Chapter 242: Excavations
After a fine meal of tacos, Milo was unsure what to do. Rather than keep playing without Belinda, he paid for a room at the inn next to where he'd just eaten and logged out of the game. He sent a message to Butch about visiting Belinda the next day and then put some time into solving a puzzle that had been bothering him.
His small tunnel scouts had been doing their job, mapping out the dimensions of the obstruction under Section E. From just the preliminary data; it was quite large. What he had thought was a thick plate of metal was actually a rectangular solid. So far, the tunnelers had found a solid surface on all four sides going down 150 feet. The only discontinuity in those surfaces was the support pillars of Section E at each corner and a horizontal structure that jutted out from one side. This structure was made of normal building materials and thirty feet on a side. A tunneler had followed and mapped it for a hundred feet before returning to mapping the main surface.
Milo was more curious than ever. It couldn't be solid. There was no reason to make a solid block of ultra-hard material. So what was in it? And if it was some sort of storage facility, bunker, or manufacturing facility, then the extension was certainly a supply line. Most probably a maglev supply train or similar transport system. Building such a facility under a Habitat wasn't a coincidence. The alignment to Section E was too perfect. He had some other theories, but first, he needed to test the material the walls were constructed of and investigate the extension. He sent commands to all the tunnelers, large and small, to clear certain areas. And then he went to get dressed for exploring.
He'd been wearing his graphene exo-suit for days at a time, correcting flaws and learning how to move in something that enhanced his strength. The results had pleased him, and he'd worked out equipment to use with the suit. A solid helmet with an opaque smoked-glass faceplate replaced the soft mesh hood and face covering. It locked to the neckpiece of his suit, giving him full protection and a heads-up display from his systems. He'd stolen many of the ideas mentioned in the original Starship Troopers book by Robert Heinlein to control his sensors and work with his systems. Tongue, jaw, and neck combinations acted like a keyboard. A detachable backpack contained air and water for extended use in areas where the air might be bad.This chapter was first shared on the Ñøv€lß1n platform.
The main uses of collapsium were for armored bunkers beneath government capitols and nerve centers. The largest in the world was part of NORAD, under Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, USA. The chance of using nuclear weapons was small, but governments and militaries prepared for extremes. The second major use was in fusion and fission reactors. Milo pondered his next moves. Someone had tried to hide something under the habitat. They might be upset at him finding out. Of course, that was only if he got caught. He briefly considered consulting Wally but decided that was a bad idea. It was too high a probability that Wally had something in his kernel that would be triggered by someone like Milo breaking into something important that was probably a government installation. Milo had no intention of leaving something like this alone. It was underneath his home, and he considered it fair game.
The next step was moving down through the narrower tunnels that led to the extension that jutted out from the collapsium walls. The small tunnelers had been busy making sure those tunnels would accommodate him. It took him two hours to carefully move down to that level, testing for possible cave-ins and leaving lines to help him climb back out quickly. The insanity of crawling through tight tunnels recently bored in the rock, hundreds of feet underground, didn't even occur to him. He was having too much fun.
Finally, he was standing on top of what was certainly a supply tunnel. The construction was standard reinforced concrete block, two feet thick. He was surprised to pick up no magnetic fields in operation nearby, which he would have if this were a maglev tunnel. Normally, getting inside such a tunnel would be difficult. Luckily, he had machinery for that. After another hour, his tunneler had made a two-foot diameter opening in the tunnel. Milo had been listening with audio sensors the whole time, picking up nothing and shutting the machine down every minute to hear. When it hit a hollow area, it pulled back, and Milo looked inside to find a dark tunnel extending in each direction. His first guess had been right; he saw the metal rings at two-foot intervals of a magnetic levitation transport system but completely unpowered. Someone had turned it off long ago, based on the dust on the rings. Milo waited a half hour and looked in each direction using a probe as far as he could. Nothing happened.
The next step was to send in a drone. The little robot fired up its three small propellers and moved into the tunnel, sending its visuals back to Milo. He sent it away from the installation first. It moved along steadily until it came to a blockage. Something had collapsed the tunnel in this direction. That was something to investigate later. He sent the drone in the other direction. The tunnel was the same and ended in a set of collapsium-coated doors sealing the tunnel. To the side was a small walkway that led to a more human-sized door. Milo was through the tunnel and jogging that way a moment later.
