"Hmmmmm—"
Twenty silver-white metal spheres rose slowly into the air, accompanied by the characteristic low-frequency hum of anti-gravity engines.
No exhaust flames, no billowing smoke — they simply drifted straight up, accelerating until they shrank into invisible specks and disappeared into the murky atmosphere.
Andy craned his neck upward, watching them vanish, feeling genuinely uncertain about the whole thing.
These were the first batch of "Celestial Dome — Type 1 Low-Orbit Base Stations."
The name sounded impressive enough — Celestial Dome, Base Station — but Andy knew perfectly well that within STC's classification system, this piece of equipment occupied an extremely awkward position.
The STC database's assessment consisted of exactly one line, which translated roughly to:
[Performance limited. Suitable for environments of extreme poverty, zero industrial base, and loss of orbital control.]
Every word dripped with barely concealed condescension.
In that golden era, what self-respecting colony didn't use geostationary satellites? Who wasn't running a quantum communications network?
If you'd sunk so low that you couldn't even get a proper orbital satellite up there and had to rely on these "atmospheric floaters" skimming the stratosphere just to maintain communications — then what exactly were you colonizing? You might as well go home and farm turnips.
"For the record, I am basically farming turnips right now."
Andy pulled his gaze back down, feeling rather sorry for himself.
His current situation fit STC's definition of "extreme poverty" to a tee.
Sure, he had guns and artillery — but those were for self-defense. In the field of aerospace, he was utterly outclassed.
He ran the numbers in his head.
The Celestial Dome — Type 1 flew at an altitude of only twenty thousand meters. Limited by the curvature of the earth's surface and atmospheric interference, each station had a theoretical coverage radius of roughly five kilometers.
To achieve a blind-spot-free full-area monitoring network — accounting for signal obstruction and redundancy backups — he'd need at least a hundred and fifty of these things to fully illuminate a five-hundred-kilometer warning perimeter around Fortress Horizon.
One hundred and fifty units.
At the current rate of his cobbled-together precision manufacturing line — one unit per day — that meant just laying out the monitoring network alone would take nearly half a year.
Half a year.
Half a year was more than enough time for his corpse to go cold several times over.
"Six, how are we looking?" Andy pressed his communicator and asked, with little energy.
"Base stations have reached the designated altitude." Six's voice retained its signature cool, detached tone — no emotional fluctuation whatsoever. "Anti-gravity engine output is stable. Solar arrays fully deployed. Conducting positional calibration."
"All twenty base stations are now in position, arranged in a ring formation over the airspace south of the city."
"Fine, power them on." Andy exhaled. He wasn't expecting much. "Patch the feed through — let me see how far these twenty eyeballs can actually see."
Since Andy hadn't yet cracked high-density interconnect technology, and had no optoelectronic conversion center capable of processing massive image data streams, the back-end of the entire system was running directly on Six's computing resources.
Six, as a subspace sextant, handled a little video signal processing without breaking a sweat.
"Connecting to video stream——"
"Synchronizing image——"
The massive holographic screen in front of Andy flickered twice.
A burst of static.
Then — click — the image came to life.
Andy had braced himself for exactly the kind of blurry, noise-filled, squint-and-use-your-imagination picture quality he'd dreaded. After all, STC had specifically said "performance limited."
But when the image actually expanded before him—
Andy froze.
Father Zorr, who had been standing to one side waving an incense burner and praying for the machine spirit's blessing, jerked his hand in shock, nearly dropping the burner on his own foot.
Even Six's consistently steady blue data stream showed a visible ripple.
Crystal clear.
Absurdly, outrageously crystal clear.
The screen displayed a stretch of wasteland ruins south of Fortress Horizon. The image wasn't merely high-definition — you could distinctly make out a mutated lizard mid-lunge, catching something in the rubble. Color reproduction was impeccable, with zero distortion.
But that wasn't even the most alarming part.
The most alarming part was the coverage.
Andy had expected to see only that one small patch of ground to the south.
Instead, the screen was filled wall-to-wall with divided panels, each corresponding to a vast sector of terrain.
These twenty base stations had illuminated the entire southern half of Fortress Horizon — nearly three hundred kilometers of territory.
No dead zones. No blind spots.
The infrared sensors had even sketched out heat signatures from shallow underground sources.
"This is—" Father Zorr pressed his face against the screen, his prosthetic eye zooming in and out repeatedly. "This is impossible—"
"This resolution, this coverage — not even a top-tier array of auspex arrays could achieve this! And this is just — twenty balloons?"
Andy was equally bewildered. He immediately pulled up the STC technical specification sheet and read it again.
It definitely said "performance limited." Was he perhaps misunderstanding the word "limited"?
"Andy, sir." Six's voice chimed in at precisely the right moment, carrying the faintest note of calculated epiphany. "After cross-referencing, this unit has determined that the cause of this performance discrepancy lies in the difference in environmental parameters."
"The 'performance limited' designation in the STC database is benchmarked against Golden Age battlefield conditions."
"In that era, battlefields were saturated with full-spectrum electromagnetic jamming, nano-concealment clouds, and even laser-blinding weapons specifically targeting optical equipment."
"Under those extreme conditions, the Celestial Dome — Type 1 could indeed only produce a rough image."
"However—"
Six paused.
"The electromagnetic environment of Zais as it exists today, while harsh in other respects, is exceptionally clean."
"No strong jamming sources. No countermeasures. The industrial particulates in the atmosphere cannot block our multi-spectral lenses."
"For the Celestial Dome — Type 1, this environment is the equivalent of — operating in the nude."
Andy understood immediately.
It was like taking a military-grade radio built to function through electromagnetic storms — and using it in the middle of the countryside with no interference for miles.
Of course the signal was strong. Of course the range was enormous.
So "garbage" by Golden Age standards meant garbage on a battlefield where gods were fighting gods. Dropped into Zais, where people were still broadcasting on analog radio signals, twenty units of this "junk" delivered the scanning coverage of a full reconnaissance vessel.
Andy's mood lifted considerably.
With situational awareness like this, anyone who tried to sneak up on Fortress Horizon was going to be very disappointed.
He reached out and began sliding across the holographic map, surveying his territory like a landowner making his rounds.
The wasteland to the south. The abandoned factories to the east. And to the west—
Andy's finger stopped.
His gaze locked.
On the western edge of the map — the ruins that Jaydon and Korber had previously scouted, the same area from which they'd brought back that Ress alien scythe — the high-resolution cameras were transmitting a perfectly clear image of a massive, artificially excavated circular structure.
A bottomless cylindrical shaft, its interior walls lined with some kind of high-strength black alloy. Around it, the collapsed frames of enormous mechanical arms still remained, folded in on themselves.
Though the interior was thick with dust and debris, the geometric precision of its shape and the unmistakable industrial design aesthetic triggered an immediate response:
[Facility Confirmed: Planetary Surface — Standard Aerospace Well.][Status: Structurally Intact / Power Offline.]
Andy stared at that red identification tag.
He couldn't move.
An aerospace well.
That was an aerospace well.
Not a mine shaft. Not a sewer access point.
This was a Golden Age integrated super-drydock — purpose-built for the safe assembly, maintenance, and launch of spacecraft directly from the planet's surface.
Free from the constraints of orbital microgravity, the facilities inside something like this were incomparably superior to any orbital drydock.
With this, he wouldn't need to laboriously haul components up into orbit for assembly.
He could build the ship underground, seal it up, then open the top hatch and fire the engines directly.
"Six." Andy's voice was trembling slightly.
"How long has this thing — been there?"
"It has always been there." There was a faint note of innocent detachment in Six's tone, the kind of person who watches a fire and doesn't warn anyone. "According to the records, when the individual human designated 'Jaydon' returned with his report, his exact words were: 'We discovered a massive underground shaft in the western ruins—'"
"He said shaft."
"Andy, sir, your response at the time was: 'Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm.'"
Andy went silent.
Was she seriously desecrating his memory like this?
He remembered now.
His mind had been entirely consumed by that alien scythe. He hadn't paid the slightest attention to whatever "shaft" Jaydon had mentioned. In his head, a shaft in the ruins meant a ventilation duct or an elevator shaft — some piece of junk.
Who could have possibly imagined it was an aerospace well large enough to fit an entire battlecruiser?
"Jaydon—"
Andy ground the name between his teeth.
"You called this a shaft?!"
"This is an aerospace well! You described an aerospace well as a shaft — do you have any idea how disrespectful that is?!"
"Could you not have thrown in two more details?! Like — fueling systems inside, maintenance platforms, alloy-lined walls?!"
But within seconds Andy deflated completely, sinking back into his chair like a punctured balloon.
He couldn't blame Jaydon.
Jaydon was an Imperial citizen. The concept of an "aerospace well" likely didn't exist anywhere in his frame of reference. Reporting "a massive underground shaft" was a perfectly faithful description from his perspective — and besides, even Jaydon could tell that Andy hadn't been listening.
It was Andy who, because the report came from a local, hadn't given it sufficient weight. He'd filed it away as useless information without a second thought.
If the satellites hadn't gone up today, he might have gone months longer without realizing that this enormous treasure had been sitting right on his doorstep the entire time.
"Damn it all—"
Andy shot to his feet and slammed the laser pen down on the desk.
"Gamma-9, get the vehicle ready!"
"I'm going to see this thing myself!"
He grabbed his yellow longcoat from the rack and strode out of the workshop at full speed.
To hell with satellites. To hell with monitoring networks.
Right now, nothing — nothing — was more important than confirming the condition of that aerospace well.
If it was still operational—
The shipbuilding timeline for his deep-space industrial program would leap from "someday, maybe, who knows" directly to "we're actually doing this."