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The morning after Ryan returned to the coast, Patricia escorted him to Dome Base.
The facility was fully operational now. The old radar station had been reduced to staff residential quarters, while every active research workstream had been relocated to Dome Base.
They stopped at the main gate on the building's concave side.
The door was massive. Thirty meters wide, twenty-some meters tall, paneled in matte black industrial coating. A human standing in front of it looked like a black-suited insect against the wall of a warehouse. The door wasn't designed for daily use. The smaller side doors handled normal foot traffic. The main door opened only for testing operations.
Researchers had been speculating about what the main door's chamber contained ever since the building came online. Theories ranged from "a larger mech" to "an industrial test rig" to "a really big aquarium that someone thought was a good idea." Today, the speculation would be answered.
Patricia produced a key and unlocked the personnel door inset into the main panel. She pushed it open.
The room inside was dark. Light from the doorway cast a long rectangle into the chamber, illuminating dust particles drifting through the air. Beyond the dust-filled cone of light, several massive shapes were visible at the edge of darkness, like hills sitting in deep fog.
"Per the blueprints you submitted, this thing took two months of crash production. It arrived yesterday. The technical crew is standing by for your assembly directive."
Patricia activated her phone's flashlight and worked her way along the wall until she found the room's lighting panel.
Ceiling lights came on one bank at a time.
Ryan looked up.
The thing he'd designed on a screen was now physically present in front of him, and the scale of it forced a recalibration. He'd built Scrapper, lived alongside Scrapper, sat inside Scrapper's cockpit. He'd thought he'd developed an intuition for mech proportions.
The right arm of Crimson Typhoon, even disassembled, made Scrapper look like a hand tool.
The arm was in three sections, separated for transport. Upper arm and elbow, forearm, hand. Each of these subsections, individually, was larger than Scrapper's entire body.
The upper arm sat on its transport cradle like a felled tree, twelve meters long, its segmented joint structure visible. The forearm rested on a separate cradle with the same massive scale. The hand, the smallest of the three sections, was about the size of a passenger sedan.
Around the three primary subsections were dozens of smaller components arranged in organized clusters: the diesel piston engines, the integrated neural connection modules, the red-painted titanium alloy armor plates, structural brackets, hydraulic actuators, and an absurd quantity of fasteners. The smallest fasteners on the floor were as thick as a human arm.
The components had been delivered disassembled to facilitate transport. The technical crew would now begin the assembly process at Dome Base, working from the master diagrams Ryan had prepared during the design phase.
Ryan stood looking at the components for several minutes.
"This room," he said finally, "is now the Storm Bay."
Patricia nodded. "Storm Bay. Whatever you want to call it. The components have been inventoried and verified. Assembly can start as soon as you authorize it."
She looked up at the disassembled arm, then back at Ryan with an amused expression.
"When this order went to the manufacturing facilities, the engineers there were genuinely confused. They couldn't figure out what it was for. Several of them privately questioned whether the design was even fabricable at scale. The lead engineer asked me twice if we were sure about the load specifications. I had to explain that yes, we were sure."
Ryan smiled. He could imagine the conversations on the manufacturing floor.
"Tell the technical crew to begin assembly immediately. They have the complete blueprints already."
"On it."
Patricia stepped aside to make calls. Ryan walked around the components, examining the workmanship. The fabrication quality was exceptional. The titanium armor plates had the precise color saturation he'd specified. The structural welds were clean and consistent. The hydraulic line routing was exactly as drawn. The manufacturing partners had taken the work seriously despite their initial confusion.
He passed through a side door and entered the main building.
The drift research lab was on the upper floor, behind two layers of security. Ryan's fingerprint and iris scan unlocked the secured door. The post-relocation security upgrades had pushed the access controls to a higher level than even Scrapper's original lab had used.
Inside, the lab was busy. Reeves and Cross were at the monitoring station. The other senior researchers were scattered across their respective workstations. In the center of the room, the Petersons sat in the drift apparatus with their sensor caps on. The connection was active.
Ryan approached the monitoring station quietly, careful not to disturb the active session.
"Status?"
Reeves looked up. "Average three-person sync duration is now over ninety minutes. Significant improvement since the last review."
Ryan checked the display. The current connection had been running for one hundred minutes. Sync strength had degraded to thirty-two percent, well below operational threshold. The pilots could maintain a connection for ninety-plus minutes, but only the first hour or so was useful for actual mech operation. The remaining time was diminishing returns as neural fatigue set in.
Ninety minutes wasn't enough to operate Crimson Typhoon. The Jaeger would need pilots who could sustain high-sync connections for several hours of continuous operation. That was still ahead.
But ninety minutes was enough for arm testing. The test arm wouldn't require sustained operation, just demonstration of three-person neural control of a Jaeger-scale system. Even a thirty-minute high-sync window would be sufficient for the test protocols Ryan had in mind.
He pulled Reeves aside.
"How are the five elite labs progressing on the assignments I gave them?"
Reeves had been technically responsible for those research groups since they were absorbed into the operation, though Ryan hadn't followed up regularly. Five elite university research groups had been recruited from a national neuroscience consortium and put to work on specific subproblems related to mech-scale neural interfacing. Each lab had received a focused research mandate from Ryan and then been left to operate independently under Reeves's general supervision.
Ryan felt a brief twinge of guilt. He'd given those labs research mandates and then forgotten about them for six months. The fact that the labs had continued to do useful work without his daily involvement suggested either that the mandates had been clear or that Reeves had been doing more management than Ryan realized.
Reeves consulted a mental file.
"Labs One and Two are working on neural connection persistence and stability. They're close to meeting the original mandate. They ran a validation test on Scrapper yesterday. Results were positive."
"And the other three?"
"Labs Three, Four, and Five are developing operating system architecture and AI augmentation for the human-machine interface. They've been preparing for a validation test on the firefighting mech. That should happen in the next week or two."
"How close are they to deliverable?"
"All five labs are within two to three weeks of completing their mandates. They've been disciplined about staying on the framework you provided. The work has been mostly applied development rather than novel research, which is why the timeline has been predictable."
Ryan nodded. The labs had effectively been doing engineering tasks framed as research. The university affiliations had been useful for talent acquisition and for plausible cover, but the actual work had been Ryan's design specifications being implemented by skilled hands. The arrangement had served its purpose.
"Let's go see what they have."
The two of them left the drift lab and walked toward the wing where the elite labs were housed.
If the labs were on track to deliver in two to three weeks, the timing aligned perfectly with the test arm assembly. By the time the arm was physically complete, the supporting software systems would be ready for integration testing.
The pieces were converging.
Two weeks. Maybe three. Then a Jaeger-scale arm would move under three-person neural control for the first time in history. The biggest unknown in the entire Crimson Typhoon program would be answered.
And after that, the only thing left would be construction.