The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [9]
“One of the others may turn up something,” Kieran pointed out, which was true. As always, this was a team effort, and everyone played a part. Sonya just hated feeling like her part was useless. “We can head back and see how they’re doing. But first, I think I owe you a drink.”
That brought a smile to her face. “Yes, you do, don’t you?”
He returned the smile. “One Earl Grey, coming up.”
* * *
Fabian was at one of the outlying buildings of the little outpost—he had just set an emitter on the hole that perforated its back wall. Now he moved over to the building on the left, and studied the hole there. Similar height to the last one, and the same size. Running his finger along the inside edge, he felt that slight ridge again, although before it had gone from front to back, inside to outside, in a clockwise motion—now it ran counterclockwise. Fabian frowned, and inserted his handy length of pipe through the hole—there was a supply cabinet against the wall, also pierced, and he passed the pipe through there as well, so that it rested at the angle of the attack. Glancing back at the other building, he tried mentally extending the line from its last hole, and then extending the line from the pipe. They didn’t line up, at least not right here—perhaps farther out they would. But he’d deal with that later. Sighing, Fabian retrieved his pipe, set an emitter on the hole by the supply cabinet, and trudged back around the building to find the point on the opposite side.
Frnats continued to follow him, keeping a bemused eye on things.
* * *
“Okay, Fabian, what are all these for?”
Sonya and Kieran had returned to the surface after their quick drink. While Kieran had gone to check on Pattie and Soloman, Sonya had joined Fabian and Frnats in the outpost’s center square. There were tiny emitters attached to the nearest holes, and glancing around she noticed that every hole in sight had one, which was an impressive feat in and of itself.
“Well, I’ve got these on every hole in the camp,” Fabian explained, tapping a series of commands into his tricorder. “I noticed that several of the holes line up perfectly—they had to be made by the same shot passing right through several buildings in a row, or else the angles wouldn’t have matched so precisely. So I’ve linked the emitters that line up, each line to a separate frequency.” He hit a key, and a small map appeared on the screen. “Soloman found a schematic of this place, and the computer extrapolated it into a 3-D model. Now I’ve linked the emitters into the model and—voilà!” He handed her his tricorder—on it was a model of the outpost, with colored lines crisscrossing it. Some of the lines ran through a single building, others through two or three, and a few on the edges pierced four or more locations.
“Acid Camp with straws,” she muttered.
“Sorry, Commander?”
Sonya shook her head. “It just looks like it’s got straws sticking out of it. And ‘Acid Camp’ is what the two survivors referred to this place as.”
“With that soup out there, it fits. Anyhow, this tells us a few things. First of all, this wasn’t done by a single ship.” Fabian took the tricorder back and pointed out one side of the image—the end points for the lines on that side ranged from centimeters apart to full meters away from each other. “See how far apart these are, and how the angles are different? The only way a ship could have done this is if it were shifting positions, rotating around and firing almost continuously. Even then, it should be more consistent—the angle should be changing by a set amount each time, as the ship pivots to face the center of the outpost. Plus,” he pointed to where one line started, not far from the square, and pierced through two buildings farther out, “lines like this aren’t starting on the outer edge, they’re near the center. That’d take either a guided missile of some sort, or a shot that came down from above and leveled out—anything else would have to hit the buildings