The shrill, grating noise sounded like so kind of tal drill boring into solid tal.
The scraping was so piercing it felt as though it could rupture a person's eardrums outright.
And from inside the tunneler's cockpit, Kain could see the fierce spray of sparks through the viewing window.
As the drill bit continued spinning at extre speed and grinding even harder against the tal block ahead, the heat generated by the friction could not dissipate quickly enough. The whole area glowed red, as if it were about to lt.
At last, just when it felt like the drill in this tunnel was about to grind itself to pieces, the machine suddenly lurched sharply forward, as if it had punched into empty space.
It had broken through.
He kept drilling, and in the end successfully opened the tunnel and entered the inner area.
Bang!
The trendous crash was the sound of sothing massive slamming heavily onto the ground. The tunneler had dropped into an enormous passage roughly fifty ters high and fifty ters wide.
What had looked pitch-black at first suddenly lit up from end to end, as if his intrusion had triggered sothing, making the whole passage blaze with light and letting him see the underground corridor far more clearly.
It was a passage full of cold tallic texture. Aside from the lighting, there was nothing else in sight.
He walked toward one side, and after about a kiloter, he reached the end of the corridor. Beyond a half-open tal gate was what seed to be an unimaginably vast garage.
It looked like a garage for engineering vehicles, because there were many colossal tal beasts equipped with huge scoops.
Calling them beasts was no exaggeration, because they really were that large. Even the smallest of them was about twice the size of his ship, already comparable in scale to an aircraft carrier. The largest looked as imnse as a mountain.
From the state of those engineering vehicles, their chaotic arrangent, the signs of damage, and the tire tracks on the ground, it looked as though before they had stopped functioning, they had been frantically ramming an even larger tal gate, one that seed to be over a thousand ters high.
After checking the area, he found no trace of any humans. There were only signs that suggested the machines had gone berserk.
But one thing left Kain puzzled: one especially strangely damaged engineering vehicle in front of him.
That vehicle looked sowhat similar to a tunneler, sothing ant for boring through rock and tal.
And now it had been split into two grotesque halves.
One half remained a normal physical object, as though so force had sliced it apart in an instant.
The bizarre part was the other half, which was stuck flat against the ground.
It looked as though it had been subjected to so unimaginable pressure in a single instant, flattening it completely against the floor.
If that were all, he would not have found it quite so strange. The real problem was that this half pressed against the ground had been crushed until it was thinner than paper, yet it did not look as though it had been smashed apart.
It was more like that half had simply sunk into the surface below.
He stretched out a hand and carefully felt along the boundary between the flattened area and the untouched floor, only to find it unnaturally smooth, with no real edge between them.
It was as if that crushed half had turned into a picture pasted directly onto the ground.
He walked toward the gigantic tal gate that had clearly been ramd over and over. There was now a breach in it, though the engineering vehicles were still far too large to pass through. For Kain, however, slipping through the gap was effortless.
What lay on the other side of the gate?
He crossed through it and walked another kiloter or so, arriving at the edge of what seed to be the platform of an industrial elevator. The sight before him left him staring blankly.
Had they hollowed out the entire interior of a planet?
He looked over the industrial elevator. It seed like it might still work.
But how?
After searching around for several minutes, he finally identified what was probably a switch. Once he activated it, the platform imdiately began to move.
Its movent was nothing like the industrial elevators in the hive cities. It did not resemble a twenty-first-century elevator either. There was no visible shaft around it, no cables suspending it. Instead, it seed to move through so sort of tractor-beam system.
And even if that beam were not holding it, it did not look like it would simply fall. The platform itself seed to hover in a state of weightlessness.
As it continued descending, the scene Kain witnessed made it feel as though he had entered the interior of Cybertron itself.
Just as a human might be rebuilt with tal and ascend through machinery, this planet too seed to have been remade in tal.
After descending roughly a hundred kiloters, he reached a new level. If he wanted to go farther down, he would need to find another elevator.
The area he had arrived at was a huge plaza, and it was covered everywhere in strange graffiti.
Those graffiti all looked like people, as if soone had plastered human-shaped sticker tattoos all over the place.
And after noticing sothing, Kain approached one of the human stickers on a wall. It depicted a figure with an exposed "wound."
It did not look human.
It looked like an android.
Looking more closely at these human-shaped stickers, he found they all had sothing in common: their eyeballs and irises were all red.
And judging by their poses, they were clearly in the middle of attacking sothing, and they all held weapons with distinctly futuristic designs in their hands.
That was...!
Kain had spotted sothing else.
He walked toward the edge of one side of the enormous floating plaza and saw that out in the empty air beyond the edge were dozens of giant "sticker tattoos" suspended in midair. They looked like the stickers of ard aircraft.
The sheer abnormality of these sticker-like objects made Kain think of a certain blue robotic cat with a four-dinsional pocket, one that had gadgets capable of turning things into sheets of paper.
So Kain suspected that these had actually been struck by so kind of attack that had transford them from three-dinsional entities into two-dinsional ones.
Was this not basically the sa concept as the dinsional reduction weapons in The Three-Body Problem?
From what he could tell so far, the targets struck by this ability were mainly androids. In other words, the n of Iron, the machine race that had betrayed humanity during the Dark Age of Technology, the sa kind of Abominable Intelligence the Imperium now regarded with such hatred.
Of course, that did not an the Imperium was foolish enough to stop developing all computational technology out of fear of creating Abominable Intelligence.
After all, enormous quantities of data simply could not be processed by the human brain alone.
Cogitators were the Imperium's term for its digital computers.
Naturally, their level of intelligence fell far short of true AI capable of independent thought. (Lexicanum)
The life-sign scanner he had brought along continued its search, but still found no living beings. Other detection instrunts also failed to pick up anything suspicious moving nearby.
What they did detect, however, was an imnse energy signature below.
Before long, he found another industrial elevator and continued descending until he reached a depth of one thousand kiloters.
"Hm?"
A sense of disorientation hit his body, as if heaven and earth had flipped upside down.
He adjusted himself imdiately.
Gravity had reversed.
Now he was standing as if on the ceiling, while the space leading toward the planetary core had beco the sky above him.
And then he stared in astonishnt at the new scene before his eyes.
What was this?
He had the strange feeling that he had stepped into The Wandering Earth and arrived beside one of its planetary engines.
The difference was that in The Wandering Earth, the planetary engines were installed on the planet's surface, firing upward into the sky.
Here, however, the structure was deep inside the planet itself, and the planetary engine was firing downward toward the core.
(End of Chapter)
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