Inside the makeshift workshop, energy levels finally stabilized above a reassuring threshold. The "Thunder-7" battery allowed Osiris' miniature fusion reactor to breathe, enabling him to focus on long-term planning.
"Baseline's solid for now. Next move, get our eyes out wider, learn what's out there before it bites us in the ass," Osiris muttered to the hovering servo-skull. "Can't just play defense forever. Intel's worth more than juice these days."
He moved to a corner of the bench where the results of his recent grind lay, three freshly "birthed" servo-skulls. Unlike the sleek, ancient original that hailed from a Martian Forge World, these new ones were scav-born and rough: skulls pulled from old nomad corpses, scrubbed, reinforced, and stuffed with sensors and processors ripped from dead terminals and rusted junk. Their shells were crude, their cables naked and sparking, lights in their sockets flickering like dying embers.
They were ugly, but they worked. Built on scraps, driven by necessity, yet fully capable of scanning, mapping, and data relaying.
"Bootin' up, linking to swarm net," Osiris said, plugging one of his mech-tendrils into the last replica. "Orders are simple, fifteen klicks radius from this joint. Sweep it clean. Map the terrain, scan below the dirt, hunt for juice, life signs, whatever is lurking out there. Build me a clean map, flag every odd blip and resource point."
The four skulls, one pristine, three gritty, flared alive. Without a word, they shot upward through a retracting hatch and vanished into the yellow haze.
Osiris returned to the terminal. His multi-screen setup flickered to life, streaming raw data as the skulls fed back real-time scans. Dunes, busted rock, twisted wrecks, mutant heat signatures, all expected. But the deeper the scans went, the weirder the returns got.
One feed caught his eye. A replica skull had pinged a rock wall northwest of town, geo-echoes showed a huge artificial hollow beneath it, clean geometry, too deep to be natural. Something old, buried, and definitely human-made.
Faint, steady low-frequency energy pulsed from inside.
At the same time, another skull traced a buried ventilation pipe under the town's dead pump station. Buried under sand and debris, but the alloy wasn't junk, it was Militech-grade. The tunnel went down deep… in the same direction as that cavity.
"Huh. Large bunker. Not civillan work," Osiris muttered, calling all four skulls to focus scans there.
Data streams merged into a rough 3D map. The underground layout was massive, fifty to a hundred meters deep, stretching under the whole town.
The northwest rock wall was an access route, the pump station vent a secondary shaft. The whole town was basically a lid slapped over a buried beast.
"Alright, Buddy," he said to the original skull. "Start clearin' that southeast vent. Closer, safer, less noise."
The skulls went to work, cutting and drilling through silt for hours until a rusted vent hatch groaned open. A wave of cold, stale air hit, thick with oil rot and trace radiation.
Buddy dipped in first, sensors flaring. Smooth walls, composite alloy, stamped with the Militech eagle. The passage dropped for hundreds of meters, opening into a ruined outpost: busted chairs, dead terminals, skeletons in faded uniforms. One terminal still flickered with burn marks.
The skull drifted close, extending a fine probe into the damaged port.
"Patchin' in… fragmented data detected… runnin' recovery," Osiris said, eyes locked on the screen.
Bits of logs, shredded reports, ghosted messages scrolled by:
**...Project Little Dipper, Seventh Outpost… camouflage layer 'Flint Town' complete… main access hidden...**
**...Arasaka sat sweeps rising again… beacon must stay buried...**
**...Neural feedback off the charts. Subject Seven, full psych burn. Traced to secondary exposure with 'Visitor'...**
**...HQ order: full lockdown. Cut power, isolate core systems. Await purge command...**
Then, static. The rest was wiped clean.
Osiris froze. "Project Little Dipper... Arasaka countermeasures... neural distortion... 'Visitor,' huh?"
He pieced it together. The town wasn't real, it was a fake shell covering an old Militech blacksite from the Corpo Wars. They'd been trying to weaponize something from beyond the Blackwall, a rogue AI called the Visitor, to go toe-to-toe with Arasaka's Soulkiller.
When things went sideways, they shut it down and buried the whole damn place.
He exhaled, the lenses in his mask narrowing. "You people really tried to leash a digital daemon... dumb but bold."
There was no contempt in his voice, just fascination.
There could be sealed AI shards down there. Untouched hardware. Intact power cores. Data from forbidden research. Treasure and death in equal measure.
"Buddy, scrape every readable byte, blueprints, energy maps, everything. Others, drop seismic and energy sensors near the vent and the northwest wall. We're going in dark. Max alert," he ordered.
The skulls scattered, silent and precise, a hidden web forming under the town.
Osiris turned back to his bench, pulling up every scan and log tagged with Little Dipper. The hum of machines filled the workshop as he plotted next steps, deeper recon, better arms, stronger defenses. If this buried relic held what he thought it did, he'd need to be ready for both jackpot and apocalypse.
The surface frontier had been claimed. Now, the underworld called.
And in the dust and dark, another chapter began.