Dr. Sandra Martinez's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Sandra crouched beside the sensor array and pulled up the first week's data on her tablet. The micro-tremors were constant, barely perceptible vibrations that her equipment caught at 0.0002 Richter scale. She traced the patterns with her finger, watching how the tremors clustered along fault lines she'd created. The review board had warned her, and she'd done it anyway. Now thousands were dead, and these readings proved the instability was spreading. She needed to understand the tremor patterns before she could design a stabilization system. Her gut had failed her once—this time, she'd trust only the data. The dome's power supply was draining faster than expected. Sandra stood and wiped sweat from her forehead. She needed a stable energy source that wouldn't fail during the next tremor. The geothermal well took three days to drill. Metal pipes descended deep into the earth, tapping into heat from the unstable ground below. The irony wasn't lost on her—using the planet's own energy to power the equipment that might save it. Steam hissed from the wellhead as she connected the generator. The screens inside the dome flickered, then brightened. Her calculations showed the well could run everything indefinitely. She checked the sensor feeds one more time, then opened her notebook to sketch the first design for a tungsten carbide drill head. The real work was just beginning.