The Mech Touch

A portal!

A portal had appeared in the testing chamber!

Ves and many other Larkinsons became incredibly attentive as they observed all of the samples disappearing in place while a small portal emerged in their place.

This was a completely unprecedented phenomenon that none of the Larkinsons had ever dealt with! How could they know that bringing together all of these special materials together would produce such an improbable result?

What happened could not be explained by conventional human science!

None of them would exhibit as much surprise if the portal showed up after piecing together all of the parts of an alien machine.

Yet what actually happened was that the Larkinsons put many pieces of raw, unprocessed ore together without putting any thought into the sizes, shapes, proportions and other properties of the experimental materials!

There was no point in asking how or why this could possibly occur. What Ves really wanted to know at the moment was whether the portal was stable and where the opening led to. An unknown party must have definitely formed this arrangement in advance!

"Why? Is it safe? Can we expect anything unpleasant to emerge from the other side?"

Just because they managed to make progress didn't mean it was good. Who knew if the spatial portal was connected to a Had they inadvertently opened up a gate that led into the middle of the blue supergiant star?

Dozens of seconds went by as the people in the armored shuttle as well as the Larkinsons working aboard the capital ships of the clan analyzed the sensor readings as quickly as possible.

Who knew how long the portal would last. They needed to figure it out quickly and decide whether to do anything quickly.

"Send in a probe! We have a few on hand, right? Just shove them in so that we can take a look on the other side!"

Fortunately, the Larkinsons had made adequate preparations so there were definitely plenty of bots and other devices on hand.

A dozen probes of different shapes and sizes soared to the middle and passed through the portal.

As expected, the Larkinsons immediately lost contact with them, but their operators had already accounted for that. The probes received different instructions that dictated what they should do in the event they became disconnected.

Ves waited impatiently for the initial wave of probes to turn back.

Whether they could come back or not was still in question. Either way, the Larkinsons would have a better understanding of what they faced.

Half a minute later, a head-sized probe flew back. Not only did it come back intact, it also brought valuable footage and other sensor readings!

"Retrieve the data from that probe but keep it on a self-contained system! No one is allowed to access them unless you have received express permission! Bring the probe to safety but make sure it is isolated from everything else. If that thing brought back any space germs or anything, the Larkinsons had to make sure these hazards didn't jump to the expeditionary fleet."

To be honest, neither Ves nor the others expected a spatial portal to appear all of the sudden. It didn't make sense! What they had done was far from building an entire beyonder gate!

"Sir! The portal is slowly beginning to destabilize."

"How fast is it decaying?"

"We cannot say as we do not know at what threshold the portal will collapse, sir. According to our hasty calculations, the portal will only be able to last for 96 hours at most."

"That long?"

"This is only assuming the portal will remain active until all of the available energies have dried up. We cannot make any accurate estimations about the threshold until the portal disappears, but it should show increasingly more unstable signs when it comes closer to collapsing.

"I see."

No portal could last forever without receiving enough support to maintain its existence.

Ves suspected that he could prolong or create a new portal if he brought in additional samples of all of the resonating exotics.

The question was whether it was worthwhile for him to do so. He had already ordered his men to ship many tons of ore to his fleet.

Did he have to order his subordinates to bring them all back again?

Ves was unwilling to do so if it meant burning away much if not all of the valuable resonating exotics that he obtained.

Many of them were completely new and unfamiliar to the rest of humanity. If he submitted large quantities of undiscovered exotics to the MTA, he would gain a large amount of MTA merits for his services!

In fact, even if he could only get tens of thousands of MTA merits at most, it was still worthwhile to give up a proportion of his total loot. Ves needed to make sure he stayed on the good side of the Association, and the best way to do that was to behave as a model mech designer who was eager to make contributions.

Did he have to give all of that up just so that he could form a stable portal to whatever was on the other side?

"Let's wait and see."

Ves stuck to his cautious approach and did not send any actual humans or mechs over to the other side.

In fact, the portal was so small that mechs couldn't even fit through the spatial anomaly.

Human-sized figures should be able to pass through, but Ves did not want to risk any of them getting lost for no reason because they failed to map out all of the dangers.

This was why learning what was on the other side was so important!

After enough time had passed to indicate that no other anomalies or dangers would emerge for the time being, Ves turned his attention to the data retrieved from the returned probes.

He did not know what he might find from the data, but he tried to keep it as confidential as possible in case there was anything controversial.

Ves moved to an enclosed compartment of the armored shuttle and waited until he received a data pad that stored a copy of the probe data.

He switched it on and authenticated his identity before he went straight to the optical footage.

Apparently, the other side of the portal was doused in darkness. The only source of light came from the probes themselves. The flood lights attached to their chassis illuminated a large and empty space that did not look that different from the tunnels and caverns dug by the Worker Bee mechs.

Ves immediately grew suspicious.

"Where the hell is this place? Is this space located on another part of this moon?"

The footage didn't last too long as the probe that made this recording only circled around for a short time before passing through the portal which thankfully looked identical to the one that the Larkinsons had created.

At least this short trip confirmed that anyone entering the portal could get back.

Although the visual footage did not reveal anything about the space on the other side of the portal, the probe contained many other sensor systems that might be able to tell another story.

Ves manipulated the data pad and accessed the other data feeds.

"Vacuum. No air."

"Complete darkness. No light."

"Virtually no particles floating around."

"There's gravity! The downward force is consistent with Iron Crusher's weak gravity!"

Ves slowly concluded that this mysterious space might not be as far away as he hoped. The most obvious answer was that this site was just an underground cave situated elsewhere on the moon.

The data gathered by the different sensors revealed more little details that strengthened this idea.

"I need to see what is actually out here!"

The data gathered by the first probe yielded no further results. Part of that was because the probe was tiny and weak. Another part of that was because the environment on the other side was subjected to a moderate degree of interference!

"This is not the sort of interference produced by artificial jamming." Ves furrowed his brows. "It's the sort of effect that appears when lots of energetic exotics or other abnormal terrain features are present."

He fiddled with the data pad and switched to the footage of the other probes. These ones had been programmed to take wider circuits before passing through the portal again.

One of them circled at a radius of 100 meters.

Another one circled at a radius of 250 meters.

The next one circled around at a radius of 500 meters.

This went on and on until the probe that circled around for 1.5 kilometers finally observed something else than darkness.

"That's… soil!"

An unnaturally smooth and stable wall of soil came into sight in the distance.

While the probe did not stray any closer, Ves was able to freeze the footage and zoom in so that he could observe this terrain feature in detail.

"This… is artificial."

While there were certain anomalies and natural processes that could have created such an exceptional sight, these were extremely low-probability events.

The most likely answer was that someone or something had dug up this soil and created this smooth wall!

As the probe ignorantly flew its circuit without making any attempts to explore the new terrain features, Ves was able to see that the smooth wall continued to look this way in every direction.

He froze the footage and accessed the other data gathered by the probe. On a hunch, he put them together and created a terrain model that roughly showed what the probe had observed with all of its sensors.

A slightly curved wall came into view. It looked like an elongated piece of egg shell.

This was only a small portion of what the probe had observed.

"If this oval wall is present in every other direction… how big is this space?"

Ves adjusted the model so that additional lines appeared on the projected model. They basically followed the curves of the 'egg shell' and went all the way around until an ovoid came into view!

This egg-shaped space was enormous. Assuming that his extrapolations were accurate, the cavern was over 22 kilometers long at its greatest length!

"What the hell is out here?!"

Ves quickly switched to the footage and data gathered by the other probes. While they traveled further from the portal that they had emerged from, they encountered nothing but darkness and smooth soil walls.

He still wondered why and how such a big space could remain stable for so long. Shouldn't the walls have cracked or collapsed due to lack of support? How much time had passed since this space came into existence?

After a bit of time, Ves received a second data pad that contained the data retrieved by the probes that returned later.

He quickly accessed the footage of the one that had arrived last and sped it up. The probe actually couldn't traverse a perfect circle because it would bump into the soil wall if it proceeded any further.

The stupid probe simply flew in parallel to this enormous surface before it finally began to circle around to the other side.

At a certain point, the footage began to reveal a hint of grey!

"Something is there!"

Ves held the data pad closer to his face as he watched the grayish shape grow bigger and brighter.

Once the probe came close enough, Ves completely froze as he took in the dramatic sight.

An enormous skeleton came into sight!

Not just that, but the part of the skeleton that the probe managed to capture with its sensors looked like a long spine that stretched all the way into the darkness.

The size of this skeleton was enormous!

Assuming that it was relatively complete, Ves immediately dismissed the possibility that it belonged to a humanoid species.

The shape of these bones looked so similar to that of an iconic group of species that Ves did not doubt his current guess!

"These are the bones of a giant whale race!"

In fact, Ves already had a more precise guess in his heart.

The only species that could carve such a smooth oval underground cave was the phase whale!