Desert Planet (THE RIM CONFEDERACY Book 6)
Page 21
They also had learned that all of the foundries had lain dormant for more than thousands of years until just a few moments ago at least for this one. He clicked on his PDA and the Scavenger’s on duty deck cadet sounded scared but did confirm that yes, the terraformer was underway at about six feet per second. He had no idea on the others that they’d already recorded location wise though. The third mate made a choice. He had to get out of this foundry and that meant that he’d have to go down the rope ladder as it was slowly swaying the thirty feet to the ground. It was something any able bodied seaman would be expected to be able to do—he just hoped he could too. He spun and slowly lowered a leg down so that his foot reached the first rung, and as he found it, he then lowered his other leg and slowly began to move down the ladder. He had already made three more rungs down wards when the terraformer stuttered to a halt and that made him miss a rung and he swung freely by only his hands.
No more than five feet away from him, an orange laser beam from above suddenly appeared, with it’s more than five petawatts of power, it was like the searing power of a sun almost close enough to touch.
It turned the third mate into a cinder in a millisecond as it drilled down deep into the planet below. It boiled everything it met and it read the chromatics of the ores that came back and then recording the location for later machines that were on their way to the planet.
Around the terraforming foundry, the air of course, was barely that; very high in carbon dioxide, it made the planet a hothouse but that didn’t matter much as it was uninhabited. Not a single sentient species on the globe though it was full of what could be called normal predator prey animals. Thick air, now horribly smelling of burned vegetation, peat, ores of unknown type and soil, rock and the third mate too.
The laser snapped off; it’s trillions of watts suddenly gone.
The foundry slowly started up it’s movements again. Ahead of it lay a continent’s worth of laser drilling and testing the ores it needed. They were quickly liquefied and the resulting up-welling of the gas billowed and behind it was now only one such vented hole.
This terraforming foundry had sat idle for thousands of years; now it would move along it’s path doing it’s job, making this planet a colonization candidate.
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Dear Reader…
If you've made it this far, you're most likely thinking that this was the best SciFi you've ever read.
Or maybe not.
Maybe Captain Scott wasn't your cup of tea?
Or you hate the Baroness and her scheming ways?
Or does the Caliph look like an upcoming tyrant?
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Would you mind taking a few minutes to write a review for me please?
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Jim Rudnick
2016