blogombal Chapter 7 Outpost
Chapter 7 Outpost
The vehicles traveled through the tunnels of the bottom nest for several hours.
Liu En didn't drive the whole time. The sulfur fog in the geothermal zone was too thick, with visibility less than twenty meters, so he slowed down. After leaving the geothermal zone, the terrain worsened, and collapsed pipes and broken gratings forced him to return the car to the warehouse and walk through nearly two kilometers of ruins.
The location of the 86th outpost was not precisely marked on the map. It was a vague area of coordinates, roughly covering a radius of two kilometers. Liu En searched within this area for nearly an hour before finally finding the entrance behind an inconspicuous corner of a passage.
The door was completely unrecognizable. It was embedded in the wall at the end of the passage, its surface covered with thick rust and deposits, almost blending into the surrounding terrazzo panels. Liu En scanned the space behind the door with his field of energy, confirmed the presence of a cavity, and then disassembled the door.
Behind the door was a downward-sloping passageway. Air rushed out from the depths of the passageway, dry, old, without decay or sulfur.
He walked down the passageway for about fifty meters. There used to be wall lamps on both sides of the passageway; the bolts securing the lamp holders were still there, but the lamps had been pried off. There used to be cable troughs in the corners; the supports for the troughs were still there, but the cables had been pulled out. Every few meters on the ground, there were traces of fixing devices; the threads on the bolt holes were clearly visible, but the devices themselves were gone.
At the end of the passage was an airtight door that had been pried open. The door was leaning against the frame, the lock mechanism violently destroyed, and marks from crowbars and cutting tools were visible on the surface. Behind the door was a spacious circular hall, approximately thirty meters in diameter and with a fifteen-meter-high dome. The floor of the hall was littered with a large amount of garbage—broken packaging bags, rusty cans, discarded scraps of fabric, shattered plastic containers, and unidentifiable organic waste.
The walls were covered with pry marks. All the fixtures had been removed, all the pipes had been pulled out, and all the equipment bases had been chipped and pitted. On the hall floor, there were marks from the installation bases of several large pieces of equipment; the bolts on each base had been loosened, and the surfaces of the bases had been deeply scratched by pry bars.
There were six doors on the walls surrounding the hall, each leading in a different direction. All the doors were either open or had been removed. Liu En entered the first room. The room was empty, except for irregular gaps in the walls where equipment had been removed. The cable trays on the floor had been pried open, and the cables inside had been completely pulled out.
The second, third, fourth, and fifth rooms were all the same.
The sixth room was the largest, located at the far end of the hall. The walls on either side of the door frame bore heavy marks of fastening; the size and spacing of these marks presented a familiar pattern in his field of vision—the mounting bases for a large array of Thinkers. Judging from the number and arrangement of the bolt holes, at least three Thinkers stood side-by-side on the same wall. Everything else had been removed.
Liu En stood in the center of the empty hall. For thousands of years, generations of scavengers had wandered this area. To the inhabitants of the Bottom Nest, an abandoned outpost of the Mechanicus was nothing more than a free parts market. Everything that could be carried away had been carried away, everything that could be dismantled had been dismantled, and everything that could be smashed had been smashed open.
But his trip wasn't in vain. The ground and walls are still there.
He began to break it down. He started with the nearest wall. He already knew the composition of the terracotta panels, but the atoms in these panels were no different from those in any other terracotta panel. He broke the thick terracotta wall down into atoms, stored them in a warehouse, and exposed the black rock layer behind. Then the floor, the same process. And then the next wall.
The figures for material reserves are rising rapidly.
He stood in the center of the hall, watching his domain erase the last traces of this outpost from physical space. Walls disappeared, floors disappeared, ceilings disappeared, connecting passageways disappeared, door frames disappeared, bolt holes disappeared, scratches left by crowbars disappeared. Everything metallic, ceramic, organic—he didn't even spare the trash left behind by the scavengers in the hall. Broken packaging bags were broken down into molecular fragments of hydrocarbons, rusted cans were reduced to iron and tin atoms, and dried organic waste returned to its most basic carbon and nitrogen structure.
More than an hour later, the original outpost was gone. Only a huge crater remained on the ground. The crater walls were the original rock structure of the nest, covered with black, dense rock without any signs of human intervention. Looking down from the crater opening, the depth was about fifteen meters; the bottom was flat, also exposing the original rock layers.
As Liu Enzheng was about to leave, his field of vision swept across a corner of the rock strata at the bottom of the pit. There was an anomaly there. About four meters below the rock strata at the bottom of the pit, his perception detected a cavity. It was not naturally formed; the boundaries of the cavity had distinct right angles and planes. Above the rock strata at the bottom of the pit, he found an inconspicuous depression, as if this area had been disturbed by some creature's nest.
He crouched down and began to break down the rock layers covering the cavity.
A vertical shaft was exposed. The shaft was about one meter in diameter and exactly four meters deep. The four walls were made of cast-in-place ceramic steel, with a smooth surface and no damage or corrosion. At the bottom of the shaft was a circular metal door, without any markings, only a handwheel-type rotating handle.
He jumped into the well, gripped the handwheel, and turned it three times. The lock mechanism emitted a low, metallic scraping sound, followed by a hissing sound of pressure being released, a sound that had persisted for millennia. The door opened.
The space behind the door was a huge, secret chamber, covering an area of over a thousand square meters. The dome was over ten meters high, and the lights had long been turned off, but he didn't need light. The field had already presented the complete material composition of the entire space to his perception the moment he entered.
There's equipment here. A lot of equipment.
Neatly arranged workstations, each equipped with a complex set of instruments he had never seen before. An array of at least a dozen Thinkers occupied an entire wall of the chamber. A crisscrossing system of pipes ran through the ceiling, connecting the workstations and terminals. Small reactors—at least three, distributed throughout the chamber—had completely ceased operation, their core temperatures matching ambient temperature; their fuel had long since been exhausted.
All the equipment was covered with a thin layer of dust.
But in the deepest part of the secret room, something was waiting for him.
In his field of perception, the outlines of those things took on human shapes. No, not entirely. They were once human bodies, but now they were more like a mixture of organic and mechanical devices, with the mechanical proportions far outweighing the organic ones. Dozens of such figures were arranged against the wall, some fixed to chairs, some lying on stretcher-like tables, and some simply sitting on the ground with their backs against the wall.
Their bodies were completely desiccated, their skin a dark brown, almost leathery texture. The exposed metal surfaces of their prosthetic bodies were covered with a fine layer of oxide, and in some places, even verdigris rusted. The cables and tubes at the joints had long since stiffened.
Liu En walked towards the figures. The moment the field covered them, information about their material composition flooded his consciousness. The alloy material of the exoskeleton, the polymer insulation layer of the internal cables, and remnants of some organic tissue—dried, fibrous fascia and skin. Deep within this information about material composition, he saw a brain. Or rather, something that had once been a brain.
Over thousands of years, the organic matter within the cranial cavity had slowly degraded into its most basic molecules: remnants of the carbon skeleton, breakdown products of lipids, and amino acid fragments of proteins. There were also things that weren't molecular remnants—tiny metal plates, microcircuit boards embedded in the inner surface of the skull, and hair-thin gold wires connecting these boards. These were memory storage devices, the data cores used by the priests of the Mechanicus to back up their consciousness. But the electrical charge within those storage devices had long since dissipated, and the microstructures carrying the data had lost their original arrangement under the erosion of time.
He held the miniature data cores, peeled from the inner surface of the skull, in his palm. The metallic surface was dull and lifeless, showing no sign of any energy. His abilities could disintegrate the physical materials of these data cores, but the data that once recorded memories and thoughts had vanished into nothingness thousands of years ago with the dissipation of electrical charge.
He disassembled the core data. The atoms were stored in a database. There was no data, only matter.
Deep within the sealed chamber stood a larger workbench than the others. A humanoid figure was fixed to its surface. Its body had been almost entirely replaced by machinery—its limbs were sophisticated metal prosthetics, its torso was covered in terracotta armor plates, and its chest cavity housed not lungs and a heart, but a complete life support system and data processing unit. Half of its skull's skin had been replaced with metal; an optical lens was mounted where one eye should have been, while the other eye had vanished entirely into a sea of metal and cables.
This is a mechanical priest.
His brain was also reduced to remnants of a carbon skeleton and molecular-level fragments. But beneath the armor plates on his chest, Liu En's field sensed something.
This data storage device was unlike any memory core he had seen before. It was larger, more complex, and instead of being housed within the cranial cavity, it was contained within a separate metal module suspended in a protective liquid container. The container was made of a double-sealed alloy, with trace amounts of inert liquid molecules remaining inside. It was perfectly sealed, never opened; the liquid had slowly evaporated over thousands of years, condensing into a thin ring of dried residue on the container's inner wall. But within the sealed cavity at the bottom of the container, Liu En sensed a data core several times larger than his clenched fist.
He disassembled the container and carefully extracted the core.
The core's surface bore faint traces of energy—not electrical charge, but a field he had never perceived before, so faint as to be almost nonexistent. He probed the core's material composition with his consciousness, not to decompose it, but to read the distribution of charges and the arrangement of magnetic fields within its microstructures. The data was still there. Not complete; the edges showed obvious damage, but the core itself was intact.
The data was stored in high-order binary, a coding system used internally by the Mechanics' Guild, so complex that he didn't know where to begin. But from the data structure perspective, it wasn't a technical document, nor an engineering drawing, but rather a coherent, narrative flow of information. It wasn't technical data; it was memory. A person's memory.
Liu En placed the core on the workbench and found a small metal plaque on the corpse. The plaque was inscribed with High Gothic script, which he read using a translator: "Marcus Ambrose. Mechanicus, Fourth Order. Mechanicus."
He put the nameplate and core into the pocket at his waist.
Then he began to disassemble all the equipment in the decryption room: workstations, instruments, the Thinker array, piping systems, reactors. Those massive, silent machines gradually disappeared in his field, turning into atoms stored in the warehouse. The numbers for material reserves skyrocketed, and the information about the material composition in the database expanded. Each piece of equipment was a treasure trove of information.
But for Liu En, the real gain wasn't the equipment and materials, but the data core in his pocket. It might contain Marcus Ambrose's entire life's memories, the outpost's mission, and the secrets of the planet's subsurface. He needed to return to safety to deal with these things.
After Liu En finished dismantling the last piece of reactor debris, he looked around the sealed chamber. Now, all that remained were the empty rock walls and the mostly machine remains lined up against them.
He dissected each skeleton one by one. The atoms were stored in the database. When his hand touched the last skeleton, no extra plaques or markings remained.
He turned and walked towards the pit wall, dismantling and climbing upwards, restoring the pit wall to its irregular, random shape until he reached the main passage of the lair. He took out the all-terrain vehicle, sat inside, and started the motor. The vehicle turned towards the pumping station, driving through the grayish-yellow smog.
In his pocket were a person's nameplate and a data core left over from thousands of years ago.