Deep within the gravel belt, shadows stretched and flickered.
Reagan Lazarus stared at the radar screen in front of him, his eyes bloodshot.
Two hours.
It had been two whole hours since those two mad-dog-like landships had departed.
The radar screen remained dead silent; aside from the occasional passing biological signal, there was nothing.
"Captain, we have to move," the first mate whispered beside him, a hint of panic slipping through his voice despite his best efforts. "Fuel is only enough to maintain a low-power cruise. If we don't leave now—once those two mad dogs realize what's up, or if we run into other predators—we really won't be able to get away."
Reagan gritted his teeth, crushing the cigarette butt in his hand into powder.
He knew it was time to go, too.
Sending out the advance team had been a massive gamble in itself.
A gamble that the mysterious forces of Fortress Horizon were reasonable, and a gamble that they might take a shine to the few blueprints he had in hand.
Looking at it now, he had probably lost the bet—
The convoy had likely been double-crossed, or simply eliminated as intruders.
"Notify the engine room to start preheating the engines," Reagan said, his voice raspy and drenched in the desolation of a hero at the end of his rope. "We'll head south and try our luck at the edge of the Sunless Sea."
Just then...
Zzz... Zzz...
A burst of static suddenly cracked through the comms channel, followed immediately by an excited, crackling voice shouting at the top of its lungs: "Captain! Captain! It's the convoy!"
"We're back! We're alive!"
Reagan lunged toward the console, nearly ripping the microphone off its stand. "What happened?! Did that faction accept you?"
"They did! They did!"
The convoy leader's voice carried a near-crazed excitement—the incoherent babble of someone who had just witnessed a higher civilization far beyond his comprehension. "Captain, you'll never believe what I saw!"
"The roads are hardened pavement with zero cracks! There isn't even a single rusted piece of rebar on the walls!"
"All of their people are wearing fully sealed power armor, and the weapons they hold are things I've never even seen before!"
"And they even gave us food—compressed field rations without a drop of radiation!"
As Reagan listened to the descriptions, a picture instantly took shape in his mind.
Smooth roads meant immensely high infrastructure capabilities and surplus resources; flawless walls meant perfect anti-corrosion technology and maintenance systems; power armor meant top-tier individual military hardware.
It seemed his judgment hadn't been wrong—the other party really wasn't just some ordinary warlord.
Judging by the tone of the description, they were very likely a hidden power of dark technology—true survivors who had inherited the legacy of the Golden Age!
"All hands, hear my command!"
Reagan abandoned all further thought, completely throwing his brain out the window. "Engines to maximum power output!"
"Destination: due north, Fortress Horizon!"
The massive, ugly body of the Scavenger roared to life. Its tracks kicked up clouds of dust as it hurtled furiously toward the north.
Two hours later.
They passed the previous battlefield—the very spot where the Fuck Your Grandma and its escort ship had been destroyed.
Reagan stood on the bridge, staring at the scene outside the window, his legs turning to jelly.
What a magnificent, yet utterly terrifying dismantling site!
Over a dozen massive heavy engineering drones hovered directly over those mounds of iron ruins.
Extending multiple mechanical arms, the plasma cutters at their tips spat blinding blue light.
Armor plating half a meter thick was sliced open under the cutters like butter.
Gigantic lifting electromagnets clamped onto the cut metal blocks, hoisting them straight into heavy trucks waiting alongside.
The entire process was smooth as silk with zero redundant motion—its efficiency was terrifyingly high.
Reagan watched, slack-jawed.
Every ship-scrapping he had ever seen in his life involved thousands of coolies wielding oxy-fuel torches and hammers, clanging away at it for months on end.
And the scene before his eyes—
"Is that... their engineering capability?" The first mate swallowed hard. "If those drones were used to dismantle our ship—"
"Accelerate!" Reagan interrupted him, a wild, fanatical gleam in his eyes. "Full speed ahead!"
Finally, Fortress Horizon came into view in the distance.
The black steel fortress stood towering at the end of the wasteland, radiating an aura of cold, lethal authority.
The Scavenger slowly decelerated, coming to a halt about three or four kilometers from the city wall.
Reagan straightened out his oil-stained captain's coat, preparing to deliver a heart-wrenching speech of surrender over the radio.
However...
Before he could even open his mouth...
Several black drones screeched through the air, hovering right in front of the Scavenger's bridge.
From the speakers beneath the drones came a young, indifferent, and deeply disgusted voice: "Black-smoke-spewing piece of junk, stop immediately."
"Take one more step forward, and I might not be able to stop myself from opening fire."
Reagan froze, frantically grabbing the mic. "My lord! We are here to join you—here to join Deep Space Industries!"
"We have technology! We have blueprints! This ship might look run-down, but its firepower is still fierce—"
"Fierce?"
Andy had deep doubts about that. "My scan results show that your ship's propulsion system consists of 826 internal combustion engines of various models hooked up in parallel."
"There are zero exhaust filtration devices, let alone any sound dampening facilities."
"Your thermal efficiency is only around 23%, leaving nothing for the crew except noise and carcinogens."
"Look at that black smoke trail behind your ass—it's practically smearing over my solar panels!"
"I need you to deeply understand that a large-scale pollution source like this is strictly forbidden from entering Fortress Horizon!"
To be fair, acquiring the Mimetic Polyalloy was indeed very satisfying, and Andy had technically agreed to their surrender verbally.
But when Andy actually laid eyes upon the Scavenger in the flesh, he felt nothing short of despair.
In particular, his initial assessment of the crew was extremely pessimistic.
He believed that an organization capable of building such industrial trash must be made up of utterly low-quality personnel.
It was almost certainly packed with coolies who only knew how to swing shovels, overseers holding whips, and meat shields with zero technical skills.
Letting this crowd in would yield nothing in terms of high-end productivity while consuming food and oxygen—and might even lower the average IQ of Deep Space Industries as a whole...
Holding the mic, Reagan froze on the spot as if struck by lightning.
He had envisioned many potential reasons for rejection.
Perhaps they didn't trust him, or perhaps they looked down on his strength.
But never in his wildest dreams did he expect the reason to be... environmental protection?!
Too dirty? Too noisy?
This is the damn wasteland, big bro! Whose landship DOESN'T spew black smoke?!
The ones that don't smoke are called dead ships, alright?!
Big bro! Shouldn't you reflect on whether YOU are being way too civilized and overly squeamish?!
Yet Andy's stance was adamantly firm, leaving no room for negotiation.
For an industrial zone currently engaged in precision manufacturing, a mountain of trash like the Scavenger—emitting hundreds of tons of waste gas per hour—was a total nightmare.
The sheer vibrations alone would induce manufacturing errors, not to mention the massive dust clouds damaging the dome satellites.
"Then... what should we do?" Reagan was on the verge of tears. "My lord, we really have nowhere else to go! If you don't take us in, we're dead meat!"
The comms channel went quiet for a few seconds.
Then another voice came through—it was Bauer.
"Boss, I don't think there's any value in keeping this ship around anyway."
"Aside from the two main drive shafts potentially containing a bit of Adamantite, the rest is pure garbage."
"How about..."
"We have them evacuate the crew and leave the ship right where it is?"
"It's not like three mining spots were enough anyway—adding one more makes little difference."
Andy thought for a moment.
Although this ship was trash as a vehicle, and its personnel were likely bottom-of-the-barrel...
As a mining node, its value surprisingly surpassed the three landships beside it.
While those three ships were rich in Adamantite, their material composition was far too uniform and extremely difficult to process—making them specialized ore.
The Scavenger, however, was different. It was a massive, fully categorized mobile scrap yard. Its hull contained everything from civilian copper wire and industrial rubber to ordinary carbon steel and all sorts of weird polymers.
"Chaotic variety" happened to be the favorite diet of the current Molecular Reconstructor; the messier the materials, the more room it had to work its magic.
Even in a world where everyone was competing to be worse, getting a ship to look as utterly wrecked as the Scavenger took a special kind of effort...
Beyond industrial uses, the subsequent construction of Fortress Horizon also required a massive amount of basic building materials.
He couldn't very well drain a warehouse full of high-end materials just to build toilets, right?
That would be pure squandering!
Now, if this ship were developed as a mining node, it would perfectly resolve the base's astronomical demand for low-end universal materials during its expansion phase.
It was actually acceptable.
"Fine."
"We'll do it that way."
Andy spoke into the mic. "I will send transport craft to pick you guys up. But that scrap heap of a ship must shut down its engines immediately and be scrapped on the spot. Understood?"
With almost zero effort, Andy tearfully acquired yet another massive mining node, Site D.
Half an hour later, ten heavy industrial shuttles landed on the open ground beside the Scavenger.
The hatches opened, and fully armed guard soldiers rushed out to maintain order.
Reagan led his crew, queuing up in a long line to begin boarding.
In his workshop, Andy watched the headcount numbers constantly ticking up on the screen.
[Processing Incoming Personnel Count...]
[Total Count: 2,145 people]
[Identity Identification:]
Combat Personnel: 499
Logistics / Laborers: 301
Skilled Technicians (Mechanical/Electronic/Structural): 1,345
"Wait a minute?"
Did I read that right?
One thousand three hundred and forty-five skilled technicians?!
Looking at that absurd number on the screen, Andy's logic core experienced a moment of lag.
To be honest, before seeing the data, he hadn't held out much hope.
After all, whether it was the name or the appearance, that ship radiated a heavy, undeniable scrap-yard vibe.
Andy's original psychological expectation was that if he could scrape together a hundred people who understood basic mechanical concepts and knew which way to turn a nut without stripping the threads, he'd be thanking his lucky stars; the rest would just be used as raw labor.
And now he was being told that over 1,300 ready-to-work skilled technicians were hidden inside?
This completely defied the common sense of the wasteland's lost knowledge era!
Andy even briefly wondered if Captain Reagan had some weird fetish for collecting engineers, and whether the interior of that junk ship was actually a brutal, high-intensity sweatshop forcing people to learn technical skills every single day.
Overthinking it yielded no logical explanation, so he simply dropped it.
Regardless of where they came from, now that they had entered the gates of Deep Space Industries, they belonged to Deep Space Industries.
On a wasteland planet with a warped tech tree like Zais, skilled workers who were still alive were absolute treasures.
Although they lacked theoretical knowledge, their hands-on capabilities were extremely strong, their adaptability was off the charts, and they possessed incredibly rich practical experience. As long as Andy gave them a standardized process and assigned a batch of servitors to assist them...
They would be the most perfect industrial workforce!
Zero training required—ready to work right out of the box!
"Damn, I hit the jackpot for real this time."
Soon, the more than one thousand new members were brought into the underground central hall of Fortress Horizon.
Looking at the high-precision machinery they had never seen before and the busy drones crisscrossing through the air, every single one of them was rendered speechless by shock.
Where were they?
The Kingdom of God?!
No radiation, fresh air, comfortable temperatures, and even a faint, rich aroma of machine oil!
Andy stood high on the platform, looking down at this crowd of new employees.
Now that everyone was here, it was time to reorganize them immediately.
Deep Space Industries' original structure was very simple: only Engineering Dept. 1 (the original Vault crew) and Engineering Dept. 2 (the former Rust Brotherhood).
Now that the headcount had grown and the team had expanded, a much finer division of labor was necessary.
"Listen up, everyone," Andy's voice echoed through the hall via the broadcast system.
"From this day forth, you are official employees of Deep Space Industries."
"I don't care what you did in the past—here, there is only a difference in duty, not in status."
"We will now undergo departmental restructuring."
Andy pointed a finger.
"The original Engineering Dept. 1 will retain its designation, responsible for infrastructure construction and maintenance."
"The original Engineering Dept. 2, led by Bauer, will be responsible for power systems and heavy machinery operations."
Next, he looked toward the crowd of newly arrived technicians.
"Newly established: Engineering Dept. 3."
"Responsible for operating the precision processing center and manufacturing high-precision parts."
"Anyone who has previously repaired prosthetics or handled electronic components, step to the left!"
Swish! Hundreds of people walked over.
"Engineering Dept. 4."
"Responsible for weapon and equipment assembly, as well as ammunition production."
"Anyone who has modified firearms or repaired gun turrets before, step to the right!"
Another few hundred people moved.
"Engineering Dept. 5."
"Responsible for raw material processing, operating the Reconstructor feed inlets, and sorting work at the analysis stations."
"Those with great physical strength who aren't afraid of getting dirty, step to the center!"
"Engineering Dept. 6."
"Responsible for vehicle maintenance. Anyone who knows how to modify cars or ships, head to the back!"
Following Andy's commands, the crowd of over two thousand people was rapidly funneled into six structured formations.
The originally crowded and chaotic mob instantly became neat and orderly.
The organizational structure of Deep Space Industries underwent a qualitative leap.
It was no longer the old "communal pot" model where everyone was mashed together, but a modern industrial system characterized by clear responsibilities and specialized division of labor.
Production bottlenecks were completely shattered.
The machine tools that had been sitting idle due to a lack of manpower could now run 24 hours a day in three shifts.
The raw materials piled up in the warehouses that couldn't be processed could now be continuously turned into finished goods.