23: Chapter 23 Loot and Intelligence

The Expeditionary Force spent nearly a week completing the inventory and looting of the entire Mining City.

The inventory statistics made him feel that the return on this expedition was quite substantial: a batch of Imperial standard weapons and equipment—though most required repairs to be put back into service, the foundation of the weapons was sound; a complete communication array component—Marcus began estimating the man-hours needed for reassembly the moment he saw it; large reserves of ore and fuel—enough to keep the Blackstone Town Arsenal running at full capacity for several months; and a crate of ancient STC data cores.

Old Tom's eyes lit up like fire when he saw that crate of data cores, though he only said, "Put it on my workbench, don't get in the way."

Lin Mo had the weapons and equipment sorted by category—the damage to the lasguns and Bolters varied; some merely had shattered sights or deformed frames, while others had circuits that were completely fried.

The accompanying craftsmen made a preliminary assessment of each weapon, separating them into two piles: repairable and scrap.

A few items were picked out from the scrap pile to be kept—not for use, but for salvaging parts.

Marcus, meanwhile, crouched beside the communication array, using a rag to wipe the dust off the controller panel, revealing rows of neatly arranged button interfaces, muttering to himself as he checked the interface specifications.

The Chaos Psyker had left behind a notebook.

The edges of the paper were curled and yellowed, and some pages were stained with dried, dark blotches.

While flipping through it, Lin Mo discovered a hand-drawn star map tucked into one of the pages—it did not depict the Eastern Star Sector, but somewhere much further away.

A coordinate point was marked on the map with Chaos runes, with a simple symbol drawn next to it: the center where eight rays converged.

Lin Mo compared this mark with the record of the octagram pendant on the wall of the Blackstone Town Intelligence Center; the shapes were identical, but the size and level of detail differed—the octagram on the pendant looked like a mass-produced item, whereas the mark on the star map appeared hand-drawn, with varying pressure in each stroke, as if the person who drew it had done so with a certain solemnity.

"Uncertain," Lin Mo said without looking back. "But moving forward is better than waiting for death."

The way time passed on this planet was not quite the same as on Earth.

There were no phones to remind him of meetings, no calendars to tell him what day of the week it was.

There was only sunrise and sunset, only battle and calm, only living and dying.

He used vertical lines in his notebook to track the days, drawing a horizontal line across every five.

This primitive method of counting made him feel secure—at least he still knew what day it was.

He closed the notebook and tucked the star map into his filing cabinet, placing it alongside the octagram pendant.

He didn't know where that coordinate point was, but at least he knew that Chaos was also searching for something—and they were much earlier than him.

On the way back, he repeatedly recalled the scale and the direction of the marked lines on the star map, trying to overlay it in his mind with the map of the Eastern Star Sector that Marcus had drawn—they didn't match; the reference frames of the two maps were completely different, as if two distinct systems of spatial cognition were each depicting their own world.

Alice put on a new suppression ring on the way back.

Lin Mo noticed her fingers tense slightly as she put it on—not out of resistance, but as a form of compromise.

She lowered her gaze for a moment, as if confirming that the feel of the ring was the same as before.

Then she continued walking forward.

Lin Mo followed a few steps behind her, noticing that her gait was steadier than before they set out—not physically steadier, but with a clearer sense of psychological footing.

Upon returning from the Mining City, Locke noticed that the defensive deployment on the outskirts of the town had changed—Lin Mo had replanned the positions of the fire points during the week he was away.

It wasn't that there were more watchtowers, but that the previously over-dispersed defensive lines had been consolidated into three core defensive lines.

The overlapping fire sectors for each defensive line had been recalculated, and blind spots were compressed to a minimum.

Locke did not comment on this change; he simply stood on the new defensive line for a while, walked along the ballistic coverage area of one of the lines, crouched down to touch the thickness of the soil at several firing positions, and then turned and went to the training ground to completely change the patrol routes of the new recruits.

The chaos attention level dropped from fifty-eight to fifty-five.

Lin Mo hung the captured star map in the Archon's office, with the full map of the Eastern Star Sector drawn by Marcus posted next to it.

There was a large blank space between the two maps.

He placed a blank notebook on the desk between the two maps and wrote a date and a question on the first page.

The date was that of the current day.

The question was: "How many years earlier did they arrive than I did?"

A Chaos star map, an unknown coordinate, and at the center of the eight rays, a mark that Lin Mo could not understand.

The inventory work at the Mining City continued late into the night.

While Lin Mo was recording the quantity and status of each item in his notebook, his attention was caught by a manual tucked away in a pile of debris.

It was not the Chaos Psyker's notebook—it was something much older.

The cover was gone, the page corners were curled and yellowed, but the text on the inner pages was written in Standard Imperial Low Gothic.

Judging by the content, this was a duty supervisor's log from when the Mining City was still operating normally.

"Follow the map, three days."

Lin Mo flipped to the date on the last page—an ordinary day before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy.

The duty supervisor had written a sentence at the end of that day's entry: "Received evacuation order. Miners have been evacuated. I will remain on duty until the last batch of equipment is crated."

The log ended there.

He did not make it out in time.

Lin Mo placed the log into his document bag—not for the sake of research, but because he felt this person's final diary entry should not be left to rot in the ruins.

He gently brushed the dust off the cover of the log and placed it separately in a dry bag, keeping it with the documents that required priority protection.

After the inventory work was completed, Lin Mo found several noteworthy documents in the Mining City's Archon office.

One of them was the last communication record sent before the Mining City was overrun—a call to the Imperial Navy Eastern Star Sector sub-fleet requesting support; the communication frequency and encoding format were standard.

The record showed that the call was received, but the support fleet never arrived.

Lin Mo folded the communication record and put it in his pocket.

He did not need more evidence to prove that the Empire would not save them—Blackstone Village had never counted on Imperial rescue.

But this record confirmed one thing: this Mining City had sent a distress signal before it was overrun by Chaos.

The signal was received, but rescue did not come.

This meant that the Empire knew what had happened here, but they chose not to intervene.

This realization gave him a more sober understanding of the Empire.

He wrote in his notebook with a charcoal pencil: "Do not count on reinforcements. Not because they cannot come—but because they choose not to."

After organizing and categorizing the documents found in the Mining City, Lin Mo discovered a pattern—several reports from different sources mentioned the same area: the outskirts of the Green Sector.

The frequency of Chaos activity in that area was higher than in any surrounding sector, but no report explained why.

He kept thinking about this question on the way back to Blackstone Town.

Chaos would not concentrate activity in an area without reason—they were either searching for something in that area or waiting for something in that area.

Between the two possibilities, Lin Mo leaned more towards the first—they were looking for something.

The bumping of the convoy made it impossible for him to take detailed notes, but he used his fingernail to carve a few marks on the edge of the vehicle board—the abbreviation for Green Sector and a question mark, reminding himself to check it the moment he arrived in town.

He leaned against the board wall in his seat and closed his eyes, piecing together the scattered fragments of intelligence in his mind—the Chaos Psyker's star map, the coordinates in the communication record, and the transport routes mentioned in the duty supervisor's log before the Mining City fell—there seemed to be a blurred connection between these fragments, but he could not see it clearly yet.

The first thing he did after returning to Blackstone Town was to open the door to Old Tom's workshop and rescan the crate of STC data cores.

He wanted to know if the STC data contained the coordinates for the Green Sector—where the blueprint for that plasma engine came from, and it might point to some ancient facility in that area.

*Only, he still didn't know how to get there.

A metal shell casing slid off the stamping machine, rolling into the collection bin with residual heat.

—Old Tom, Notes on the First Batch of Homemade Ammunition.

Another day ended.

The number of days he had spent on this planet was slowly becoming a number he dared not think about too closely.

But he was still alive every day—and that was enough.

["A hundred battles on the battlefield have shattered my iron armor, the southern city is already surrounded by layers of sieges. I charged through the camp to shoot the Huyan general, and alone led the remaining thousand cavalry back."]

—Li Bai, "From the Army". Fragments of memory sealed within the mirror of the emperor surfaced quietly in the darkness.

The words the Chaos Psyker said before dying—"Your suppression ring is about to fail"—echoed repeatedly in Lin Mo's mind.

He had asked Alice once later on.

She did not answer.

But he noticed that, from then on, her movements when putting on the ring were half a beat slower.