Read Rusch, Kristine Kathryn - Diving Universe SS3 for Free Online

correct.
    Then she had two of her assistants look through geologic records to see if anyone had mapped caves in the Naramzin Mountain Range.
    The mountains, it turned out, were mostly unexplored—or at least, they hadn't been explored in the modern era. Only mountain climbers, adventurers, and extreme athletes had gone up there until the archeologists and scholars descended upon the Spires of Denon as if they were some kind of holy relic.
    She couldn't even tell what had caused the descent—whether it was some scholarly discovery or a meeting or something that happened in passing.
    Zeigler's research was meticulous. She had started with the works he'd published six years ago, and worked her way forward. She hadn't cared as much about his hypothesis about the City of Denon, the hypothesis that had turned out to be right. She probably should have, because if he'd used similar logic and proof to find the caverns, then she could really trust his conclusions.
    Only she somewhat trusted them now, and she barely had the patience to go through the six years of research. The idea of going over his entire life's work gave her the shudders.
    Zeigler made his presentations in lectures, holovids, actual documents, and at conferences where his words were recorded, as well as the question and answer sessions. All of his raw research was easily accessible, unlike some work she'd seen. Some scholars made it hard to dig through the raw materials, but Zeigler clearly wasn't afraid of someone stealing his positions.
    He obviously wanted his work to be transparent, so that the other scholars would realize how correct he was.
    It had taken her days to go through the material, and she still wasn't done. But she was convinced: there were caverns beneath the City of Denon.
    The problem was, she'd had her ship's sensors go over the mountain range. The area around the Spires was blocked. Every time a sensor touched the area, the stream got bounced back to her ship with a warning:
    Energy of any kind could destroy a valuable part of Amnthra. The Spires of Denon are a preserved monument to the ancient past. If your work destroys even a small portion of the Spires, you will be subject to the Monument Protection Arm of the Unified Governments of Amnthra....
    All of that, followed by legal codes and legal language. The upshot—years in an Amnthran prison or something equivalent in other parts of the sector, her ship's license removed, and her travel privileges permanently suspended. Even if she didn't get the prison sentence, the other items terrified her more.
    She stopped using the sensor. It hadn't compiled any information from the nearby mountains, either. They had come up blank on her data screen, which was odd. As if they were simply a holographic feature of the land, something she knew was not true.
    She had experienced sensor white-out on other jobs. Usually the sensors stopped functioning because of a protective field, but she couldn't believe one existed so close to the Spires.
    Although something had to exist, given the way her own beam had come back to her, along with a message. But she hadn't traced that message. It could have come from any part of Amnthra, activated when her sensor touched the protective barrier near the Spires.
    She would figure all of that out when she needed to. Right now, she was trying to customize one of the holomaps of the mountain range. She looked up when her assistant, Roye Bruget, came into the room.
    It wasn't really fair to call Roye an assistant. He was more like a part of her. They had worked together from her very first job, and he had saved her butt more times than she wanted to think about.
    Sometimes she felt that even though she was nominally in charge, Roye knew more about the way everything worked. Her team usually trusted him to be the voice of reason on her jobs. She could be snappish, short, and difficult on good days. Roye was always cheerful, always willing to help.
    Unless someone made him