Star Force: Empire (SF58) (11 page)

“Good,” she said with a bit of relief. New pieces to
work with were always a bit jittery, for her workers were used to building the
same design specs again and again, with the process down to a very fast and
efficient routine that allowed them to assemble ships at an impressive rate.
“I’ll take you out myself, unless you want to snoop alone?”

“Lead on,” he said, finally abandoning the window.

Hightower would spend another 4 hours in the shipyard,
studying the new construction procedures and learning a few more of the old
ones, then he took his private puddle jumper through planetary orbit and out to
a jumppoint not cluttered with stations then over to Arcadia, the innermost
planet whose original desert wasteland was now almost entirely covered with
cityscape. There he went down to the surface and inspected the deep mining
operations and half a dozen factories, stopping by a maturia and then a Knight
training center before continuing with his system-hopping tour that would take
him some 3 weeks to complete before heading back to Corneria and his office
tower.

There he fell back into the regular routine, pulling
through massive amounts of data from across the system while also monitoring
news feeds from across the empire, the ADZ, and the war reports, along with a
new message from Paul.

That he pulled up first off and saw a short tech note
indicating that a new containment shield was in prototype stage and working
well, putting them one step closer in the long journey towards stellar mining.

Hightower pulled up a secure file, then a hologram of
the V’kit’no’sat version of a ‘star forge’ manifested itself over his desk,
next to which was a long list of items necessary for its construction, a few of
which had checkmarks next to them. With the touch of a button and a bit of
virtual scrolling he found the containment shield requirement and checked it
off, putting them one step closer to the mother of all corovon mining
operations.

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