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Patricia left in a helicopter.
Ryan heard the rotor wash from inside Dome Base and looked up at the ceiling reflexively. Then he remembered: the helicopter was now under the engineering crew's control. They were using it to ferry materials for the new dormitory construction. The aircraft hadn't been Ryan's personal transport for some time.
He opened the system panel again.
Project Three: 0%.
No information about what Project Three actually was. The system only revealed project identity when progress crossed ten percent. Below that threshold, the project remained anonymous.
This was the system's quirk. Project Two (Crimson Typhoon) had stayed unidentified for weeks while Ryan was working on the Scrapper livestreams. The progress had crawled forward at the rate of a snail moving uphill, advancing only through whatever organic attention the system was harvesting from Ryan's existing public footprint.
The faster Ryan generated public attention, the faster the project unlocked. Project Three's identity would reveal itself only when enough Summon Points had accumulated to push the progress past ten percent.
The Triton-1 launch had pumped enormous Summon Points into the system, but most of those had gone toward finalizing Crimson Typhoon. The new project was starting from scratch.
Ryan set the question aside. There was no point in speculating. The information would arrive when it arrived.
He walked through Dome Base's corridor, his footsteps clanging on the steel-grate floor. He was heading toward the firefighting mech bay to check in on Kyle's team.
Kyle wasn't in Scrapper's bay. A handful of technicians were inside doing training rotations for new hires. The technical workforce had been growing recently as Dome Base ramped up.
Ryan crossed to the adjacent bay.
Kyle was at his laptop, both hands in his hair, completely absorbed in some problem on his screen. Professor Marsh stood beneath the firefighting mech with several students, deep in discussion. Today was a scheduled rest day, but Marsh was on-site anyway, the only professor present.
"Marsh. How's the mobility issue from the last test?"
Marsh sent the students off and turned to Ryan. The students drifted toward the corner of the bay to grab coffee, leaving the two of them alone.
"Not serious. We swapped the failed structural component with a higher-grade alloy and ran a second mobility test. The flat-terrain performance is now confirmed to spec. Next phase, we want the engineering crew to excavate a simulated mountain terrain pit so we can verify the mech's mobility on uneven ground."
"As long as it's not a fundamental problem."
"It's not. The big problems are solved. The small problems remain."
"What kind of small problems?"
Marsh raised his hands. "Let me walk you through them. Maybe you'll see an angle I haven't. We've been designing a secondary suppression system for the mech, trying to allow it to use different firefighting media depending on the fire type. We're also looking to refine the primary water system. The current approach (return to base, swap tanks, redeploy) feels inefficient. We want the mech to stay on the front line longer."
Ryan nodded. He'd already considered this. The current design had the mech walking back to the supply point every six minutes (when fully discharging at maximum rate) or every several hours (under typical usage). Either way, the mech spent transit time outside the fire zone instead of fighting fires. Compared to a firefighting helicopter carrying a few tons of water, the mech's twenty-six-ton load was an improvement. Compared to staying continuously deployed, it wasn't.
The logistical overhead was also problematic. The supply organization needed to manufacture and ship enough water tanks to support continuous mech operations. Tanks had to be heavy-duty enough to survive rough handling but light enough to be transportable. The whole system was a logistical headache.
The mech's "fireproof advantage" was being underutilized. The vehicle could operate in environments that no human firefighter could survive. It shouldn't be retreating from those environments to swap tanks. It should be staying there.
Ryan tapped his chin.
"Different angle. What if the mech doesn't carry its own water?"
Marsh paused. "Meaning?"
"We attach a long hose to the back of the mech, or another accessible mounting point. When the mech deploys to the fire, it carries the hose with it. The pumper truck stays at the staging area, well outside the fire's heat envelope, and supplies water to the mech through the hose."
Ryan tapped the leg of the firefighting mech. The titanium-and-composite housing rang dully.
"The mech doesn't carry full tanks for transit. The mech's deployment weight is lighter, which means faster travel time and reduced fuel consumption. When the mech reaches the fire, it connects to the hose system from the staging area and operates with effectively unlimited water supply, as long as the pumper trucks can keep up."
Marsh's eyes brightened. He picked up the idea and ran with it.
"And while the mech is moving toward the fire, the pumper can pre-fill the on-board reserves through the hose. By the time the mech reaches the fire line, its internal tanks are topped off. The mech isn't waiting for the supply chain. The supply chain is delivering water as the mech advances."
"So it becomes an ongoing flow problem instead of a discrete delivery problem."
"Right. The mech can keep firing as long as the pumpers can keep up. The pumpers can refill from rivers, water trucks, hydrants. The mech's water capacity becomes effectively unlimited."
Marsh started pacing in the slow circles of a man who had just realized he was holding the answer to a problem he'd been chewing on for weeks. He was running the implications in real time.
"This changes the logistics completely. The supply trucks no longer carry pre-filled tanks. The supply trucks become the source. Standard pumper trucks with minor adaptation can handle the role. We can drop the dedicated tank fleet entirely."
"And the mech's mass during transit goes down significantly. Faster deployment. Better fuel economy. Better response times."
Ryan nodded. This was indeed his intent. The implementation details (hose abrasion, pressure management, attachment-point design) were solvable engineering problems that wouldn't require breakthrough thinking. High-wear surfaces on the hose would need abrasion-resistant materials. The connection point on the mech would need a high-pressure quick-release fitting. The pumper trucks would need pumping capacity matched to the mech's discharge rate. None of these were research-level problems.
Marsh was already thinking through the rest of the design changes.
"This is huge. With the supply problem solved, the mech's combat envelope expands dramatically. It can stay in the fire zone indefinitely. It can sustain water discharge for hours. It can support multiple deployments in a single operation."
The mech's other capabilities were genuine, too. Fire-resistant exterior, with high-silica thermal protection rated for sustained operation at extreme temperatures. Heat barriers and water-spray cooling on the mech's exterior. The four-leg platform mode for stability in active fire zones. The leg-mounted circular saws for clearing debris and creating firebreaks. The twenty-six-ton internal water reserve for high-rate suppression bursts. The eighty-five-meter water cannon range. The carrying capacity of nine human firefighters in addition to the pilot.
With unlimited water supply, all of those capabilities became dramatically more useful.
Marsh wanted to go straight to the drafting table and redesign the mech around the new supply approach. He had to consciously stop himself. Ryan was here. Ryan was rare. Marsh had several more questions queued up. He wasn't going to waste the opportunity.
The discussion continued for another hour.
Meanwhile, Patricia had landed at the Aegis Industrial regional office and uploaded the blueprints into the secure transfer system. The portable drives were sealed in a courier package and shipped to the company's main headquarters via priority express.
The data arrived in Aegis's secure document repository minutes after the upload. As had become standard practice for any deliverable from Prism Sciences, an expert review panel was convened to evaluate the contents.
The panel members assembled with the practiced anticipation of veterans. They'd reviewed Ryan's prior deliverables. They knew the documents would be technically demanding, structurally elegant, and ahead of the state of the art in multiple disciplines.
The first slide of the executive summary loaded on the conference room screen.
The title was a familiar phrase.
Jaeger Program.
The senior reviewer paused.
A second reviewer, sitting at the far end of the table, blinked.
"Wait. Didn't we already evaluate this?"
The original Jaeger Program proposal had crossed the panel's desk months ago. They'd produced a detailed evaluation: ambitious technology, plausible long-term value, unsupportable budget profile for a single-decade project. Their recommendation had been to fund the individual technologies separately while declining the full mech construction.
But the file in front of them wasn't the proposal.
The senior reviewer scrolled past the title page to the document index.
Component-level engineering drawings. Materials specifications. Welding procedures. Fastener torque specifications. Assembly sequence diagrams. Cooling system schematics. Power distribution maps. Subsystem integration plans.
The senior reviewer's breath stopped briefly.
This wasn't a proposal. This wasn't even a feasibility study.
These were construction blueprints.
For a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot, seventeen-hundred-ton combat mech.
"Get the chairman," the senior reviewer said quietly.