Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 5.10

Day 123

When I woke up, I could tell the Seizers had moved me in my sleep. I lay in my airbag rather than on the ground. Understandable, given how they needed their space behind me.

The car had been fixed back to pristine condition. No clearing and no dropship told me "good morning" when I looked out of the window.

I left the car. A channel flew before the fine-sanded mountainscape dominating the view. Around the smooth sand, riverbeds extended endless deserts of equally smooth cobblestone. Occasional spikes stabbed out of the ground like stalagmites. No forest in sight.

As the scorching Sun told me, morning had long passed. Considering how late I went to bed, anything else would've been a miracle.

The Seizers stood several yards away from the car.

Crick was already in full work mode. Their bushbot pierced bottle-sized, yellow, and spiked cylinders into the vulcanite ground. The soil behind the car already resembled a gigantic pinboard, with the occasional boulder interrupting the pattern.

A wire connected the devices, leading to Crick's laptop. You needed a magnifying glass to spot the farthest cylinders. How long was this pinboard? Several miles?

I understood why they did their fieldwork outside the woods.

A rectangular free space lay at the cylinder network's center.

Crick strolled over to me. "You woke up just in time, Human. You surely want to know about my latest experiment.

"Tell me."

"The yellow wire coils are geophones. They record seismic waves and tell us about the resistivity of the bedrock material. The velocity of a seismic wave changes based on the material it traverses. By measuring the delay of velocity between different types of-"

"I don't think I wanted so much detail, but thanks. So, by calculating resistivity, you can tell what the ground is made of?"

The bushbot brought Crick xir antimatter rifle. "Correct. I will cause an explosion with the rifle in the middle of the geophone net to trigger seismic waves."

Good that this network was so large. The explosion would be further and fainter than the one in the forests, but I'd still have preferred earplugs.

Helix approached us while Crick focused on their rifle.

"Any nano-earplugs?" I asked Helix.

"Won't be necessary. It'll only be a small explosion. You don't waste antimatter to make noise."

Crick aimed with unyielding concentration as if we weren't even there.

"By the way," I asked. "Why does Crick know so much about geology. Aren't they an exobiologist?"

"They are, but they are also a nerd, like you and me. Nerd's gotta do something during their immortality."

Crick fired. As Helix said, it sounded like a firecracker compared to the nuke unleashed against the zombies. Its fireball covered a tiny fraction of the rectangle at most while its neutron radiation hardly affected the geophones.

Helix held a terminal for Crick to see. It depicted a three-dimensional coordinate system with a clear peak in the middle.

"Can't read the units," I transmitted. "Is this peak about resistivity?"

"Correct," Crick answered, eyes on the screen. "What is the geological feature with the highest electrical resistivity you can think of?"

"Um, granite? Mud? Limestone? Sand?" Do these even have unusual resistivity at all?