A "vertical slice" of fiction.
Heliacal
“Are you sure you want to go speak to Julien? He controls the assets here, and it’s not exactly like you’re on good terms.”
“Sophie, I have to follow through on this. It’s been decades of work to get to this point, but even putting that aside I just can’t shake it. It occupies my mind during the day, it occupies my dreams… I need to do this.” He sat next to Sophie now, taking a spot on the couch which wasn’t covered in hardware or tools. “Julien doesn’t have any power here anyway, I have something he’s been desperate to obtain for the last seven years, as well as the, uh, insurance policy I put in place before we arrived. He may think he has control, but the truth of the matter is he has as much to lose as we do. He’ll put on a show, but he’ll help us.”
There was a heavy pause. Neither of them wanted to admit they were scared of losing each other.
He stood up from the couch and walked over to the screen-table, staring at a small blinking green indicator on the display. After uttering a short vocal command the image presented lifted off the surface of the screen-table and filled the space in the room above it, swelling almost to the full height of the room.
The flickering holographic image represented the planet’s third moon, a small tidally locked satellite several hundred kilometers in diameter. The surface was uninteresting, being made up of mostly yellow-ish material compressed by eaons of impacts from debris, but it wasn’t the surface he was interested in.
Deep below the surface the green indicator pulsed steadily. Now that there was room to do so, additional information about energy signatures was being displayed along side it.