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In the new base's mech hangar, a huge curtain now sealed off the entire work area from top to bottom. The only way in was through the assembly corridor at the rear.
Inside the hangar, Crimson Typhoon's torso had been installed. With only its two legs and its enormous torso, it looked like an incomplete giant.
The only parts still missing now were the arms, the two big fuel drums on its back, and the head cockpit.
"Hank, you done in there?" a technician called from up on an elevated platform.
He waited for a reply and looked ahead of him.
Before him stood Crimson Typhoon, not yet clad in armor, its huge pitch-black components exposed across the surface, fierce and commanding. A maintenance access hatch sat on the shoulder where an arm had yet to be installed.
He stood on the elevated platform, watching the dim tunnel and waiting for his colleague's answer.
"This is way better-looking than the Venus de Milo," he murmured at the marvel in front of him.
Looking around, he saw a great many pieces of engineering machinery surrounding the mech, with a tall gantry crane overhead. It was these machines that had created the miracle before his eyes.
This was a true industrial miracle.
After a long wait, a voice finally came from inside the tunnel.
"I'm done."
Then his colleague Hank, in full safety gear with a safety line attached, came slowly climbing out along the maintenance tunnel's ladder on the shoulder, a flashlight clenched in his teeth.
"Honestly. I send you in to connect a few wires and you can't even do that smoothly." The technician who'd called out grumbled a little, then pulled out his radio. "Task complete. Task complete."
Only now did Hank emerge fully from the tunnel, returning carefully to the elevated platform and wiping off the machine oil he'd gotten on himself. "You know how it is. It's pitch black in there, no sense of direction at all. Finding that many wiring interfaces isn't exactly easy."
With him out, the information lines were now connected from the master control room into the mech's interior.
In the master control room.
Ryan received the report relayed back from the hangar. "Let's begin."
The operator beside him caught on at once, worked the computer for a moment, pulled up the mech's self-check system, then pressed the detection button on the screen.
Tap.
Mech power: online.
Self-check program: initiated.
On the console in front of him, information flashed rapidly across the computer screen, and a two-dimensional cutaway image of Crimson Typhoon appeared on it.
The mech's internal self-check system went to work at once, and the measuring instruments and sensors installed throughout it began operating in sync.
The running engine gave off a continuous sound, supplying power for the self-check system. The two technicians still standing on the elevated platform admiring the mech jumped in fright.
Crimson Typhoon, without its armor installed, had rather poor sound insulation.
A behemoth's engine starting up beside you was like a mouse sleeping in front of a snoring elephant.
"Let's hurry up and get down." The two of them, made thoroughly uncomfortable by the noise, piloted the elevated platform rapidly away from the mech.
Ryan looked at the self-check results on the computer screen. It quickly detected several construction defects and serious problems, which were magnified and marked red on the corresponding parts of the mech's two-dimensional image.
The most serious problems shown were the absence of the head cockpit and the left and right arms.
But that was because the mech hadn't had those parts installed yet.
Setting those two issues aside, none of the other problems were major.
Logan stood behind Ryan, also watching the issues the program fed back.
"Not bad. Nothing serious. It should just be some wiring that wasn't installed properly. I'll send someone to sort it out." Logan let out a breath, and a great weight lifted from his heart.
He'd been afraid the self-check system would detect some unexpected error.
"Mm. Chief Engineer Logan, just arrange it," Ryan said, not overly worried. For a project this large, a few small problems were perfectly normal.
Besides, with the mech's assembly progressing this fast, not a single problem would have been the strangest thing of all.
Crimson Typhoon's torso section was now fully assembled.
The torso was one of a mech's core areas. It contained the mech's power core, the hub of the energy transmission channels, the dense liquid neural connection pathways, not to mention all the other various cables. Crimson Typhoon's torso even held a small ballast tank inside, used to maintain the mech's stability in the sea.
The torso's completion also meant many of the mech's functions and systems could now be started.
The operating system had now been written into the computer inside the mech. It was precisely because of this that the master control room could start the mech's self-check system by computer from this far away.
These systems would bring a great deal of convenience to the current work. The whole-mech self-check system, for example. With it, assembly speed could be greatly increased, and any errors that appeared could be found quickly. Otherwise, once the mech's armor was on, no one would know where a problem lay.
Ryan left his seat and spoke to Logan. "How are the mech's other parts coming? Roughly how much longer?"
Logan adjusted his glasses, barely a moment's thought needed. "We've already removed the mech's right arm from Storm Bay next door. We're doing a complete disassembly over there now, and then it'll be transported here and installed onto the mech."
"Also, once the old arm finishes migrating, another right arm will immediately fill the vacancy in the bay and begin assembly in Storm Bay."
He laid it out patiently, bit by bit. "At the same time, the left arm has already started in the assembly zone, and the assembly progress is at about seventy percent now. If you feel that isn't fast enough, I can pull more people from the other technical groups, though that would lower overall efficiency and wouldn't speed things up by much."
Ryan quickly stopped him. "This speed is already fast enough."
He marveled inwardly. Worthy of the country's top engineering talent. Under Logan's management, this project's progress was genuinely a little frightening.
Logan's ability had been an enormous help to him and to the project. This was the first time he'd felt such pronounced help in a research project.
By Ryan's estimate, at this astonishing speed, all of Crimson Typhoon's arms should be installed in under a month.
"Right, how's the cockpit?" Ryan suddenly remembered.
For a mech, the cockpit was the most important part, more important than the power core.
Logan scratched his hair, a rare trace of difficulty on his face. "The cockpit assembly is a bit troublesome. We're still discussing the specific process steps. Once that's settled, assembly can start, with an estimated time of about a week."
Ryan understood.
The cockpit's assembly was indeed troublesome, because this section was the single most equipment-dense place on the entire mech.
Bar none.
Here were the liquid neural connection pathway hub, the human life-support system, the energy system, the electronic system, the transmission system, the detection system, the display system. Nearly all of the mech's systems and technologies converged here in one great gathering.
And how big was this cockpit?
Four meters tall at its highest, eight meters long at its longest, with the circular LCD zoom viewport at the very front, used for observation, only two meters in diameter.
Compared to the mech's body, it could truly be called small in the extreme. Even among other mechs of the same class, a cockpit this small was a rare sight.
Cramming that much equipment into a space this small was naturally no easy task.
But he believed this problem wouldn't stump Logan for long.