Chapter 242: Excavations


    After a fine meal of tacos, Milo was unsure what to do. Rather than keep ying 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 quiterge. What he had thought was a thick te of metal was actually a rectangr 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 pirs 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 simr 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 sentmands to all the tunnelers,rge 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 ws 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-ss facete reced the soft mesh hood and face covering. It locked to the neckpiece of his suit, giving him full protection and a heads-up disy from his systems. He''d stolen many of the ideas mentioned in the original <em>Starship Troopers</em> book by Robert Heinlein to control his sensors and work with his systems. Tongue, jaw, and neckbinations acted like a keyboard. A detachable backpack contained air and water for extended use in areas where the air might be bad.


    He had rebuilt his ws after testing and much research into materials. Additional ''exo-muscle'' in hands, feet, and tail made up for hisck of mass. The w tips were tungsten reinforced with lonsdaleite, a hex-based carbon form 58% stronger than diamond. It wasn''t easy to work with, and the replicators had gone through several tries before Milo was happy with the oue. Alta-Viator wasn''t around in this world to give him sharp ws, so Milo made his own.


    Down in the sub-basement where therge tunnel started, he had a small cargo mover ready. The vehicle was meant for moving in service tunnels and was only 30" wide. Milo loaded tools and scanners and drove it into the tunnels that slowly sloped down to where the excavators had hit the blockage. After an hour, he emerged into a modest cave dug out by the machines. The air was bad here, filled with exhaust fumes and rock dust. He was d to have a full air system in the suit. Examining the material, he saw a dull grey metal with low luster. An attempt to scratch it with a diamond-tipped drill resulted in a broken drill bit. The ws of his suit couldn''t touch it. They were made of the hardest material avable to him, and they couldn''t leave a mark on substance. He was getting more and more excited as he tried several other tests.


    Forcing himself to breathe slower, he tested the material with X-Ray Fluorescence. The analyzer came up with no information other than 100% of the X-ray beam had failed to prate the material and excite its atoms. The angle didn''t matter; all of the beam was dispersed. That was the final clue Milo needed. Someone had built a huge instation of some sort using Copsium and hid it beneath a Habitat. The material was horrific to make. It was technically a metal, but the distance between individual nuclei was much shorter than normal, resulting in an ultra-dense material. A one-inch te of copsium was equivalent to ten feet of steel.


    There were many drawbacks to using it. First was the weight. At over a hundred times the density of normal steel, it was useless for anything other than a fixed location. Several corporations had dreamed of constructing tanks and missiles with the material, but it wasn''t feasible. Why buy a copsium armored tank that is too heavy for most roads and too slow to maneuver? Especially when it costs a thousand times more than a standard tank! Secondly, making copsium took the use of a microscopic ck hole to generate the stress needed to copse the molecr structure. The ck hole required the power of a fusion reactor. Each molecule of copsium was created in a flux state and could be moved maically to where it bonded with arger amount of the material. The building beneath Section E had taken years to construct fully, and Milo had zero doubts that it had contained a fusion reactor at some point. You simply couldn''t transport the amount of copsium in use here.


    Which gave hints as to what this was.


    The main uses of copsium were for armored bunkers beneath government capitols and nerve centers. Thergest 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 instation. 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 copsium walls. The small tunnelers had been busy making sure those tunnels would amodate 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 ur 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 maic 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 maic levitation transport system butpletely 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 instation first. It moved along steadily until it came to a blockage. Something had copsed the tunnel in this direction. That was something to investigateter. He sent the drone in the other direction. The tunnel was the same and ended in a set of copsium-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 momentter.