Demise

[Boss]

Altair Research Complex, Omicron Iota

The Redemption loomed over the stacked pallets and containers of supplies like a brooding mother hen. Technicians and Nomad forms crawled over it, fixing something here, removing a broken part there. The dim lighting was punctuated by light arcing from welders, cutters, or electrical conduits as they worked. The old armor plating was pulled off bit by bit, aged plates of steel littering the inside of the hangar, while neatly stacked Niobium-Boron alloy plating rested to one side. A few of the turrets, apparently dismissed as too old or damaged to use, were either dumped unceremoniously on the floor or were being removed by a small track-mounted crane moving overhead. A number of people were busily inventorying the newly acquired items, checking them off, and hustling them out through a large door built into the stone that formed the back wall.

Through this door was a cavernous storeroom that dwarfed the hangar in comparison, with massive columns running easily a hundred meters from floor to ceiling. These columns were honeycombed with sockets for containers to be locked to, giving a massive amount of storage. Crates and tanks from the back were passed from column to column by robotic arrays before being handed to large ground-mounted arms that set them down on a pad clearly labeled with danger zones. The arrays ran on a circular track around each column that moved vertically, giving each array perfect access to any storage unit in its column.

The new pods were set on the hazard-marked areas, routing and inventory data was fed into the terminal, and they were promptly picked up, passed back, and stored. Some of the pods, however, were placed on an automated conveyor that passed through a brightly-lit inventory scanner and sanitizer before being pulled off and stacked by an overhead crane in R&D Bay 3.