useful out of them until they finished talking about the new toy. Once that was done, though, it was time to get down to the business of why this miraculous device wiped out an entire outpost.
“We’re still working on that, Captain,” Sonya said. “We think it must have gotten turned on accidentally, and not by Madl’r—Corsi found his body in the commissary, nowhere near the device. There may have been a tremor—BorSitu’s atmosphere has electrical storms all the time, and when they hit the shield they can cause a slight shudder—or the cradle had a power surge, or a cleaning ’bot bumped it somehow. We don’t know yet. But the device switched on, and its programming kicked in. It set out to find dilithium. And the nearest source of that—”
“—was the power plant,” Gold finished. “Okay, so it rings the station, drilling its way through everything, thinking it’s making paths to the deposit. Every time it hits the shields it bounces back and makes another pass. Then it holes the shield array, and on its next pass it goes outside the boundaries of the camp. So why didn’t it come back?”
“This thing was built to make enough holes for miners to use, and then to move on to another location,” Fabian explained. “It had already provided plenty of tunnels—if not for the shields it probably would have moved on long before. So once they dropped, it set out to search for another deposit.”
“Did it find one?”
“Probably not.” Pattie glanced down at her padd. “The rock is thick here, and the sensors don’t work as well aboveground—too much electrical interference. Once beyond the camp, the device probably decided it couldn’t find any more deposits, and shut down.”
“Is it still out there?”
Pattie and Fabian glanced at one another, then nodded. Fabian explained. “Like I said, Madl’r was smart. He built this thing with enough protection to withstand the atmosphere’s corrosive effects. If left out there for a week or two, it’d eventually get worn away, but right now—yeah, it’s still out there.”
It looked like Captain Gold was done with his questions, so Sonya leaned forward. “Okay, good work. We know what did this, and how. The why sounds like pure chance—crazy, but it can happen. So the question is, do we retrieve it?” She glanced at Gold—as captain, it was really his call.
If she was hoping for a decisive answer, though, she was disappointed, as he shrugged. “The mission was just to find out what had happened, which you’ve done. Then it was to make sure this wasn’t some ‘shield-killer’ weapon, which it isn’t. So, do we need to go get that thing? Probably not. But it just doesn’t sit well with me to leave it out there.”
“Actually, there’s a very good reason for going to get it,” Kieran put in. “I’m assuming this place will be restored and restaffed, right?”
“It’d make sense,” Pattie said. “BorSitu’s too valuable to leave unattended, and this outpost is already established and easy enough to repair. In fact, we’ve already done most of the repair work ourselves. Why waste the effort to build a new one?”
Kieran nodded. “Okay, so they’re going to put more people down here. Now, we’re guessing that device is still active somewhere. What if it winds up near the camp again?”
“It’d get stopped by the shields.”
“Sure—if it came at them from aboveground. But this thing’s built to go belowground—let’s say it burrows in at some point. It could wind up under the outpost.”
Sonya froze as what he was saying sank in, and she silently berated herself for not catching it before. The shields were built to provide a protective dome over the camp. They didn’t extend far belowground.
“Right, we go get it.” She tugged at her cuff and forced herself to take charge. “Pattie, look into boosting the shuttle’s sensors—I want some way to see what we’re doing out there. Fabian, project the device’s exit trajectory, and