The core drill was a cumbersome thing; its derrick—made of a white triangular lattice—extended thirty meters into the blue-green Donovanian sky. Not to mention that the big machine was deafening. The whine from the electric motor was one thing, the way the drill stem and running gears clattered was another. A pump was blatting as it sucked mud from the pit before forcing it down-hole to lubricate the bit where it chewed through metal-rich rock. It was loud enough to blot out even the raucous local chime, which was different from anything Kalico Aguila had heard in the north.

Kalico’s team from Corporate Mine was drilling the first exploratory hole in the Southern Continent, half a world away from Corporate Mine and its smelter. Lea Shimodi, Corporate Mine’s head geologist, had been intrigued by this particular formation for years.

This was all a metamorphic deposit—hard and dense stone that had been cooked under incredible pressure then fractured, faulted, and compressed so that liquid metals had been squeezed up through cracks in the rock.

Kalico Aguila—wearing a chamois-hide coverall—watched the tubular drill stem where it rotated in the deck, mud and cuttings oozing up around it to run off into the pit. Since she’d first learned that a Board Appointed Inspector General was aboard Turalon, her nerves had been on end. Her gut dyspeptic.

She’d known Suto Soukup a decade ago when she’d been Board Supervisor at Transluna. His reputation had been as an uncompromising ferret when it came to corruption, malfeasance, and graft. Now he was arriving on Donovan with a Board Appointment. Carte blanche to stick his nose into anything he wished, ask any question he desired, interrogate any person, with the power to arrest and charge anyone he found culpable.

At that moment, Lea Shimodi hurried forward with a sample cup and scooped up some of the goo. Retreating, she skipped her way across the deck and down the ladder. Staring fixedly at her sample, the geologist hurried across the scorched bedrock to where the shuttle ramp was down. Two marines, Abu Sassi and Sean Finnegan, in full armor, helmets on and weapons at the ready, stood to either side. Lea barely gave them a glance as she trotted up the ramp and into the shuttle bay, now a makeshift laboratory.

Kalico took another look around.