Desperate environment fostered foolish faith.
Annie was doing it her way, steadying the miners’ fraying nerves.
“As long as we follow…
the angel’s guidance…
nothing will come for us…”
“Death…
is not…
the end…
we are…
with the angel…
always…”
Through the observation window, Aldric could make out the restless miners gathered around Annie, though he couldn’t catch the words.
“Annie is doing well.”
Molten iron rolled in front of Antor.
Iron bars came out of the molds one after another under his hands.
A quiet smile crossed his face.
“My sister is a very gentle person.”
Aldric had expected that after he had pulled the miners back from the brink, the show of ability alone would hold their morale steady for a while.
But the rock pressing down from above was visibly closer than before.
It could come down at any moment.
That was impossible to ignore.
Imagine being sealed in an enclosed space with tonnes of rock directly overhead, close enough to see, shifting closer by the hour, potentially coming down on you in the next second.
And the energy shield flickering in and out like a struggling heartbeat, depending entirely on how much power was left in reserve.
How could you not feel fear?
Even miners, who had long since made peace with tight, enclosed spaces underground, would feel the primal dread rising when death was this close and this visible.
The process of facing death is more terrifying than death itself; even basic physiological instincts can cause a breakdown.
Aldric wasn’t willing to gamble on when the miners would reach their limit.
Bluntly put, most people would lose their grip just from looking just by looking up.
What he had just demonstrated should be enough to pull the sanity value back up.
With someone actively calming them down on top of that, the despair wouldn’t cascade into something uncontrollable.
He didn’t know exactly what Annie had been saying.
It didn’t matter, as long as it was working.
The geological movement was far from over.
The psionic activity deep underground was still fluctuating.
The temperature down here should have been sweltering.
Instead it was unnervingly cold.
This world had too many things about it that didn’t add up.
“Thank you for your hard work.”
He watched the miners gathered around Annie, speaking in low voices about something he couldn’t hear.
Their faces were visibly calmer than before.
Aldric spoke without thinking.
“Do you think it’s feasible?”
“Commander, if you say it is, then it is.”
“This is an extremely difficult engineering problem.”
“Commander, whatever you decide to do, I’m behind it.”
Aldric looked at Antor and suddenly laughed.
Since when had he become the uncertain one?
The pressure was getting to him too?
It was truly a damned human instinct.
Though it also proved, in its own way, that he was human.
He was human.
Not a god.
“You are my god.
For you, I would…”
“Stop.”
“Antor.”
Aldric cut him off.
He turned and looked at Antor’s burning eyes with a level expression, then said four words in a flat tone.
“I am not a god.”
He had no love for gods.
He loved only humanity, only the Federation.
He would never place humanity’s future in the hands of a single supremely powerful individual and call it faith.
He knew too well what those so-called gods actually were.
He had personally ordered the execution of more of them than he could count.
The Federation had come this far on its own.
Not on the grace of gods.
He wouldn’t promote faith in gods.
He also wouldn’t tear it down by force.
He would simply use truth to grind it into dust from the roots up.
“The construction of the shelter will surely succeed.”
“Humanity has always found a way through.”
“I have never doubted that.”
“Man will conquer nature.”
“Antor, prepare the modified powered picks.
We need to move faster.”
“Also, our workers need some safety.”
…
“System, push the warning information to all players.”
Warning: Camp in critical condition.
Urgent need for large quantities of ore and biological material.
Completion rate declining.
“Another earthquake?”
“Why is it dropping again?”
Drool watched the screen pulse red and felt the urgency land in his chest.
“Dig faster!
Faster!”
The buried camp needed metal and power in enormous quantities.
The vibrations kept coming.
The rock pressing down from above could be measured in tens of millions of tonnes.
The structural web of stone bracing against stone was the only thing holding any of it back, and even that wasn’t absolute.
The underground kept shaking.
The camp was burning through energy without pause.
Miners worked at the rock face with their picks, steady crack after crack.
Ore poured in from every tunnel.
Rock-borer carcasses came with it.
The borers went into the bio-power plant.
The electricity came out in two directions.
One portion kept the camp stable, holding back the collapse that was always one bad moment away.
The other went into smelting, producing molten metal that was poured into the gaps between rock layers.
That distributed the load, taking weight off the command ship’s frame and the shield.
The camp was desperately short on energy.
The rock-borers’ erratic behavior meant the exploration squads were bringing in good hauls, but the borers were also lethal if you lost focus for even a moment.
One lapse and you were coming back dead or missing something important.
In front of Antor, ore melted in the furnace and was poured into molds.
Simple hot-forging gave the output decent structural strength.
The smelting produced industrial exhaust in volume.
The ecological command ship’s artificial oxygen cycle processed it almost immediately.
Even with the engineering section running at full heat, the air quality barely registered as contaminated.
The workers moved with energy.
They were breathing clean air.
They were eating food that actually tasted like something.
And they had something to push against.
Annie: “For our angel…”
Above the camp, a lattice of steel reinforcement bars slowly spread across the ceiling.
Miners moved through the framework, weaving between the struts.
The overhead rock flickered with arcing light as weld after weld was laid down.
Of course, the steel bars alone couldn’t bear tens of millions of tonnes.
Steel bars were a frame.
Steel blocks were the actual load-bearing structure.
Aldric’s plan was to seal the dome above them with solid steel blocks, building a proper shelter.
To make that work, he had written off most of the outer zones.
No wasted material.
Once the steel blocks were joined into a continuous shell, an enormous egg-shaped structure, the weight above would be distributed across the whole surface and cease to be an immediate threat.
The tradeoff was that it would require an almost incomprehensible amount of ore.
A number that bordered on impossible.
But there was a path to it.
That was enough.
“Antor, have you worked through the armor system yet?”
Without resupply, clone trooper armor that broke stayed broken.
He needed a contingency, and not just for the players.
More urgently, for the miners who had nothing but thin work clothes between them and the cold.
After two straight days of smelting work, Antor had begun to understand the portions of the armor system loaded into his implant.
“Currently, we can only manufacture armor using basic high-strength steel.
Based on the working environment of the miners, I designed a half-body armor, which is still in the testing phase.”
“The powered system, I…”
“The powered system isn’t urgent.”
Standard Federation ground clone infantry ran two integrated systems.
The exoskeleton, and the composite armor fitted over it, covering almost every surface.
Composite armor was a high-strength, low-weight material, roughly as light as plastic but capable of absorbing a direct hit from a small-caliber cannon round without failing.
It was extremely difficult to synthesize manually.
Antor could produce a small amount by hand, but for practical purposes high-strength steel had to be used as a substitute.