Cutlass Sharpened Read Online Free

told me to never look at
anything at face-value. Look for what’s not there rather than what
is.”
    “ I don’t get it.”
    Stephanie was all about history and was one
who almost never lost her temper. Woe be to those when she did.
Renee on the other hand only had patience when treating a patient.
For anything else she was quickly bored and easy to set off.
    The glamorous blonde beauty
demonstrated with her hands. “Look at how the range lines up with
an old fault line. I’d bet my left arm that those weren’t
mountains, but volcanoes. They only looks like rounded mountains
due to constant battering of lethal sandstorms generated by the
desert.” She discarded all but the largest of them all.
“ This one in
particular struck me as strange for over an hour, but I couldn’t
quite put my finger on it till Jess fixed it for me like this. What
do you see of this volcano?”
    “ Nothing?” She
guessed.
    “ Precisely.” Stephanie
grinned all the way to her pointed eyeteeth. “Nothing. The volcano
looks like a mountain.”
    “ Uh, I’m with Renee.” Steven
said after setting course along with the fighters to the place the
blonde was interested in. “I’m confused. Isn’t a mountain a
mountain and a volcano a mountain too?”
    “ Not at all.” Stephanie’s
normally calm navy blue eyes sparkled with interest of discovery.
“If you look at this big one. It tells me it either was built by
the largest opening or was the last to be made to retain its
stature. If you look at the others around it…” she pulled her hands
together in the hologram to show the extinct volcanoes near it.
“What do you see now?”
    “ Oh!” Renee squeaked out
first and pointed “Lava tubes! They all have cavities and chambers…
all but the big one!”
    “ That’s my girl!” Clapped
Stephanie. “It is a dead volcano, but why would its core be solid I
asked myself. It was the newest in the range. Just because our
scans didn’t find a single sign of unnatural tool marks or
habitation doesn’t mean someone didn’t do something here. A standard
long range scan would reveal nothing out of the
ordinary.”
    “ My wife’s a genius!”
Jessica lilted with pride and though she didn’t see it, Stephanie
blushed.
    Stone reached the mountain first to report
“We won’t have long to work. My instruments detect a massive
oncoming sandstorm that will last a minimum of three weeks. You’ll
have no more than three hours before it hits. I’m also getting
something else.”
    “ What?” Prompted Deegen
closing in on his position.
    “ I’m uncertain. Could be
nothing. All the iron in the sand is making it difficult for
clarity. Likely boulders being tossed around. The average wind
speed in it is near eight and a half hundred kilometers per hour.
Our ships can’t handle that kind of onslaught more than five
minutes.”
    Steven said “Copy. We’re an hour out and I’ve
activated the maximum output to reach in the shortest time.”
    “ We’ll give a more in-depth
scan while we wait. If Stephanie’s hunch is right we’ll find
something irregular before you reach us.”
    Steven climbed the shuttle up for thinner air
to gain all possible speed without needing to do another reentry.
Stephanie though kept her focus glued to the hologram getting
clearer analysis as the two Fighters flew around and around the
target and soon had her grinning from ear to ear. “Thought to hide
from me, eh? Not a chance.”
     
    Roughly an hour later Renee stood beside
Sparky and felt the minor jostle of landing and lowering of
dampeners once reaching solid ground. She pressed the button which
opened the side cargo hatch and they exited first to find the two
sleek fighters landed side by side on the inner rim of the volcano.
She saw Satellite, Stone’s falcon, flying without need of an oxygen
mask since birds can live easily in higher elevations and Hunters
trained in harsher conditions so they didn’t require breathers
either. Renee and Jessica though