Earth's Last Angel Read Free Page A

just yet,’ she smiles in return.
    Bill drops a locator beacon where the signal stops. Then he drives around the entire edge of the depression in a zigzag pattern, like a sailing yacht tacking into the wind. This allows him to mark the outer edge of the signal with locator beacons. After taking just over seven hours to complete the drive around the depression, Bill calls it a day.
    â€˜I don’t know about you, but I’m starving!’ he announces
    â€˜OK let’s head for home, we’ll have a meal and a well-earned rest.’
    â€˜I reckon we drive a star pattern over the depression tomorrow to see if it’s a solid signal across the whole thing or just little pockets of signal.’
    â€˜Sounds like a good idea. Then at least we’ll know what we’re dealing with.’
    With a solid meal and a good night’s sleep under their belts, Bill and Sheona head out to the depression bright and early the following morning to start their surface survey with the new ice detector. The results are surprising even to Bill and Sheona. If the ice detector actually works, then this depression holds the biggest ice deposit ever found on the asteroid belt!
    â€˜Bill…if this is what I think it could be, we’ll have to use our brains a bit here.’
    â€˜What do you mean, love?’
    â€˜Let’s not jump to conclusions just yet, let’s do some spot drilling and find out what we’ve got here. Then we can file our report with verified data and not guess-work.’
    â€˜Mmm…you’ve got a point. You got to admit it’s pretty damn exciting, we could be standing on the biggest ice find ever!’
    â€˜Not a bad retirement package then, mate!’ she smiles.
    Over the next six weeks they drill 300 core sample holes, finding pure ancient ice with no contaminants down to a depth of 500 meters. The rock crust on top of the ice is only 30 meters at its thickest. After only two days drilling Bill and Sheona decide that it would be safe to land the vessel directly on the depression.
    â€˜I think we’re nearly done here, Bill, we’ve got all the data we need to send in our report direct to Sky Jewel. I’ll send Borazik a copy as well. They are going to flip out when they see how much ice is in this deposit!
    â€˜We are going to be mega rich!’ laughs Bill ‘I’ll just finish this last hole then we can call it a day.’
    Bill feeds the laser-head drill rod deep into the ground. It passes the 400 meter mark, then 500, then 600. Approaching 700 meters the drill bit detects solid rock and stops drilling, the hollow rod now starts its journey back to the surface, retracting from the tubular hole.
    Solid ice core fills its inner tube. As the rod retracts towards the surface, ice squeezes out the end of the hollow rod, just like toothpaste out of a tube, breaking off in long cylinders 300 millimeters thick. These drop onto the ground in a growing pile of ice cylinders.
    Bill adjusts the extraction speed on the drill and is monitoring its progress when he notices a cylinder of ice break off the end of the rising ice cylinder. To his amazement, there is a strange blue pulsating light coming from within it. As he rushes over to check it out, he calls out to Sheona.
    â€˜Come over here and check this out!’
    As Sheona arrives from stacking up the cylinders of ice from the previous hole, Bill picks up the cylinder of ice and carefully prises it open to reveal a hotdog size, sapphire blue, pulsating crystal.
    He holds it out to Sheona. ‘What the hell is this Sheona? It’s beautiful!’ handing it to her gently.
    â€˜I’ve no idea, Bill. It’s obviously a crystal of some sort, check out the fine, smoky mist that swirls around it. Let’s take it back to the P V and see if we can get a molecular ID on it, the geo sampler should be able to ID it for us.’
    â€˜OK let’s do it now, I want to know what the hell this