Sector Nine was a wall, a spire, and eleven square kilometres of rust-coloured nothing.
The wall was six metres of poured composite with gun mounts every forty metres, most of them empty because the last rotation had taken their own weapons with them. The spire came up out of the middle of it, 120 floors of it, tapering, alien in a way that took a while to accept. There were no right angles anywhere on the outside of it.
The four hundred people leaving did not linger. They came down the ramp in a column while Eclipse was still coming up it, and one of them, a woman with a Vaelport patch and the worst haircut Adam had ever seen on a soldier, stopped in front of him and shook his hand.
"Fair warning, it's quiet here until it isn't. The enemy doesn't have any fixed intervals of attack," she said.
"How long since the last attack?"
"About eleven hours. It was small. They usually send a few smaller squads to check the situation and then the real offensive begins. No need to worry for a few days. As you have been briefed, other fronts are applying pressure to give you guys time to set up everything."
"Alright, thanks."
The lifts did work.
That turned out to be the single best thing about the spire, because whoever built it had put four of them up the core and they moved fast enough to make your ears go pop. Top to bottom in under a minute.
Adam reserved the top floor.
He and Ren walked into it and stopped, because the whole of the hundred and twentieth was one room with a window that went all the way round, and from up there you could see the wall, the yard, the landing field, the desert going out flat in three directions, and to the south a low dark line.
"That's it," Ren said.
"Mhm."
"Our home until this war ends."
"Yeah, sadly. Not much color out there."
She put her bag down in the middle of the floor. "I want a bed under that window."
"Just like in the guild building, eh. I guess some things never change." Adam smiled.
"You like it that way too." Ren puffed.
He gave the guild the rest of the day and then he put them to work, because sixty people standing around on a new wall is how a sector gets taken. They needed rotations and schedules.
The guild members operated on a special schedule. L4 and L3 members had four-hour shifts. Covering the whole day and night. L5s only acted in cases of attack or other emergency.
While the guild members were sorted out, Adam and Sage worked on a plan for the military personnel. Equipment operators, engineers, cooks and other staff.
There were special assignments too.
Holst had the power plant.
"It's alien," he reported, at four in the afternoon, covered to the elbows in something. "It's a masterpiece. Whoever ran this place before us hooked human regulators onto it and bam, it works. Also very efficient, about 9 times more than nuclear power plants."
"Nine times."
"I checked it four times because I didn't believe it either."
Nine times. Damn. If they continue this tech advancement we won't be able to win this at all.
[ Host, our side realized this issue and that is why they have almost everyone on the front lines. While no official numbers were revealed, I estimate at least nine L7s have been deployed with at least one L8. Those earthquakes we feel every so often are most likely the after effects from those battles. ]
Let's hope we finish it soon.
The Gengar started acting out at some point in the evening.
What it did was come up through the floor of the room Adam was standing in, which was not unusual, and then go back down through it, which was also not unusual, and then do it eleven more times in a row while making a noise it had never made before.
"Yeah, all right, I see you."
It went down again and stayed down for a while and came back up.
"I get it? How far down."
The Gengar spread its arms.
"That's not a number."
It spread them wider.
Adam went and got Ren and a floor plan. Looking at it, they soon realized something was off. According to Gengar, he found a huge space below the base, but not the basement. This space was located much lower underground.
"The teams from before raided this place but never found anything like it." Adam pondered.
They looked at the plan for a while longer. "They found a lab, cleared it, ticked the box and went home. Nobody digs past a floor that's already checked."
"They should have, I know in the official rules it says it clearly that the use of scanners is mandatory when occupying a new area. Those things can see deep. But... That place probably uses advanced cloaking devices so it was never discovered."
Ren looked at the Gengar. "How much down?"
The Gengar spread its arms again, and this time it kept going until it had turned all the way round.
Adam decided to find the entrance as fast as possible. They might be sitting on something dangerous.
"Find the way in," he told the Gengar, and to the shadow under the table, "go with him. I want the entrance, not the room. I don't care how long it takes."
Marshadow was gone before he finished the sentence.
Then he went back to his work. He had to solve all the problems found on site. Repairs, logistics, defenses.
It took four hours.
They came back up through the floor together, which made a member from Kessho drop a full crate of ration packs, and the Gengar took hold of Adam's sleeve and pulled.
The lift was on the ninth floor, behind a wall.
Not a hidden door. A wall, poured in one piece, with a corridor on the other side of it that did not appear on any plan and had no way into it that a person could use. Adam put his hand flat on the composite and Sage, utilizing Overhaul, analyzed the structure.
[ Host. I am detecting multiple layers of authentications and protections. It is genuinely excellent work. ]
And?
[ And this answers our question of how they missed it. It is just too advanced to notice. ]
Adam looked at the Gengar, which was hanging in the air at eye level with its arms folded, radiating a smugness that was frankly unearned given that it had solved the problem by not knowing there was one.
"Overhaul," Adam said, and put his hand through the wall.
The shaft went down a long way.
Not tens of floors but more. Sage counted it on the way and stopped saying numbers out loud after a while and simply put the total up when they reached the bottom, and the total was the sort of number that made Ren say something in Valdros that she did not translate.
The doors opened on a corridor with the lights on.
"The lights are on," Ren said.
"Yeah."
"Creepy."
"I know. Stay behind me and don't touch anything, and if I say run, you run, and I'll be right behind you."
"You will not."
"Shhh," he shushed her.
[ Host, there are zero networks here. I can't hack into it like this. ]
There was a terminal forty metres in, set into the wall. Whoever built the place had never intended a single bit of information to leave it by air.
Adam took the housing off with Overhaul, found the bus underneath, and held his palm against it.
All yours.
[ Interfacing. ]
Adam felt Technopathy being used.
The wait felt longer than it was.
Then Sage put the feed up behind his eyes, and Adam stopped breathing for a moment.
It was not a lab. The lab was upstairs, the two levels the Commission had found and stripped. This was underneath the lab and it was a factory, and it was running.
Not idling. Running.
Sage walked the feed through it for him, room by room, and every room was worse than the last. Casting floors. Assembly lines two hundred metres long with things moving on them. Test cells. A spine gallery where torsos hung in rows on a chain, unfinished at one end and finished at the other, and past that a storage hall that Sage had to pull the view back three times to fit into.
Androids. Standing in ranks, in the dark, powered down.
How many.
[ Ninety-one thousand, four hundred and six. It is still making them. It has been making them without interruption for approximately eight months. ]
Where's the crew.
[ There is no crew. There is nothing alive down here and there has not been since we took over the sector. ]
Ren had gone very still next to him. "Say the number again."
"Ninety-one thousand."
"That's on our side of the wall."
"That's under our building."
There was an artificial intelligence in it.
Sage found it and killed it.
[ Handled. It was not a mind, Host, whatever the architecture implies. It was a ruleset with enough capacity to know how to do its job. ]
Meaning.
[ Meaning it had worked out, some months ago, that its facility was surrounded and that its production was pointless. I can see it in the logs. It worked on the problem four hundred thousand times and reached the same conclusion every time, and then it went back to making androids, because its directives told it to make androids and to await instruction. It could not act on its own conclusion. It was not permitted to. ]
So it just kept going.
[ It kept going. It never called for help, because nobody told it to. It never armed the garrison, because nobody told it to. It never even raised the lights when the Commission came through two floors above it. That is the only reason this place has been sitting under a human sector for eight months without anyone dying. ]
Adam thought about a thing under a floor, alone, absolutely certain it was pointless, doing it anyway, for eight months.
Did it know I was here?
[ For eleven seconds. ]
"Sage. Can you turn them on?"
[ Yes. ]
"That was fast."
[ I have had the factory for ninety seconds and I have absorbed all of it. The command architecture is intact, the authentications too. I am now the only thing on the planet that holds the keys to it. It would be difficult to run this place while we are away. Ninety-one thousand bodies is not a task I can hold while you are being shot at. ]
So what do you want.
[ I want to make something. A second instance, built from me, permanently integrated down here, wired to the factory and to the storage hall. It will interface with me and it will answer to you. It will not be me. It will be smaller and much more boring. ]
Do it.
[ Doing it. ]
The lights in the corridor changed, very slightly, all at once, all the way along.
[ Done. It will need a designation. ]
Woah, that was fast.
[ I could have done it faster, but there was a lack of power available. ]
Aha, very smug I see.
"Let's call it Nine," Adam said out loud.
Ren said, "What?"
"Nothing. Naming a thing."
Sage found out about the rest in the following hour, while Adam sat on an equipment crate in a corridor two hundred and something floors under his own bedroom.
There were design files. Not production files, design files, for things the factory had never been told to build. Sage walked him through eleven of them and then stopped, because Adam had asked her to stop.
These weapons, if finished could turn the war around. All of this because Gengar was bored. Isn't that funny.
[ Host. Any four of these, finished and fielded, would have moved the line by a hundred kilometres. ]
Why weren't they finished.
[ Because they never got the chance. Look at the last log entry. ]
It was a work order. Routine. Timestamped four minutes before the surface fell.
Whoever had taken this ground had taken it so fast that the people who built this place never got downstairs. Nobody locked anything. Nobody burned anything. Nobody spent thirty seconds giving a very obedient machine one final instruction, and so it had stood in the dark for eight months, making an army for a war that had walked over the top of it and kept going.
They came up at four in the morning.
Ren went straight to the window and looked out at the dark. "We have ninety-one thousand soldiers now. Freshly baked."
"Yeah, crazy."
"And nobody knows." Ren made that mischievous look.
"Ahh, I see where you're going with this." Adam smiled.
"No seriously Adam do we tell them?"
He came and stood next to her. Down in the yard the Tyranitar had found the only patch of loose rock in the entire sector and was lying in it on its back with its feet in the air, asleep, and the Gengar was sitting on its stomach, also asleep. Someone on the night watch had put a blanket over both of them and gone away again.
"Not tonight," Adam said. "Let's sleep on it."