novelhk Chapter 59 Destroyed Spaceship
Chapter 59 Destroyed Spaceship
The timer showed that several days had passed since the team entered the wrecked ship.
Progress was slower than expected. It wasn't due to any insurmountable obstacle, but rather the increasingly complex structure of the wrecked ship. The passageways traversed on the first day at least revealed the structural outline of a standard Imperial warship—the regularity of the branching corridors, the spacing between compartments, the logic behind the placement of fire doors—all within the identifiable scope of Imperial engineering standards. But deeper in, everything changed.
They had entered a far cry from the original cruiser's wreckage. The passageway's cross-section had transformed from a regular rectangle into a collage of various cross-sections—the circular cross-sections of the Ark Eldar passageway were crudely welded together with the Imperial's square-shaped corridors, square cabins were compressed into rhombuses, and ceilings abruptly dropped at one point, only to rise tens of meters at another. Over thousands of years, the ship's interior space had developed a suffocating, folded structure.
Liu En's consciousness extended to cover an area of several kilometers in radius. The location of the cabins and the moving entities hidden in the shadows were all laid out in his perception. The passage was not straight; it branched and folded everywhere. Some sections required a long detour to return to the original direction, while some sections turned out to be dead ends halfway through. He simply used his field to create a new path, concealed it, and continued forward.
Kara, with two companies and five hundred machine gunners, followed behind, sometimes at a distance of several kilometers, sometimes as close as a hundred meters, depending on the curvature of the passage and the density of the Greenskins' activities. Specialized machine gunners carried supplies and moved through the middle of the column.
In what appeared to be a military supply depot from the Great Crusade era, Liu En saw sealed crates piled on the shelves bearing the Astronautical Army's insignia—not the simplified double-headed eagle of the M41 era, but the older insignia from the twilight of the Great Crusade, dating back to the M35 era, with more intricate lines and a crossed scepter beneath the eagle's claws. The supplies were plentiful, including: Hellfire Guns, Multi-Barrel Laser Cannons, Melt Guns, Melt Bombs, various spare parts, ammunition, fuel, and more.
He identified each type of material; for those without blueprints in higher dimensions, he decomposed them, extracted the blueprints, and archived them; the rest remained as they were.
Then he stood up and said in the garrison channel: "Armor depot, equipment from the elite Astronautical forces during the M35 era. Quite a lot of stuff, Kara, note the coordinates, you can take it with you on the way back."
Kara replied in the channel that she had received the message and recorded the coordinates.
He walked out of the warehouse and added in the garrison channel, "No rush to move, mark it first. We'll talk about it on the way back."
Kara arrived at the scene shortly after, and her men found some molten metal bombs in several sealed boxes in the corner of the warehouse. The boxes were marked with the Ordnance Department's red insignia and the label "Molten Metal Bomb - Assault Type." Liu En picked one up and examined it; on the back of the label was a line of small print: "Magnetic Static Fuze - Double Safety." He instructed the servitor to pack them separately and transport them with the supply team, reasoning that they might come in handy.
Several more warehouses like this were later discovered. There were standard ammunition boxes from the M35 era, fragments of heavy bomb gun bodies, pieces of automatic cannon feeding mechanisms, and power armor wreckage.
What Kara and her team witnessed was the captain walking into dusty compartments, rummaging through piles of wreckage, occasionally having them move a few intact boxes of supplies, but mostly just "taking a look." Unbeknownst to them, during those "looks," the captain had already extracted and archived all the valuable material composition information from the wreckage.
A heavy weapons depot, mostly collapsed. The blast doors were twisted and deformed, their seals broken, and the interior was filled with a thick layer of dust. Liu En's consciousness probed into the ruins, sweeping through the rubble to find the outlines of several complete walking mechs—four Sentinel mechs, bipedal, with sealed cockpits and intact weapon racks. They knelt beside the collapsed support pillars, their armor plates covered with millennia of accumulated dust, but their main structures remained intact.
He walked over, brushed aside the surface rubble, and revealed the side of the mech's cockpit. The riveted nameplate was etched with: "Desert Falcon Type · Reconnaissance Sentinel · Akhan Forge World · Serial Number AF-2291". The nameplate on the multi-barrel laser cannon on the weapon rack also bore the Akhan Forge World stamp.
The four mechs were in different conditions—two were intact, one had a broken hydraulic push rod on its left leg, and one had cracks in its cockpit armor plate, but its core frame and weapon system were basically intact.
Field coverage. All four Sentinel mechs—from their frames to their armor plates, from the cockpit's instrument panels to the weapon rack bases—were reduced to atomic clouds and flooded into the warehouse. The cockpit structure of the first, the hydraulic system of the second, the weapon interfaces of the third, and the power piping of the fourth—fragments of the four wrecks were layered, compared, and assembled in high-dimensional space. The winding parameters of the servo motors were extracted from the first, the sealing structure of the hydraulic push rods was completed from the second, the interface protocols of the weapon racks were obtained from the third, and the material formulas for the power piping were confirmed from the fourth. The complete blueprint for the "Desert Falcon" reconnaissance Sentinel took shape in high-dimensional space, with enough precision to replicate each component.
He left no physical remains. All four mechs were completely dismantled, leaving only four shallow dents on the ground.
The wreckage of a cruiser's bridge. The armored observation windows of the bridge were shattered, the control consoles collapsed, and the mainframes of the Thinker Array were crushed into fragments by the collapsed ceiling. The model was old; the processor's logic gate arrangement was completely different. He crouched down, his field covering several core fragments on the ground. The decomposition command was issued. Atoms flooded the storage warehouse; the lattice-like storage method, the data bus routing, the wet-core packaging method within the fragments—incomplete, but a outline could be pieced together. Archive.
Deeper inside, Liu En's footsteps stopped beside a corpse. Not shattered by a bomb, but its neck snapped by the shockwave of an explosion, lying at the entrance to its workshop, still clutching an unfinished rifle. Tech Master. Its rough, green skin was covered in old scars; its left arm had been replaced with a crudely made mechanical prosthesis, the welds rough, the hydraulic pipes exposed. The disassembly command was issued. Tech Master's body—muscle bundles, mycelial networks, the unusually developed brain region behind its eyes—transformed into an atomic cloud, flooding into the warehouse. A complete information documenting the composition of matter took shape in higher-dimensional space. Archived, tagged "Orc Barbarian · Tech Master · Complete".
Green-skinned Boy, Farting, Tech-master—every Green-skinned corpse had been decomposed under his field of influence. The blueprints for the ordinary Green-skinned Boy, Farting, and Tech-master all lay quietly in the database's category directory, tagged "Orc Barbarian - All Levels - To be Researched".
He wasn't collecting spoils.
The Greenskins are not a species that arose from natural evolution. They were designed by the Ancients as biological weapons during the War of Heaven 60 million years ago. Their genetic code is pre-loaded with basic engineering knowledge, combat instincts, and a collective psionic field. Even their fungal spore reproduction mechanism was deliberately encoded for colonization efficiency. Their physiological structure is a complete war machine, optimized for combat from the bottom to the top. Psykers handle basic labor, Greenskins charge into battle, Technocrats manufacture weapons, Physicians heal the wounded, and Psykers connect to the WAAAGH field. The entire social structure is itself a sophisticated war machine, with each component fulfilling its role in the Ancients' design blueprint. Over 60 million years of evolution have transformed them into the most resilient predators in the galaxy today, but the core instructions etched deep within their genes have never changed—fight, survive, and reproduce.
He didn't need these blueprints to shape the Orcs, but the deeper he studied the Ancient Ones' war machines, the more inspiration he gained for the design of the Garros servant system. The Orcs' physiological structure was a living factory; the pre-loaded knowledge system in their genetic code resonated across species with the Andros engineering data infusion protocol he saw in the Marcus data. That wasn't a reference; it was the underlying logic. In higher dimensions, he opened the blueprints of the Puppets, staring at the topology of those mycelial networks for a while, then opened the blueprints of the Tech-Masters, seeing that the density of neural synapses in the abnormally developed brain regions was several times that of ordinary Orcs. The Ancient Ones wrote knowledge into genes, allowing the Tech-Masters to "think" out weapon blueprints without learning. He wasn't an Ancient One, but his information database contained complete biological blueprints from Puppets to Tech-Masters, giving him ample time to slowly ponder—how the gears of this war machine meshed.
He snapped out of his daze, stood up, and said in the garrison channel, "Keep moving forward."
The corpses of greenskins were scattered throughout the tunnels, some killed by Casterland mechs, but many more mummies left over from thousands of years ago. They had lain in the wrecked ship's tunnels for countless years, their skin shriveled into a dark green shell, their rifles still clutched in their hands, their machetes tucked into their belts, and the ammunition pouches hanging from their belts long since weathered and crumbled. Greenskins don't decompose after death; instead, they slowly disintegrate in a unique fungal process, releasing millions of spores. These spores drifted through the wrecked ship's ventilation ducts, took root in the cracks of the metal walls, and germinated at the damp pipe joints, sprouting new greenskins, farts, and scougars. Each greenskin was a mobile breeding ground. The wrecked ship contained hundreds of thousands of greenskins, all grown from spores over thousands of years.
As Liu En walked past the corpses, he scanned them with his consciousness: confirming that there were no signs of life, that they had not mutated into anything else due to subspace radiation, and at the same time, he quickly searched the database to confirm whether the blueprints of these types were complete.
In the passageway behind, specialized service servitors moved silently, carrying supplies, their only sound the friction of their gears amidst the otherwise silent ranks. The decorative elements along the passageway grew increasingly varied. Beside the Imperial-style, utilitarian engineering panels were the distinctive curves and recessed lighting troughs of the Ark Eldar, their luster dulled by millennia of warp corrosion, the troughs long since devoid of electricity. There were also the rough graffiti and welded patches of the Greenskins—they had patched up the collapsed passageway with sheet metal and scrap steel, the welds crude, ventilation holes poked into the plates, and painted with red and yellow stripes. The graffiti bore crookedly written Low Gothic words: "KILL," "DIE," "WAAAGH." They had lived in the wrecked ship for countless generations, making this their territory.