Nico looked at the dead Klem hybrid in disgust. “Well, we can’t take it alive, but I will still put a chunk of the brain and some chitin in this pickle jar and toss it in my flat space for later.”

Max chuckled at the thought of some hapless medical researcher getting a pickle jar full of Klem as a research sample but quickly turned his thoughts to more pressing matters. They still didn’t know how deep this facility went or what all had been going on there. So far, they had only found the reception and administration floors, and that didn’t tell them too much since all the computers were isolated by the level.

Nico spent a moment looking through the computers again and then turned to Max with annoyance in her thoughts. “I think I have found out what is going on here. There should have been a central mainframe linking this all together. That is why we aren’t finding any sort of message-passing system on the floors.

But it appears that there were mechanical breakers between levels of the system. I can’t find any damage to the servers on this floor, but they don’t connect to any other floor, so I suspect that the breakers are not a digital measure but a physical one that actually separated the connections.

If we can find it, we can reconnect it and possibly get the link back up to the surface levels, so we can start reintegrating the data.”

The two of them focused on finding the breaker for a while before Nico sighed. “There are cables that go from every level that we have been to so far to some point below us. There must be a mainframe in the lower levels where the connections were physically severed. There’s nothing we can do to fix them until then.

We could physically splice them together through another router, but the software isn’t set up to run like that, and we would need hours or days to get it working again. That’s time that we don’t have.

I did find some information, though. The next level is a materials storage floor, there are references to sending workers down to get more paper and other supplies, but the way it’s referred to makes it seem like more than an office supplies room.

If there really was a whole floor full of materials for this facility right below us, we could have hit the jackpot early. The type of materials they are stockpiling for research will give us a clue as to what they were doing since a Replicator system can only create what it already knows.”

“Then let’s get this over with. I don’t know how many floors they built in this damnable laboratory, but I’m starting to get the feeling that it is much larger than the Alliance Fleet in orbit thinks it is. Three floors for paperwork and staff administration doesn’t exactly scream ‘small isolated facility,’ at least not in my mind.” Max agreed.

It took a few minutes to locate and clear the debris from the stairwell that led down to the materials storage floor, but at least it was wider than the previous two stairwells, wide enough that both Mobile Suits could stand shoulder to shoulder as they went down the steps. That could be either a good sign, that they were going to get into more spacious areas where they wouldn’t have to knock down cubicles constantly while they fought, or a bad sign, in that they were getting into a more spacious area, where they could be faced with larger numbers of large Klem.

Max opened this door more carefully and stepped out into the warehouse of the storage floor.

Mostly, what he could see were rows upon rows of racking containing pallets of supplies, bulk bags of materials, and a silo containing some sort of unknown supplies in the far corner of what was visible to him.

Nico spoke softly, only through the earphones in Max’s helmet, using her System Function. “We have some interesting data on this floor. Sensors indicate at least sixteen different radiation barriers, plus a wide variety of complex chemicals and one small sample of the monomolecular substance that we built Absolution from.

Going by the amount of material, I think they managed to get their hands on one of the tablets. There is no wireless network activity, but I suggest that we go see if they have had any luck translating the tablet. It will also give us a clue as to how often they have been to our Galaxy to gather materials and if there were some ulterior motives to their work.”

Max nodded and turned toward where she had detected the suspected tablet from the ruins. It was possible that it was recovered by a tourist that had gone to visit Governor Tennant’s planet, but it could also have been one of the stealth-equipped ships which had done a snatch-and-grab.

If their thoughts were similar to what Max’s had been, they thought there were some ancient secret species behind the ruins, which might have extremely advanced technology that had threatened a large part of the known universe in the distant past.

The question was if they were trying to replicate them, prepare to fight them, or if the tablet was simply a curiosity that they had collected incidentally to whatever else they were doing in the region.

The Mobile Suits were fairly quiet while moving across the warehouse, but they should have been detected by now if there were anything around. Nothing had moved, and Max hadn’t picked up on any heat signatures either, so it was possible that the level was deliberately left empty so that the Klem wouldn’t destroy their stockpile of materials for their research.

A normal warehouse didn’t need all that many people to make it function, but there should have been someone, or at least an automated forklift, here somewhere. At the moment, there wasn’t even a sign of the equipment that the staff must have used.

“There it is. Just up ahead inside the stasis chamber.” Nico informed him, indicating the glowing purple energy barrier around a clear tube.

Only a small piece of the tablet was inside, and it was one of many pieces of antique artifacts that had been stored along that row in identical tubes. It seemed that the researchers had either finished their analysis or they hadn’t yet realized the value of their find and started to investigate it.