Chapter 19: Project Ursa Minor
Within the temporary manufactorum, energy levels had finally stabilized above the anxiety-inducing threshold. The "Thunder-7" pattern battery had given Joric's micro-fusion reactor a moment to breathe, allowing him to dedicate more processing cycles to long-term strategy.
"Baseline survival parameters are temporarily stable. Next directive: expand our sensory reach. Deepen our control and understanding of the surrounding environment," Joric issued the command to his hovering servo-skull. "We cannot remain perpetually reactive. Information, old friend, is a more fundamental fuel than even promethium."
He moved to a corner of the workbench, where the results of the past few days' work rested: three newly "born" servo-skulls. Unlike his original, a priceless and ancient artifact from a Mars Forge World, these three were products of grim necessity. Their craniums were sourced from the scavenger corpses he had reclaimed from the mine, now thoroughly cleansed, sanctified, and reinforced with metal. Their internals were a mishmash of sensors, processors, and power units salvaged from the town's derelict terminals. They were crude, even grotesque, with exposed cabling and visible weld-lines. The light in their eye sockets was an unstable, flickering blue.
They were abominations of pragmatism, born of scarcity. But through the sacred application of Mechanicus doctrine, their core functions—scanning, mapping, data-transmission, and basic logic—had been achieved.
"Initialization complete. Uploading Collaborative Cartography Litany." A mechadendrite from Joric's back plugged into the data-port of the final replica, infusing it with commands. "Mission: With this sanctum as the point of origin, you will conduct a millimeter-level terrain scan of a 15-kilometer radius. Commence sub-surface penetration augury, energy-signal tracing, and life-sign monitoring. Primary objective: generate a complete, living geo-informational map. Tag all potential resource nodes, artificial structures, and anomalous zones."
Four servo-skulls—one master-crafted original, three crude replicas—lit their oculars in unison. They ascended silently, passing through a temporary hatch in the garage roof, and shot off toward four different quadrants, quickly vanishing into the jaundiced sky.
Joric returned to his main terminal. On the crude, multi-screen array, data began to pour in like a waterfall. Four distinct streams of real-time information wove themselves into an increasingly detailed, dynamic map.
The initial data was as expected: endless dunes, weathered rock formations, twisted metal skeletons, and the thermal signatures of radiological mutants.
But as the scans deepened, the secrets hidden beneath the dead desert began to emerge.
Joric's attention was captured by the data from one of the replicas. It was scanning a seemingly ordinary cliff-face to the northwest. The geo-radar echo revealed a massive, artificial cavity deep within the rock. Its structure was unnervingly regular, far too deep to be a natural cavern. More importantly, a faint but stable, low-frequency energy signal was detected in its depths—a signal that was neither radiation nor geothermal activity.
Almost simultaneously, another skull, scanning the old sewage pump station to the southeast, found a large ventilation duct. It was almost completely blocked by sand and refuse, but its construction was of a high-grade alloy, completely different from the cheap materials of the surface town. The duct plunged deep underground, its vector pointing directly toward the cavity under the northwest cliff.
"A subterranean structure. Massive. It is not civilian-grade." Joric redirected the resources of all four skulls, focusing their augurs on the two locations.
The preliminary survey confirmed it: the main body of the facility was directly beneath the town, at a depth of 50 to 100 meters, its footprint covering the entire area. The cliff-face was a primary entrance; the vent was part of its life-support system. The surface town was nothing but a crude lid, placed to conceal the mega-structure below.
"Prioritize clearing and exploring the southeast ventilation access. It is closer to the manufactorum and the environment is more controllable," Joric ordered his "Old Friend," the original servo-skull.
The skull executed the command with holy efficiency. It guided two of the replicas, using precision micro-lasers and impact-drills to clear the compacted debris at the bottom of the pump station. After several hours, a rusted but solid ventilation hatch was exposed. It was breached. A dark, sloping tunnel was revealed, from which poured a cloud of cold air, rank with the smell of stale machine-oil and trace radiation.
The servo-skull darted into the passage, its powerful augurs piercing the darkness, transmitting the internal structure in real-time.
The tunnel walls were smooth, made of a high-performance composite, and clearly branded with the Militech eagle insignia. The passage descended for several hundred meters before opening into a larger space.
It was a small outpost or security node. The room was littered with overturned furniture, shattered monitors, and several skeletons, long since bleached white, still clad in the tattered remains of Militech uniforms. The emergency lights were dead, but the skull's scan highlighted a violently damaged data-terminal in the corner.
The skull drifted cautiously toward the broken terminal. A hair-thin data-probe extended from its mandible and jacked into the sundered port.
"Attempting data-scry... Residual data-fragments detected... Parsing..." Joric stared intently at his screen.
Broken log files, fragments of experimental data, scraps of engineering reports... they were dragged up, piece by piece. The text was corrupted, full of corporate jargon and military codes, but the key fragments were enough to piece together a shocking truth:
...PROJECT URSA MINOR, 7TH OUTPOST...
...ENVIRONMENTAL CAMOUFLAGE LAYER ('FLINT TOWN') CONSTRUCTION COMPLETE... EFFECTIVELY OBSCURING PRIMARY ACCESS...
...ARASAKA SATELLITE RECON FREQUENCY INCREASING... MUST ENSURE 'BEACON' REMAINS ABSOLUTE ZERO...
...ANOMALOUS NEURAL ACTIVITY LOGGED... TEST SUBJECT 7 EXHIBITING IRREVERSIBLE COGNITIVE DISTORTION... SUSPECTED SECONDARY INTERACTION WITH 'THE VISITOR'...
...HQ DIRECTIVE: ALL URSA MINOR FACILITIES TO FULL SILENT RUNNING... SEVER NON-ESSENTIAL POWER... PHYSICALLY ISOLATE CORE DATABASE... AWAIT FINAL DISPOSITION...
The data-stream ended abruptly, the rest apparently wiped by a powerful electromagnetic pulse or physical destruction.
Project Ursa Minor? Countering Arasaka? Anomalous neural activity? 'The Visitor'?
Joric's optical lenses narrowed. The town was a disguise, an "environmental camouflage layer" built to hide a secret Militech research facility. It was from the last Corporate War. And the fragments implied the project's core purpose... was to create a counter to Arasaka's Soulkiller program, by weaponizing something from Beyond the Blackwall—a Rogue AI they had codenamed 'The Visitor'. The technology he'd been finding was likely just a byproduct of this dangerous, heretical research.
When the war ended, the project was deemed too dangerous, emergency-scuttled, and sealed. The town above, its purpose gone, was left to be swallowed by the sands.
"A ruin built to trifle with Abominable Intelligence..." Joric murmured, a cold interest in his synthesized voice. His life in the 41st Millennium had given him a profound, holy terror of such things, but it had also taught him of the immense power and risk they represented.
This place could contain sealed data-fragments of the Rogue AI, intact mil-spec hardware, a sheltered power core, even research logs that had escaped the purge. All of it infinitely more valuable—and infinitely more dangerous—than the scrap on the surface.
"Old friend, continue all attempts at data-retrieval. Prioritize schematics and power-conduit maps. All other units, deploy covert seismic and energy-fluctuation sensors at the vent and cliff entrances. Monitoring level to maximum alert." Joric issued a rapid string of new commands.
The four skulls returned to their tasks, weaving an invisible surveillance net over the entire town.
Joric turned back to his workbench, calling up every scrap of data on the underground facility. Exploring a technological tomb that might house a rampant AI was not a task to be undertaken lightly. He needed better maps, more firepower, a much larger power reserve, and a plan to counter info-contamination and daemonic-logic attacks.
The buried secret was a tempting, poisonous lure. His logic-core spun at high speed, calculating the litanies of risk and reward, and began to forge the first steps of a plan to desecrate this tomb.
The borders of his new territory had just expanded from the surface to the sunless depths.