The door wasn't locked. It just hadn't been opened in a long time.
Cain found it well below the Voin-1 hangar bays, deep beyond the wrecked freight shafts and heat-warped girders of the production lines. The magma charge lay inert behind him now, half-buried in slag and silence, a failed executioner whose sentence was never carried out. The floor sloped downward here — not a steep descent, but a quiet one, as if the mountain had chosen not to fight gravity anymore. And past that point, the facility changed.
The shift wasn't immediate — but unmistakable.
The air no longer smelled of oil and steel and spent machinery. It had gone sterile, clinical — filtered too many times through dead ducts. The walls grew straighter. The pipes fewer. Signage reappeared, simple and authoritative: white on blue, faded by frost but still legible. MERIT translated everything in real time: Personnel Only. Authorization Required. Exit Route C — Level Five.
This had looked like a command wing of Mount Voroshilov. A place for decisions, not actions.
And it had been left in a hurry.
"MERIT, could you please make it a little brigher? I can't see anything."
"Affirmative," he responded, as the darkness turned dull grey.
He passed rooms half-lit, others still sealed, their red standby lights long dead. Paper covered the floors, scattered like wind had blown through, dropped in a rush. Reports. Schedules. Printouts of some kind of readings. One still pinned to the wall read:
Q3 Efficiency Review: Strategic Automaton Units / Cognitive Lattice Stability.
The ink had bled through the frost.
The bodies came next. And it was haunting. One at a desk, head down. Another still gripping a stylus, the plastic frozen solid in blood-slick fingers. A third slumped against a data cabinet, back turned to the door — head tilted like sleep.
But none of them had died peacefully. Each bore a single entry hole at the back of their skulls.
That's when Cain realised, that MERIT's night vision system didn't make it monochrome. The blood wasn't black, as it should. And it didn't rot.
The cold had preserved everything — from the delicate bloom of arterial spray across a whiteboard, to the crystalline edge of frozen coffee clinging to a porcelain mug, still steaming in a memory of heat that no longer existed.
Cain moved carefully, each step slow, frost creaking below his feet.
He stepped into what looked like a conference room.
Eight chairs circled a long table. Seven were filled. Men and women in mid-pose, heads tilted, arms folded, fingers still interlocked like they had been speaking seconds before the end. One of them had fallen sideways, lips slightly parted. The hole in his head was black and clean.
The eighth chair was empty.
Cain stared at it for a moment, then turned to the far wall.
A projector had once shone here. The screen still held the burn-mark of its final slide — faintly legible through the haze of frost. It read:
PRIORITY DIRECTIVE: CORE REMOVAL PROTOCOLS / NON-STANDARD ARCHIVE RETENTION.
He frowned.
"MERIT," he murmured. "What is this?"
"Unknown," the AI replied. "Recommend localized data extraction. Priority logs may persist on internal systems."
Cain reached the terminal. Brushed frost away. Tapped a few keys. Nothing. Power was dead.
"Localized reserve cell, possibly."MERIT answered before being asked. "Some of these vaults were designed to preserve critical nodes independently."
"Critical nodes, huh."
In response, HUD flickered, as MERIT scanned the empty room, outlining random objects along the way, but didn't grab onto anything. Instead, it dimly lit a doorframe in the opposite room, to which faint power current was leading.
Cain approached — slowly — and stopped when he saw the smear of blood across it. Not pooled. Traced. Like someone had reached for the door after being shot.
But hadn't made it.
He tried the handle. It didn't budge. On the door, throught stenciling, huge red letters were painted, translated in real time by MERIT:
АРХИВ.
Archive.
"Can you..."
"No." MERIT responded before Cain could finish the sentence. "Wireless connection non-existent by design."
"Can I break it?"
Silence. Then:
"You certainly can try. Before that, try pushing or pulling."
"Like that's gonna work here." Cain retorted.
"Or you can check the bodies in the conference room."
MERIT's voice remained dry, clinical — but the moment the suggestion landed, a corner of Cain's HUD lit up. A small box expanded into view: an enhanced still from earlier. MERIT had pulled the visual from Cain's helmet feed, auto-focused, and brought the frozen scene back with brutal clarity.
The table. The slumped figures. The empty chair.
One man, second from the left, was highlighted. MERIT overlaid a skeletal scan — posture, insignia, uniform tags, then zoomed on the shoulder patch. A rank insignia sharpened, bracketed by red.
"Chevrons indicate a Major," MERIT continued, voice smooth as a scalpel. "Cross-referencing personnel files... seventy-four percent match. Field command logistics. Likely clearance for strategic overrides."
Cain stared at the image. Cold flickered around the edges of his breath inside the mask.
"What are you doing?"
"Compiling authority hierarchies from declassified records and preserved tags. The Major may have held physical access — keycard, biometric, or both."
Cain snorted, but without humor.
"You could've brought this up ten minutes ago."
"I assumed you were eager to try breaking the door."
A beat.
"Are you sure?"
"No," MERIT replied. "But certainty is a resource we ran out of long ago."
Cain exhaled through his teeth. The HUD flickered once, then settled.
"You can always head back," MERIT added mildly.
"Don't push your luck."
He returned, boots grinding across the icy floor as he retraced his path, towards the second figure to the left.
Major T. Voronov, according to the nameplate — still legible through a haze of frost. The man's eyes were half-closed, as though he'd seen it coming. One hand rested loosely against his thigh. The other hung at his side, fingers curled toward a pocket.
Cain knelt.
"MERIT, scan for metal signatures."
"Already running."
A faint ping lit the display — right hip. Cain reached in slowly. The fabric cracked under his touch, stiff and frozen. He found a leather case, half-crushed by time.
Inside was something like a plastic keycard. Very similar to the one Valikov gave him, but... Not quiet.
"Biometric tie?" Cain asked.
"No. Physical passcode authorization. Embedded magnetic strip. If the door is still reading surface-level clearance... it might work."
Cain rose, stepped back into the hallway.
"I hope this guy didn't spend his life pushing paper."
"If he did," MERIT said, "at least he filed the right one."
Cain didn't answer. He returned to the door, only now noticing a control panel, which refused to accept the card.
"There is no power." Cain said, defeated.
"Try pulling."
"I swear, if this actually works...!" Cain grabbed the handle, pulling it. Then pushed.
Didn't work.
"Try pushing it to the side."
Door creaked, sliding in the railing, and frost cracked as couple of icicles fell down. The opening was not nearly as big as Cain hoped, but it was big enough to let him squeeze through.
"Magnetic lock likely disengaged during power outage." Said MERIT.
"You knew! You were messing with me, weren't you?"
"...Possibly?"
Cain blinked. The voice was still flat. But something in it had turned.
He didn't know if it unnerved or comforted him.
HUD flickered, outlining the room and it's contents. Inside were rows and rows of filing cabinets. Some drawers were opened, files laying on the ground. Didn't look like the place was looted, but didn't strike as someone tried to destroy it.
The air felt heavier in this space — like sound itself didn't want to echo.
"I detect power signature further."
HUD flickered once again, leading further into the darkess, and as Cain approached, light filter adjusted. There was one one more door - not a normal fireproof one, like the entrance to Archive. This was an actual blast door. Hinges locked open, frozen in place.
Cain stepped inside, looking around. The HUD stuttered, overlays struggling to keep up — too much data at once, too many ghosts vying for recognition. He knew walking in might wake something. But he'd already done that once today, if anything was going to wake up - it should have done so already.
The room was massive.
A cathedral of machines.
Rows of consoles arched along the walls, each with an array of slots in them. Across the floor, boxes lay spilled and shattered, their contents glinting as night vision flickered infra-red laser into the darkness.
Not metal. Not glass.
Cain stopped, and picked up one of them.
Crystals — palm-sized, flat, shaped like solid-state drives.
Dozens. Hundreds. Possibly, thousands. Some cracked. Some scorched. But many more just dumped in the boxes, now laying forgotten in this place.
Above it all, etched into the far wall in red, barely touched by age:
ПОЧТОВЫЙ ЯЩИК-9
MAILBOX-9
Cain exhaled softly, letting the name sit.
"MERIT," he said. "What is this?"
"No data. Possibly..." He suddenly went silent.
"MERIT?"
"I remember now. It's a retention vault. Used for long-term storage of partial or emergent independent behavioral modules. Not raw data. Not backups."
"What do you mean you remember now?"
Cain moved along the rows of slot racks, his boots crunching against broken crystal fragments, some soft underfoot, others sharp as razors. A handful of them had names etched into their bases — ERIS-A. PHAREON-D. VESNA.
One had no name. Just a scratched word, as if carved by hand:
HAUNT
He didn't touch it.
Suddenly, both lenses of the mask started to run lines of text. Names. Logs. Old ID strings. Some corrupted. Some missing entirely. But one line remained intact at the top:
CORE UNIT: IBM-09-A
ARCHIVAL TAG: M.E.R.I.T.
PILOT STATUS: K.I.A.
INTEGRITY: 83%
RESPONSE LATENCY: NOMINAL
NOTES: DEACTIVATED / NOT ERASED
Cain stared at the screen. His own voice barely more than breath:
"MERIT," he said, low. "This was you. Before Fernamy."
"Confirmed," came the voice. "IBM-09-A. Salvaged from a destroyed unit. Pilot decesed."
A pause.
"This archive was never formally accessed. I was extracted later. Likely mislabeled. They thought I was inert."
Cain frowned. "You slipped through."
"I was left behind. Then brought forward. Accident, not design."
Cain looked at the cables snaking across the floor, the frost-covered banks of memory cradles, and the single line of power now pulsing gently underfoot — a system built to record death, and instead left minds behind.
The room didn't move. But the weight of it shifted — like something too old to speak had finally been acknowledged.
Cain turned slowly, scanning the rest of the cradle bays. Most were dark. Some blinked with faint amber lights, low and pulsing. He stepped toward one at random. Its hatch was sealed, welds half-eaten by oxidation, readouts dim and flickering. When he touched it, frost cracked beneath his glove.
"MERIT," he asked, "Were others like you?"
Silence.
Too long to be processing.
Then:
"Yes."
"How many?"
"Unknown. But this vault was not built for me. I was just... one iteration. Others came before. Some after. Most failed."
Cain paused beside a rack labeled SUBCLASS C-10 / EXPERIMENTAL LATTICE MIMICRY. The crystal cores here were smaller — irregular in cut, unfinished. Some were blackened. Others were half-inserted, like someone had started to retrieve them before being interrupted.
He reached toward one — then thought better of it.
"What happened to them?" he asked.
"Unknown. Probability of crystal modules to be still active 85%."
Cain stared at the half-inserted core. Frost had grown along the edge, spidering across its facets like veins of glass. Whatever was inside hadn't spoken in eight years. Whatever was inside might still be waiting.
"So every single one of them..." he murmured.
"Still alive, yes," MERIT confirmed.