"Mark, buddy," Marcos's voice crackled over the secure channel with a casual, almost exhausted tone. The audio feed thrummed with a bizarre mixture of digital fatigue and unadulterated awe, and the modulation clipped slightly at the extreme edges of the syllables, an indicator of heavily taxed internal processors operating near their thermal limits. "Look, man, I know you literally just managed to take one small leap for man, but a giant one for mankind twenty minutes and 42 seconds ago, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed your brief moment of domestic tranquility feeding the local apex predator, but I am going to need you to head to the command canopy in the military base immediately. I have already taken the liberty of summoning Juan, Aurelia, and Kenjiro from their respective sectors. You will all definitely want to sit down for the presentation I have prepared."
Mark frowned, the lines on his forehead pulling together to form a crease of weary curiosity. The sudden shift in Marcos's tone from his usual sharp wit to this strained, taxed tone put him on edge. "What's going on? Did something happen at the enrichment plant? Don't tell me something bad happened at the quarry."
"Relax, man. You can stop tallying up hypothetical infrastructure damages," Marcos replied with a hint of dry amusement bleeding through his digital fatigue. "Everything is alright. This situation does not pertain to an industrial accident. It is strictly regarding the data from the highly encrypted archive that the dormant Sentinel forcibly jammed into my mainframe before it initiated its self-termination sequence three weeks ago."
Mark let out a slow breath, unclenching his jaw as a wave of relief washed over him. "Alright. That's good news. But why call an emergency meeting out of the blue for that? I mean, we were just in the lab. We could review the files there."
"Because aside from the one table on the Shepherd, the tactical holotable in the canopy is the only projector array in the entire colony capable of rendering the macro-scale topographical data I need to show you," Marcos retorted smoothly. "Furthermore, the laboratory's primary atmospheric scrubbers are still actively venting the highly toxic, radioactive fumes from your final melted prototype. It is hardly an appropriate environment for a command briefing, much less for a child. Speaking of, bring little Lyra along. She appreciates my high-fidelity holographic displays much more than you do."
Mark looked down at Lyra, who was completely absorbed in her task, wiping a dusting of breadcrumbs off the fuzzy, worn face of her stuffed bear. Atlas had positioned his chin in the dirt mere inches from her boots, his eyes tracking the surrounding civilian movement with indifference.
"Alright," Mark said into the comms, reaching down to hoist Lyra securely back onto his hip. She wrapped one arm around his neck, settling comfortably against his chest with the bear squeezed between them. "Give me ten minutes to make my way there."
Mark picked Lyra up and began a jog straight toward the military compound. Atlas woke immediately, and though he had been left behind initially, he quickly caught up.
As they made their way through the colony, laborers carrying heavy crates of refined materials and passing engineers reviewing digital datapads instinctively gave the trio a very wide berth. They pressed their backs tightly against the modular housing units to let the giant predator pass without incident, offering Mark quick, respectful nods as he jogged by.
Mark approached the heavily fortified command canopy, which had apparently undergone some upgrades during his time of absence. The structure featured thick and aggressively angled S-Alloy composite plates designed specifically to deflect explosive shrapnel. It formed a squat, heavily armored bunker resting squarely in the center of the military sector, surrounded by reinforced sandbags and dormant automated turrets. He stepped through the primary threshold, surprised to see Atlas squeeze his bulk inside the doorway before hitting the control panel.
It seemed as if some of Snowball's antics were rubbing off on him.
The thick doors hissed shut behind them, and the pneumatic locking bolts slid deep into the reinforced floor with a vibrating clunk, completely isolating the room from the outside world.
Mark walked across the grated decking toward the central tactical table. He leaned his weight heavily against its reinforced edge, keeping Lyra seated comfortably on his arms. Gathered around the opposite side of the table were Aurelia, Kenjiro, and Juan.
"Alright, Marcos, we're all here," Mark announced to the room, offering a quick nod to the others. "Talk to us. What is it that you've been burning all that processing power on."
The intricate matrix of holographic projectors embedded into the ceiling paneling whirred to life, and Marcos materialized in the immaculate form of an Earth-era English butler.
Though he'd used a butler avatar before, it was different this time. He wore a sharply tailored black tuxedo with a white shirt and immaculate white gloves, and, instead of his young appearance, he looked like an older gentleman with well-groomed, silver-grey hair and a full, neatly trimmed "Van Dyke" style beard and mustache. And though he carried a stoic, attentive, and slightly formal expression, his voice still carried the weight of digital fatigue as well as his trademark sarcasm.
"Good afternoon, little Lyra," Marcos greeted warmly in a heavily accented British voice, offering a deep bow that made the little girl giggle in delight. Her eyes tracked the glowing blue figure with fascination. Marcos's avatar then straightened up, his glowing eyes fixing on Mark. "For the past three and a half weeks, while you were isolating yourself inside the laboratory to successfully master the transmutation of Helium-3, I have been waging a grueling, incredibly aggravating war of my own within my processing core while also helping you. My primary servers have been running at such extreme temperatures, that I am genuinely surprised I haven't melted entirely through the floorboards of the Shepherd."
Kenjiro let out a low whistle, crossing his arms over his coveralls. "I had noticed something off when I went into the cargo bay to retrieve some of the goodies I had stored away. I then checked the systems and was wondering why the ship's ambient coolant lines were running thirty percent above their standard baseline. I thought we had a mechanical leak or something, but it was just you overriding the thermal safeties?"
"Necessity dictated drastic measures, dear Kenji," Marcos replied smoothly. He raised his white-gloved hands, elegantly conducting the empty air as millions of luminescent alien glyphs, complex overlapping geometric matrices, and incredibly dense, multi-dimensional code began to spin rapidly around the avatar's form. The projection cast a haunting, shifting blue light across Mark's face and caused Lyra's fascination to explode as she gasped softly, reaching her small hand out over the table to try and catch the floating, glowing symbols.
"Unlike its initial appearance, the data packet the Sentinel handed over was anything but simple," Marcos continued, the glyphs swirling faster. "It was aggressively encrypted, and though the code had been written millennia ago, the programming utilized a localized, highly specialized Strathari cipher that dynamically shifted its own internal syntax every single microsecond. For those of you who don't speak binary, it means the architecture constantly rewrote itself to evade detection, employing a polymorphic variable state logic. In even simpler terms, whoever wrote this code was downright gipped by paranoia."
Mark kept his eyes locked on the spinning columns of data, leaning closer to the table. "Yeah, yeah, but then the mighty Marcos cracked it. Otherwise, I doubt you would've summoned us here just to show us a firewall beating you."
"Well, Mark, I bled for it, digitally speaking, of course," Marcos said, his avatar brought his hands together in a sharp clap, a gesture that caused the rotational speed of the holographic code to aggressively accelerate until the individual glyphs blurred into solid, glowing bands of blue light. "With the limited capabilities of the Shepherd, I initiated billions of simultaneous decryption simulations. But color my surprise when I not only failed, but did so repeatedly and spectacularly. I eventually resorted to utilizing Anahrin's foundational linguistic architecture as a brute-force mathematical battering ram, aggressively forcing the cipher to process massive volumes of contradictory logic loops until the primary lock experienced a catastrophic, system-wide failure. And after many attempts, I was able to crack it."
Marcos' avatar stopped and looked at Mark. "Mind you, I did this all while having myself split helping you. As of now, I have spent the exact duration of the last twelve hours fully translating, compiling, and decoding every single byte of the machine's digital legacy into a format comprehensible to human engineering."
Mark uncrossed his arm to adjust his grip on the edge of the table and shifted Lyra in his other. "And? What exactly did we get out of the machine's head? Was it worth almost melting your servers?"
"Well, you can say it was more than worth it since I was able to acquire the absolute holy grail of localized, planetary defense," Marcos declared proudly as his butler avatar swept his arm in a wide, theatrical arc. As he did so, the swirling bands of code snapped outward, dissolving into the air to display a sleek, highly detailed, imposing schematic of the fifteen-meter-tall Sentinel mech they had previously fought in the cavern.
"I now possess the complete, uncorrupted engineering blueprints for their kinetic shielding algorithms," Marcos detailed. He highlighted the invisible overlapping energy fields surrounding the mech's digital chassis with a soft, pulsing green glow. "These algorithms function by actively displacing mass and kinetic energy across a localized electromagnetic grid, rendering physical projectiles completely inert upon impact. Furthermore, I have extracted the precise metallurgical formulas for the hyper-dense dark metallic-ceramic alloy comprising their exterior armor plating, and the exact capacitor routing schematics necessary to power their low-velocity flechette launchers."
Kenjiro stepped forward immediately, his dark eyes glued to the rotating blueprints. His thermal dynamics expertise kicked into overdrive as he analyzed the projected energy flows and the associated heat generation readouts. "I imagine that the thermal displacement on something like this would be massive... If we try to fabricate the actual projection hardware and emitter cores out of standard titanium, or even our S-Alloy, the internal components will literally melt into slag from their own ambient feedback. S-Alloy might be one of the strongest metals we know, but it still has a defined thermal ceiling. Maybe if we utilize the complex ceramic blends we just pulled from the quarry to cast the core components, we could potentially insulate the emitters."
He paused, tapping his chin with a finger. "But we can still use the S-Alloy... I mean, we did rebuild that one IUC corvette and literally designed its entire hull out of S-Alloy in a way that it could act as a massive thermal vent. If we scale down that exact dispersion lattice for these emitter cores, and then cast them with the complex ceramic blends we just pulled from the quarry to force the thermal exhaust outward..."
"Your assessment is precisely on the mark, Kenji," Marcos responded as his avatar turned to look directly at the engineer while elegantly adjusting his cuffs. "I have extracted the precise metallurgical formula for the alloy used to cast this piece of hardware. And while we do possess printers that work at the atomic level, we currently lack the specific quantum-forge manufacturing capabilities required to replicate its impossibly dense, yet lightweight atomic structure. The metal actively consumes and redirects heat with near-perfect quantum efficiency that we yet cannot match."
Marcos pointed a finger at the glowing green energy grid. "However, by reverse-engineering their shield algorithms and utilizing the thermodynamic venting principles you lot established for that IUC corvette, we can possibly manufacture our own human variant. The ceramics will act as a highly directed heat-sink array, forcing the S-Alloy to bleed the thermal feedback into the surrounding atmosphere."
"It's going to run incredibly hot," Kenjiro muttered, visualizing the physics as a prototype in his head. "Venting into a pressurized atmosphere presents a lot more problems than bleeding heat into a vacuum. But it should work."
"If it does, it will undoubtedly possess downgraded effectiveness compared to the original design," Marcos confirmed. "Our version will likely fracture or overheat under sustained fire, where, as we noticed during the fight, the original components would hold completely firm, unless overwhelming firepower strikes. But it should function. Furthermore, we must maintain perspective: this Sentinel's hardware is hundreds of thousands of years old, and the Strathari were an ancient civilization of relentless innovators and cosmic polymaths. It is highly improbable that they did not continually iterate, advance, or create far superior alternatives to this specific product as their empire aged. By all means, this shield is merely our technological baseline."
Juan leaned heavily on the table, his heavily scarred face breaking into a wide, predatory grin as he looked directly at Mark. "So, you're telling me we could put active energy shields on my operators? My people are specialized ship-breachers. We know exactly how to lock down a zero-G corridor, vent the atmosphere, and clear an airlock. But, as you've already borne witness, out here against these lethal native beasts? We are completely out of our element. A proper heavy planetary infantry unit would have wiped the floor with those reptilians during the clearings of the forest, but my guys took some severe injuries. If we can actually take a physical hit without losing a limb or getting cut in half, it would completely cover our lack of planetary infantry training and change our entire operational capacity."
"It would be something that levels the playing field for your mercenaries, that's for sure," Marcos agreed out loud. His avatar then turned its eyes directly onto Mark and spoke directly and privately through the small earpiece securely resting in Mark's ear.
"Furthermore, Mark," Marcos said quietly into his ear, ensuring the rest of the command staff only saw a silent avatar looking respectfully at their leader, "highly advanced shielding technology is already deeply embedded within the theoretical data and lessons Anahrin left for you. It was information I unlocked as soon as I deciphered the mech's shielding technology, though it's another one of the things I'm hard-coded against simply using without you understanding its concepts. Concepts that go far beyond these ancient mechanical barriers the Sentinel used. You need to put in the grueling hours to manually work your way up to unlocking them."
The mention of Anahrin's lessons also got Mark's curiosity on whether his system held something similar or not. He kept his eyes open, maintaining a neutral and focused expression. But internally, his consciousness dove straight into the System's interface. He navigated past the glowing golden node of the perfected fusion reactor, searching the sprawling, branching digital branches of the [Technological Ascendancy] tree.
There, resting deep within the defensive logistical tier, was a node clearly labeled [Kinetic Energy Shielding]. He wasn't entirely surprised when he found it, but the progress bar beneath the text sat at a stagnant, flickering 1%. Mark knew instantly that he hadn't contributed a single ounce of effort or research to that specific percentile and that the System had tracked the aggregate technological progression of humanity as a whole, pulling from the collective achievements of the species.
Mark vividly recalled the news he had seen while on Mechanicus after the whole courthouse fiasco. Aegis Aerospace Inc., one of the massive ship-building conglomerates, had proudly shown off a highly unstable prototype energy barrier to the public. He remembered that it had managed to absorb exactly three direct missile hits before the containment fields catastrophically failed. Humanity had already taken its very first stumbling baby step into shielding technology. He just had to drag his species the rest of the way across the finish line.
Mark blinked, pulling his focus out of the system and back to the physical room. His mind raced through the possibilities of adapting the ancient hardware into something his people could wear. "That's incredible. The shield tech alone leapfrogs our defensive capabilities past anything the IUC has ever drafted by millennia. Show me the rest of the archive."
"Don't be so hungry now. That is merely the appetizer," Marcos interrupted smoothly, the external speakers successfully re-engaging. His avatar snapped his fingers with a theatrical flourish, and the entire mech schematic dissolved into a beautiful cloud of blue sparks.
The blue light shifted rapidly across the room and expanded outward across the entire width of the table to form a perfectly rendered, highly detailed three-dimensional topographical map of the northern mountain range. The camera angle of the map zoomed in aggressively, plunging downward through the holographic layers of topsoil, dense granite, and solid basalt to illuminate the massive doorway that Aurelia and the civilian mining crews had discovered buried deep inside Excavation Shaft One.
"When the Sentinel initiated its self-termination sequence and surrendered its data core three weeks ago, it voluntarily communicated its localized, primary directives," Marcos explained. His voice dropped into a solemn, almost reverent register, completely abandoning the Butler's lighthearted persona. "We already knew this specific mountain housed a primary automated foundry capable of massive-scale fabrication, and a highly secure genetic archive containing DNA locked in cryogenic stasis, amongst them uncorrupted Strathari DNA. That was the explicit knowledge it surrendered."
Mark leaned forward, his arm tightening subconsciously around Lyra's waist, pulling her closer against his chest. "Exactly. We know what the facility is, but we don't know what else is inside it. It's the entire reason I ordered the miners to move away from the mountain and seal the tunnels. Did you get any sure information as to what else is inside?"
"Something like that," Marcos stated simply as his avatar raised both hands, and the holographic map abruptly zoomed out. The projection expanded past the northern foothills, past the dense purple jungles they had explored, soaring hundreds of miles into the digital atmosphere until it rendered a massive, sprawling chunk of the entire alien continent.
"This facility is not an isolated installation," Marcos revealed, the gravity of the data hanging heavy in the chilled air of the canopy. "But merely a single node in a planetary grid."
Five new, distinct red markers violently flared to life across the massive holographic expanse of the continent. They were scattered hundreds of kilometers apart. As they appeared, the projection cross-referenced the ancient coordinates with the scout drones they had sent out, instantly painting the known terrain around each node in high definition.
"Though the drones haven't mapped the entire planet yet, they have flown continuous orbital and high-altitude sweeps over these specific regions," Marcos continued as the topographical data fleshed out the distant, wildly diverse environments. "One facility is buried beneath a massive, fractured glacial ice shelf far to the north. Another rests deep beneath a highly corrosive alkaline inland sea to the east. The third is situated under an active volcanic caldera. The fourth is entombed beneath an irradiated desert canyon network, and the fifth lies at the exact center of a hyper-dense mega-flora jungle plateau that makes our current purple forest look like a manicured lawn."
Glowing, pulsing blue lines shot out from the primary node in the mountain, perfectly connecting all six facilities together like a glowing subterranean spiderweb. "Furthermore, they are physically interconnected by a subterranean transit network. It is a series of vacuum-sealed, hyper-advanced maglev tunnels, each one spanning approximately thirteen hundred kilometers in length."
A stunned silence fell over the room.
Kenjiro took off his grease-stained cap, his dark eyes wide as he stared at the glowing blue transit lines spanning the digital continent. "Thirteen hundred kilometers... underground? The sheer geological engineering required to stabilize a vacuum-sealed maglev tunnel of that length, accounting for continental tectonic shifts and mantle pressure... it's literally god-like."
Juan let out a low, greedy grunt of appreciation. "So basically, if we can secure that central hub, we don't just get access to a foundry and a lab, but also a completely high-speed underground highway to five other untouched alien vaults across the continent. We wouldn't have to risk our own necks hacking through thousands of miles of unknown jungle to explore this planet and just take the damn train."
Mark stared at the glowing map, his arm tightening subconsciously around Lyra's waist, pulling her closer against his chest. The sheer scale of what lay buried beneath the earth was incalculable. This facility offered the key to planetary dominance and possibly a better understanding of the origins of humanity itself.
He already knew from Aurelia's initial reports that the internal hatch at Shaft One was an impenetrable dead end since the S-Alloy teeth of their industrial tunnel diggers had sheared off against the metal without leaving so much as a scratch on the paint. His mind instantly ran through their heavy ordnance before discarding the most obvious remaining solution.
"Explosives and any other sort of bombardment are entirely off the table," Mark stated firmly. "Even if we fired one of the Shepherd's railguns down the shaft, the kinetic overpressure within that enclosed rock structure would instantly turn the ambient air into superheated plasma, and the shockwave would vaporize the foundry's machinery and shatter the stasis fields. We'd be destroying the very thing we're trying to save."
"Yeah, no sh- ahem. Yeah, no duh, forgot there were children here for a moment," Marcos chimed in, projecting a rapid visual simulation to back up Mark's. The simulation had a slug slam into the door, and a massive shockwave instantly ripped inward, cascading destructively through the digital corridors. "You would forcefully turn hundreds of thousands of years of pure, preserved Strathari DNA into a rapidly decaying puddle of useless organic waste, and completely collapse the entrance to the thirteen-hundred-kilometer maglev network, rendering the entire endeavor moot."
Mark let out a frustrated breath, running his free hand roughly through his hair. "So, applying brute force results in a failure, destroying the objective entirely, and we lack the technology to cut through it. How the hell are we supposed to get inside to access the hub?"
"Well, I don't know, maybe by using the front door?" Marcos asked sarcastically. The simulation of the railgun faded away, replaced by a calm blue glow. The three-dimensional map of the mountain range began to rotate on a central axis, spinning a full one hundred and eighty degrees to display the far side of the northern peaks. It was a hostile region completely out of sight from the colony's current perimeter, facing the deep jungle.
"The door found buried in Shaft One is merely a secondary, internal loading hatch. It was purposefully engineered to act as an impenetrable dead-end for unauthorized access. The facility, however, possesses a surface entrance designed exclusively for massive logistical transit and the deployment of mechanized armor." Marcos said as the map zoomed in on the northern, outward-facing slope of the mountain range.
"The bad news," Marcos continued as his avatar clasped his gloved hands formally behind his back and highlighted a massive jungle of topographical data covering the entire slope. "Is that over the course of the last three hundred millennia, severe geological shifting, rainfall, and structural erosion have caused Mother Nature to essentially drop a mountain on the front porch. The main entrance concourse is currently buried under approximately a kilometer of highly compacted solid rock, dense dirt, and petrified debris. It is entirely entombed within the landscape."
Mark stared silently at the pile of holographic rubble displayed on the table. "We have the electric excavators, the heavy-duty loader mechs, and the manpower to dig it out. Sure, it will take a massive amount of time and logistical redirection, but we can physically clear the landslide. However, that still leaves us staring at a giant door made of a metal we can't dent. If we can't cut the metal, and we can't blast the lock mechanisms, how exactly does digging it out help us gain entry?"
"Because there is a highly crucial detail buried within the Sentinel's telemetry that changes our operational approach entirely," Marcos explained. The blue light of the hologram pulsed with a steady, rhythmic beat, matching Mark's rising pulse. "The facility's primary localized fusion reactor suffered a catastrophic failure epochs ago. The installation is currently running exclusively on deep-emergency backup systems. In other words, the landlord forgot to pay the electric bill."
Mark's eyes narrowed as he rapidly processed the detailed telemetry. He looked at the power distribution graph Marcos projected. "If the intelligence matrix initiated a severe triage protocol to preserve the genetic archive, it would have systematically starved all non-essential systems to conserve energy. The internal automated turrets, the atmospheric scrubbers, the localized shields..."
Mark paused, his eyes widening as the brilliant realization finally hit him. He looked directly at Aurelia. "The electromagnetic locks. It cut power to the main gates. Which means that they aren't actually locked, just shut closed."
"Bingo," Marcos confirmed. The hologram projected a highly detailed simulation of their civilian mining machinery rolling into position before the massive digital doors. "The only physical forces presently keeping the main entrance gates closed are the immense friction of the mechanical tracks and the sheer dead weight of the unpowered interlocking gears. A deadlocking system possesses absolutely no active resistive power to keep the gears firmly engaged."
Aurelia's eyes lit up brightly as the engineering solution crystallized in her analytical mind. "This is a mechanical puzzle, sir. If we utilize the machinery to fully clear the landslide and expose the main gates, my teams can weave heavy-tensile tow cables. We weld those cables directly to the structural seams of the doors."
Kenjiro caught the grand vision immediately, his mind racing through the physics of the operation. "We hook the opposite ends of those cables up to the winch mechanisms on our loader mechs. But, even with twelve bipedal mechs pulling at once... wouldn't their feet just drag and slip on the loose dirt before they can generate enough torque? We'll need to physically anchor the mechs deep into the surrounding bedrock using pylons to lock their legs in place and maximize their traction."
"Exactly," Aurelia nodded, looking eagerly at Mark. "We bolt their feet to the bedrock, sync the electric engines, and utilize overwhelming mechanical torque to physically pry the dead doors apart."
Mark stared silently at everyone within the room as a genuinely excited grin finally broke across his exhausted face. The simplicity of the proposed operation appealed directly to his pragmatic nature. Though he knew Marcos had it in the bag if they had to decipher magic codes or execute complex quantum hacking protocols to bypass the ancient security, he was happier that they just needed to use good ol' brute force.
"How long will it take to extend the maglev tracks and physically move more heavy equipment to the northern face?" Mark asked.
"If we order the crews to run the automated 8x8m mobile printers around the clock, continuously extruding track sections, we can establish the new staging area and officially begin clearing the entrance within a week," Marcos replied, running the logistical timelines in a fraction of a second. His Butler avatar offered a crisp nod. "However, excavating a full vertical kilometer of densely compacted rock and establishing a secure, fortified perimeter around the dig site will require approximately one month of continuous, uninterrupted labor following the track's completion."
"Get it done," Mark ordered as he turned his gaze away from his people and stared directly into the glowing holographic representation of the mountain's entombed northern slope, resting his free hand flat on the edge of the tactical table. "Juan, prep a heavy security detail to protect the workers since they'll be highly exposed out there. Aurelia, get those cables extruded and tested. Kenjiro, get everyone ready to begin extending around the mountain.
"We're going to crack this vault wide open," Mark said as his eyes narrowed, the pulsing blue and red light of the tactical table casting sharp shadows across his and Lyra's faces.
---
Patreon exists for those of you who want to read ahead:
https://www.patreon.com/Crimson_Reapr
Join us on Discord where you can discuss my work, meme about, or mess around, just don't be an idiot. This link is permanent:
https://discord.gg/qzAgV2vahM
Crimson_Reapr is the name, and writing Sci-fi is the way.