Madlands

20. W.M.P.

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Things only got worse when Grey and Kayliff arrived on level twenty.

They'd hit the half-way mark through their thirty-minute timeframe when they dropped comms with Ranger Two, and had decided to keep heading upwards while Case and Ingrid tried to make sense of the monolithic equipment down in the depths.

This new area was, thankfully, also devoid of life, but not of activity.

It was one large room that spanned the entire circular floor-plate of the silo-level. It was arranged in rings, with inactive, numbered terminals lining most of the outer wall, interrupted only by the lifts, the hatch to the west service ladder, and a truly impressive screen. The screen was active, showing a slowly rotating, intricate diagram of what looked like Cereda. As it spun at a crawl, newly visible locations would get tagged and flagged with call-out details—temperature, vibrational, and pressure readings, depth measurements, and compositional breakdowns of surrounding materials. They seemed to be taking readings from incredibly deep within the mantle of the moon—a calibre of engineering and technology that Grey hadn't encountered in the Madlands, especially considering that the data seemed to be a live-feed, with some of the values updating continuously as they crept across the screen.

The next ring in from the outer terminals was a series of arc-shaped counters, mostly empty, save for a few forgotten datapads on one of them, closer to the far side of the room.

The centre of the space could only be described as some kind of mission control. Whoever was in charge likely kept track of all the room's goings-on and gave orders from the slightly raised platform that was enclosed by a waist-high, curved banquette of displays, control panels, and comms.

Having stared at the giant screen long enough to get a sense for its contents, both Grey and Kayliff were drawn to the central station. It had two openings, each on opposite sides of the enclosing banquette. Grey stepped up into it and Kayliff followed. Switches glowed and the small displays were alight. They saw the same enigmatic title, "Project W.M.P." running along the top of the displays, but, unlike one level down, that wasn't all that the screens revealed.

One was cycling through the schematics for a series of machines—mud-pumps, power systems, pressure intensifiers, boring rigs.

One showed a list of what each of the terminals around the outer ring controlled—#12: Pre-existing Fracture Detection, #13: Rotary Speed Control, #14: Torque Monitoring, ...

And one displayed a series of orders—an open jobs tracker—listing which group each task was assigned to and the overseeing commander. The titles—Line Captain, Commodore, Lieutenant Colonel—made the air catch in Grey's throat. A final name, listed as the commanding officer for the entire project, began with a Moff.

This was an Empire operation.

Kayliff.

I see it.

They'd also seen enough indicators to have more than an educated guess about what "Project W.M.P." was focused on, at least in general—resource extraction on a scale and using methods that neither of them had seen before. This was undoubtedly the cause of the unexplained phenomena plaguing Cereda these past few months.

Grey looked to Kayliff, who had left the central pod and was now leaning over one of the datapads left behind on the arc-shaped counters. He'd already connected a small cylindrical key to the bottom of it, and was depressing an odd combination of buttons in an uncommon sequence.