The shrill, grating noise sounded like some kind of metal drill boring into solid metal.
The scraping was so piercing it felt as though it could rupture a person's eardrums outright.
And from inside the tunneler's cockpit, Kain could see the fierce spray of sparks through the viewing window.
As the drill bit continued spinning at extreme speed and grinding even harder against the metal block ahead, the heat generated by the friction could not dissipate quickly enough. The whole area glowed red, as if it were about to melt.
At last, just when it felt like the drill in this tunnel was about to grind itself to pieces, the machine suddenly lurched sharply forward, as if it had punched into empty space.
It had broken through.
He kept drilling, and in the end successfully opened the tunnel and entered the inner area.
Bang!
The tremendous crash was the sound of something massive slamming heavily onto the ground. The tunneler had dropped into an enormous passage roughly fifty meters high and fifty meters wide.
What had looked pitch-black at first suddenly lit up from end to end, as if his intrusion had triggered something, making the whole passage blaze with light and letting him see the underground corridor far more clearly.
It was a passage full of cold metallic texture. Aside from the lighting, there was nothing else in sight.
He walked toward one side, and after about a kilometer, he reached the end of the corridor. Beyond a half-open metal gate was what seemed to be an unimaginably vast garage.
It looked like a garage for engineering vehicles, because there were many colossal metal beasts equipped with huge scoops.
Calling them beasts was no exaggeration, because they really were that large. Even the smallest of them was about twice the size of his ship, already comparable in scale to an aircraft carrier. The largest looked as immense as a mountain.
From the state of those engineering vehicles, their chaotic arrangement, the signs of damage, and the tire tracks on the ground, it looked as though before they had stopped functioning, they had been frantically ramming an even larger metal gate, one that seemed to be over a thousand meters high.
After checking the area, he found no trace of any humans. There were only signs that suggested the machines had gone berserk.
But one thing left Kain puzzled: one especially strangely damaged engineering vehicle in front of him.
That vehicle looked somewhat similar to a tunneler, something meant for boring through rock and metal.
And now it had been split into two grotesque halves.
One half remained a normal physical object, as though some force had sliced it apart in an instant.
The bizarre part was the other half, which was stuck flat against the ground.
It looked as though it had been subjected to some unimaginable pressure in a single instant, flattening it completely against the floor.
If that were all, he would not have found it quite so strange. The real problem was that this half pressed against the ground had been crushed until it was thinner than paper, yet it did not look as though it had been smashed apart.
It was more like that half had simply sunk into the surface below.
He stretched out a hand and carefully felt along the boundary between the flattened area and the untouched floor, only to find it unnaturally smooth, with no real edge between them.
It was as if that crushed half had turned into a picture pasted directly onto the ground.
He walked toward the gigantic metal gate that had clearly been rammed over and over. There was now a breach in it, though the engineering vehicles were still far too large to pass through. For Kain, however, slipping through the gap was effortless.
What lay on the other side of the gate?
He crossed through it and walked another kilometer or so, arriving at the edge of what seemed to be the platform of an industrial elevator. The sight before him left him staring blankly.
Had they hollowed out the entire interior of a planet?
He looked over the industrial elevator. It seemed like it might still work.
But how?
After searching around for several minutes, he finally identified what was probably a switch. Once he activated it, the platform immediately began to move.
Its movement was nothing like the industrial elevators in the hive cities. It did not resemble a twenty-first-century elevator either. There was no visible shaft around it, no cables suspending it. Instead, it seemed to move through some sort of tractor-beam system.
And even if that beam were not holding it, it did not look like it would simply fall. The platform itself seemed to hover in a state of weightlessness.
As it continued descending, the scene Kain witnessed made it feel as though he had entered the interior of Cybertron itself.
Just as a human might be rebuilt with metal and ascend through machinery, this planet too seemed to have been remade in metal.
After descending roughly a hundred kilometers, he reached a new level. If he wanted to go farther down, he would need to find another elevator.
The area he had arrived at was a huge plaza, and it was covered everywhere in strange graffiti.
Those graffiti all looked like people, as if someone had plastered human-shaped sticker tattoos all over the place.
And after noticing something, Kain approached one of the human stickers on a wall. It depicted a figure with an exposed "wound."
It did not look human.
It looked like an android.
Looking more closely at these human-shaped stickers, he found they all had something in common: their eyeballs and irises were all red.
And judging by their poses, they were clearly in the middle of attacking something, and they all held weapons with distinctly futuristic designs in their hands.
That was...!
Kain had spotted something else.
He walked toward the edge of one side of the enormous floating plaza and saw that out in the empty air beyond the edge were dozens of giant "sticker tattoos" suspended in midair. They looked like the stickers of armed aircraft.
The sheer abnormality of these sticker-like objects made Kain think of a certain blue robotic cat with a four-dimensional pocket, one that had gadgets capable of turning things into sheets of paper.
So Kain suspected that these had actually been struck by some kind of attack that had transformed them from three-dimensional entities into two-dimensional ones.
Was this not basically the same concept as the dimensional reduction weapons in The Three-Body Problem?
From what he could tell so far, the targets struck by this ability were mainly androids. In other words, the Men of Iron, the machine race that had betrayed humanity during the Dark Age of Technology, the same kind of Abominable Intelligence the Imperium now regarded with such hatred.
Of course, that did not mean the Imperium was foolish enough to stop developing all computational technology out of fear of creating Abominable Intelligence.
After all, enormous quantities of data simply could not be processed by the human brain alone.
Cogitators were the Imperium's term for its digital computers.
Naturally, their level of intelligence fell far short of true AI capable of independent thought. (Lexicanum)
The life-sign scanner he had brought along continued its search, but still found no living beings. Other detection instruments also failed to pick up anything suspicious moving nearby.
What they did detect, however, was an immense energy signature below.
Before long, he found another industrial elevator and continued descending until he reached a depth of one thousand kilometers.
"Hm?"
A sense of disorientation hit his body, as if heaven and earth had flipped upside down.
He adjusted himself immediately.
Gravity had reversed.
Now he was standing as if on the ceiling, while the space leading toward the planetary core had become the sky above him.
And then he stared in astonishment at the new scene before his eyes.
What was this?
He had the strange feeling that he had stepped into The Wandering Earth and arrived beside one of its planetary engines.
The difference was that in The Wandering Earth, the planetary engines were installed on the planet's surface, firing upward into the sky.
Here, however, the structure was deep inside the planet itself, and the planetary engine was firing downward toward the core.
(End of Chapter)
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