The hidden partition of the memory core opened like a flower, its contents spilling across the datapad's holographic display, and SC used it to infiltrate inside the main brain and he succeeded getting the files.
SC's initial excitement quickly gave way to a grim silence as he began to sift through the files.
Kaelen stood over his shoulder, watching the data scroll by, his face an unreadable mask.
The drone's mission was simple and chilling. Its designation was Sanitation Unit 7.
Its primary directive: to patrol the uncharted wilderness outside the main prison complex and sanitize any unauthorized life signs detected.
It was a hunter-killer, designed to erase any prisoners who managed to escape the walls, ensuring that no one ever truly got out.
Their crash had triggered its directive. They were not an anomaly to be reported; they were a mess to be cleaned up.
But it was the secondary files, the logs of its previous activities, that held the real horror.
SC pulled up a file labeled Cargo Manifests - Classified. It was a list of recent shipments to and from a set of coordinates deep within the Gorgon's Maze and the same general area the outcasts had described.
"Look at this," SC whispered, his voice tight. He highlighted a line item. "Shipment 4A-7. Contents: Biological Material, Grade IV. Destination: Research Outpost Epsilon."
"Biological material?" Kaelen's voice was low. "That could mean anything. Lab samples, food supplies…"
"No," SC said, his fingers flying across the screen as he cross-referenced the manifest with another file. "Look." He pulled up a second document: a list of prisoner numbers from the main Tartarus complex. Beside each number was a single, stark designation: Deceased
Cause: Natural Causes.
SC's face was pale in the glow of the screen. "The prisoner numbers on this deceased list… they match the serial numbers on the biological material shipping manifest."
A cold dread, colder than the Tartarus night, washed over Kaelen. He felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. The pieces clicked into place with sickening clarity.
The prisoners weren't dying of natural causes. They were the biological material. They were being shipped like cargo to this hidden outpost, this Foundry.
This was more than a prison. It was a supply chain. Tartarus was a human harvesting ground.
The question that had haunted Kaelen 'why?' it suddenly took on a much darker, more terrifying dimension.
The conspiracy that had brought him here was not just about political maneuvering or silencing his father, maybe something deeper and most likely it was connected to this.
To this place where human beings were reclassified as raw materials and shipped to a secret lab.
SC continued to dig, his earlier excitement replaced by a feverish intensity. He found fragmented data packets, heavily corrupted, but still legible.
They were partial lab reports from Outpost Epsilon. They were filled with technical symbols that Kaelen didn't understand, terms like cellular degradation, bio-energy extraction, and psi-signature amplification. But the meaning, even if the science was obscure, was horrifyingly clear.
They weren't just killing the prisoners. They were processing them. They were breaking them down for something.
"What is this?" Kaelen breathed, staring at a diagram that showed a human figure surrounded by a complex array of energy conduits. "What are they doing to them?"
"I don't know," SC admitted, his voice strained. "This is beyond anything I've ever encountered. This isn't standard Imperial black site research. This is… something else. Something forbidden."
He scrolled further, his eyes scanning the lines of code and data. He found a list of personnel assigned to the outpost.
The names were all heavily coded, but the departmental designations were clear: Genetics, Bio-Engineering, Exotic Energy Research. And one that made Kaelen's blood run cold: Project Legacy - Chief Scientist.
The glimpse of the truth they had gained from the drone's memory was not a clear picture.
It was a single, horrifying brushstroke on a vast, dark canvas. It answered none of their questions but created a thousand more, each more terrible than the last.
The conspiracy was deeper, the rot more pervasive, than either of them could have imagined.
Kaelen looked away from the datapad, out into the oppressive darkness of the Tartarus night.
His personal quest for justice, for the truth about his father, had just collided with a secret so monstrous it threatened to eclipse everything else.
He was no longer just a wronged man seeking to clear his name. He was a witness to an atrocity, a witness who now had no choice but to follow the trail of evidence to its source.
"The coordinates," Kaelen said, his voice hard as iron. "The manifests list the coordinates for Outpost Epsilon. Pinpoint them on the map."
SC nodded, his face grim. "Already on it."
The red icon on their map pulsed, no longer an approximation, but a confirmed destination.
The Foundry was waiting.