When Earth Reigned Supreme (The Human Chronicles Saga Book 12) by T.R. Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

buildings fading into the distance south of the spaceport, with dozens of fifty-yard-wide conveyor belts stacked with uniform crates feeding into the complex. Huge cargo trucks were moving from the harvesters to the conveyor assemblies, dropping their loads in a dance of robotic efficiency before circling back around for another load.
    The massive complex had to be the processing center for the raw food being brought in from multiple universes. From here, the finished product would exit the complex in an equally impressive display of choreographed efficiency, to be distributed throughout the Colony.
    With a trillion hungry mouths to feed, this had to be just one of countless spaceport processing centers scattered throughout Sol-Kor space. Where this one was located was what concerned Adam the most.
    Drake switched the view to the north, and Adam heard an audible gasp from the members of his team.
    Beyond the grounds of the wide spaceport, a sloping plain rose up to meet a towering bluff, capped by a high ridge that the drone sensors placed at an elevation of a thousand meters above their present altitude. Adam had been on dozens of alien worlds in his time, but he had never seen something that looked this alien, this ugly and foreboding.
    Atop the ridge, seemingly built haphazardly out of various sized blocks of a mottled black and gray, rose a series of raggedly-shaped pyramids. The arrangement of their blocks followed no logical, symmetrical pattern except to form the basic shape of a pyramid. The structure appeared to be off balance and with huge gaps along the edges, giving the whole thing a craggy, disorganized look, as if blocks were added when needed and without regard to placement or aesthetics.
    Several of these pyramids bordered the ridgeline, with one taller than the others, even as its neighbors challenged the main structure for supremacy. Each structure staircased down to almost the base of the ridge before another grouping of blocks began to grow upwards to form the neighboring pyramid.
    The image zoomed in as close as it could, and Adam and the team could see more detail within the row of craggy pyramids. Each structure was connected to the one next to it by a series of tubes, and even from this distance they could see pods moving within. In addition, they could make out windows and doorways on the individual building blocks. Drake sent the size estimates of the blocks to the team via the HUD, and they found that most blocks measured four hundred feet across and one hundred feet high. The peak of the tallest pyramid was placed at seven thousand and eight hundred feet above the altitude of the drone.
    A quick count along the ridgeline found eighteen such pyramids before the row ended as the mountaintop fell away.
    “Drake, zoom in on the stuff at the base of the bluff,” Adam said.
    The image shifted, and it only took a split second for the team to realize what they were looking at: gigantic piles of trash, one at the base of each pyramid, streaming down the mountain and accumulating along the sloping plain. Each pile had to be a thousand feet or higher, and covered by a cloud of native birds feasting on the incredible smorgasbord of refuse.
    Drake noticed movement at the base of a pile and panned the drone in that direction. The distance was pretty far, yet the camera was able to pick up a huge convoy of black trucks cycling along the base of the mountains of trash. Following the line of trucks away from the pile led to another huge complex of structures just northeast of the team, huge columns of black and gray smoke billowing from half-mile-tall towers—a power plant, fed by the massive accumulation of trash indiscriminately dumped down the mountain from the huge pyramids above.
    At least they’re recycling , Adam thought. Yet it was the casual disregard for the surrounding environment that sobered him up. The Sol-Kor were pragmatic, single-minded creatures. They only cared for their Colony and the need to