Harrison Keep, Launch Well.
Andy stood on a fractured platform, the bottomless dark yawning beneath his feet.
Gales swirled within the vertical shaft, producing low, mournful wails.
Priest Zhor had followed him down on his own initiative.
Right now, the aperture of his mechanical eye had shrunk to the size of a pinprick, and his entire body was vibrating at a high frequency.
He muttered profound binary prayers that even Andy could not decipher, likely praising the great miracles of the Omnissiah.
Andy silently activated his STC vision.
Blue data streams cascaded across his retinas, assembling a complete holographic model of the facility.
The first thing to catch his eye was the ring of seemingly flawless black shaft-wall.
In the STC's transparent structural diagram, this thirty-meter-thick alloy wall integrated incredibly complex folded-space technology and modular docking bays.
The design philosophy of the Dark Age of Technology demanded absolute space efficiency.
It would be a massive waste to use a pit this size solely for launching massive vessels.
Therefore, the designers had carved countless small compartments into the shaft walls.
These compartments remained sealed under normal conditions, blending seamlessly into the wall. Once activated, the armor plating would slide away to reveal the docking berths inside.
The specifications were uniform, designed specifically for small aircraft under five hundred meters in length.
Andy immediately thought of the twenty heavy industrial shuttles Priest Zhor had brought along, as well as the assortment of haphazard aircraft the priest had constructed.
Currently, those vehicles could only park out in the open square, exposed to the elements and at risk of being buried by sandstorms.
But once this shaft wall was repaired, all those aircraft could be tucked safely inside.
The berths even came with full sets of maintenance mechanical arms, modular upgrades, and automated refueling systems.
Andy could completely transform this place into a massive customization workshop. He could pull those civilian shuttles inside and mass-modify them into heavy gunships or assault transports, achieving an efficiency a hundred times greater than hand-crafting them on the surface.
His gaze extended further down.
Andy focused on a more core structure.
On the inner side of the shaft wall, roughly every five hundred meters, sat a ring-shaped, open-framed structure.
The Mid-Section Maintenance Base. This was the true crown jewel of the launch well.
Building a starship was not like stacking blocks; it was not a matter of simply piling parts together. It required extremely precise welding, calibration, and final assembly.
These circular maintenance bases held not only massive reserves of spare keels, high-energy fuel rods, and anti-gravity coils, but also giant engineering drones.
These were not the heavy engineering drones Andy currently possessed—the ones that were merely the size of a cargo crate and buzzed loudly when they flew.
Compared to the original hardware here, Andy's drones were nothing more than remote-controlled toys.
Every standard drone in this facility was at least larger than a heavy-duty truck, utilized a modular design, and possessed four to eight independent force-field generators alongside a wealth of black-technology mechanical arms.
They could operate right through the heatwash kicked up by a starship and perform micron-level welding in a vacuum.
Only machines like these could truly assemble a scattered pile of components into a starship within a matter of days.
Andy instinctively initiated a cognate signal search.
Right!
Time to check if there were any fellow units!
Under the standard organization of the Dark Age of Technology, a standard launch well like this would usually not be left to a rigid central computer. The variables during starship construction were too numerous, requiring immense on-the-spot judgment.
Therefore, every mid-section maintenance base was typically garrisoned by one or two Engineering Iron Men.
They served as the foremen here, each controlling over a dozen drones simultaneously and commanding thousands of autonomous machines.
If there was still a living Iron Man here—
The signal beam swept through the dark abyss.
The only feedback was a dead silence of static hiss.
No response.
The tiny shred of luck Andy had hoped for vanished.
It made sense. Tens of thousands of years had passed. Even for an Iron Man, left without maintenance and stripped of power, it would have turned into a pile of scrap metal long ago.
Or perhaps, during the Cybernetic Revolt, they had been destroyed by humanity, or by other Iron Men.
An indescribable feeling suddenly welled up inside Andy.
He realized he did not even know which factory this body of his had been turning screws in back in the day, or how it had managed to wake up in the 41st Millennium.
He continued looking down.
According to sonar echo calculations, the current depth of the launch well was 4.5 kilometers.
But that was not its limit.
At the bottom of the well lay layers of heavy expansion plates. If fully opened, they could extend the space by another 1.5 kilometers.
Maximum depth: 6 kilometers.
This dimension was very precise, highly deliberate.
It was just large enough to accommodate a fully staffed, fully armed battlecruiser.
Humanity during the Dark Age of Technology prioritized peak efficiency and pragmatism, completely eschewing the style of the Imperial Navy.
Imperial Navy battleships were routinely a dozen or even over twenty kilometers long, covered in cathedrals, statues, and shrines of absolution, and required massive living quarters to accommodate tens of thousands of mortal crew members.
This rendered Imperial ships bloated, excessively massive, and a total nightmare to maintain.
In contrast, warships from the Dark Age of Technology were highly automated.
Vast amounts of space were dedicated strictly to engines, shields, weapons, and computational cores.
A six-kilometer-long battlecruiser from that era possessed combat capabilities that could absolutely demolish a twenty-kilometer Imperial relic!
Thus, the dimensions of the launch well were tailored precisely for this peak tier of conventional combat power.
As for super-massive structures like the Phalanx or the Adeptus Mechanicus's Ark Mechanicus, those belonged to the realm of specialized engineering.
Gigantic constructs like those could not be assembled within a standard launch well or orbital shipyard.
They often required the resources of an entire planet, utilizing dedicated ring shipyards for assembly, and were not even built entirely within three-dimensional space (though the Ark Mechanicus was indeed discovered underground, Emperor knows how it got in there).
Andy did not have that big of an appetite just yet.
Being able to build battlecruisers was already more than enough to satisfy him!
A fleet spearheaded by battlecruisers would allow him to dominate the Halo Stars, blasting any reckless xenos or pirates into dust.
Andy stood on the platform, staring into the massive black void before him.
In his mind, this place was no longer a ruin.
It was brightly lit, with mechanical arms swinging and welding sparks flying.
Sleek, pristine white starships took shape as anti-gravity engines emitted low hums, ready to break through the atmosphere at any moment.
In Andy's blueprint, that was the future of Deep Space Industries.
"Phew—"
Andy let out a long breath, bringing his extended daydream to an end.
The thrill of total control faded, and cold reality reoccupied his logic core.
No matter how grand the plan, it had to be executed step by step.
The immediate task was to verify the situation down below.
Andy reached into his pouch and pulled out a black, palm-sized disc.
A micro-reconnaissance drone, codenamed "Firefly."
It carried no weapons, only high-precision sensors and an ultra-long-life battery.
The only drawback was its lackluster stealth performance; because it was an early-generation product, Andy had not equipped it with a cloaking module.
Still, even at its worst, it was far better than the Black Spirit spiders. Much better!
"Go."
Andy loosened his grip, and the drone dropped into the darkness.
The rotors deployed, emitting a faint buzz before rapidly descending and vanishing into the shadows of the abyss.
Andy linked into the feed, and the camera display unfolded in the upper-left corner of his vision.
As the depth increased, ambient light disappeared entirely, and the display switched to infrared and night-vision modes.
The shaft walls were covered in thick dust, alongside traces of dried biological slime.
Depth: 1,000 meters... 2,000 meters...
Everything appeared normal, silent, and empty.
Until the depth reached 2,500 meters.
The video feed suddenly shuddered.
In the darkness, a faint red light flickered to life.