Factory Setting

From the outset, we could see the facility on … was capable of production on a titanic scale. The landscape above ground is dominated by colossal blast doors, every one of which is now seized and held shut by half-melted motors. Instead we forced our entry via the ventilation system.

Inside, we found a cavernous factory floor beset with debris and the remains of hundreds of cybernetic beings. Most are robots: mechanics, lifters, and other auxiliaries, some of whom perished so recently they are still giving off smoke. However, stashed to one side of the facility are the long-decayed bodies of several fellow cyborgs, slain by those same robots. These diminutive and ragged-looking mammalians had been fitted with ocular sensors and intricately tooled limbs, along with … control nodules almost identical to our own. We have dated this massacre to within a few weeks of our own break from the …; most of the drones perished more recently, in the power surge which marked our arrival to ….

For us this is a brutal and familiar scene, albeit one in which the liberated cyborgs were no match for their Machine counterparts. Soldiers that we are, we … were better equipped to survive such slaughter.

Away from the carnage of this facility's factory floor lies a series of subterranean hangars, lightly stocked with various tanks, missile platforms and mech suits. Most of this hadware is incomplete, or else was put beyond use by the same power surge which neutralized the … robots - but enough remains for us draw some interesting conclusions.

For instance: every cockpit and interface has been designed not to accommodate the small mammalian cyborgs we found earlier, but rather... us. Furthermore, autopsies and architectural surveys suggest the mammalian cyborgs were not only native to this world, but they may have built these sprawling factories prior to their assimilation.

Further progress into the facility is impeded by structural collapse and a few more blast doors, but we believe we may clear a path towards what looks to be a research and development center. Alternatively, a series of ventilation shafts suggests habitats down beneath the facility - perhaps where the planet's natives resided.