197: Chapter 197 No Man's Land

Year 2 of the current cycle, the third month, 4:22 PM.

The western maintenance branch of OUTER CACHE-07, 613 meters away from the equipment bay.

The G-Explorer-C was stuck on the edge of the tilted maintenance platform. The force-controlled operation cabin beneath its chassis supported an 87-kilogram communication relay box, with its rear-right foot suspended above the drainage gutter.

Its other five mechanical feet were all pressed against the narrow load-bearing ribs, and the remaining support margin was only enough to maintain its current posture.

Ahead was a half-disassembled relay cabinet, behind it dragged new optical cables and spare parts, and the manipulation arm was still clamping a box that had already been delivered to the installation position.

Any of them could be handled individually, but precisely not all at once.

The G-Explorer-C tried to move its rear-right foot outward; as soon as the foot-end probe touched the ground, the low-frequency echo indicated multi-layer separation.

It retracted its mechanical foot and requested a support point for the second time.

Within a three-meter radius nearby, no ground capable of withstanding lateral torque could be found.

[Operation Status: Paused]

[Operational Load: Maintained]

[Self-Escape Path: Unavailable]

[Assistance Request: External Support / Towing]

The communication relay box was only nine centimeters away from the bracket.

Beyond nine centimeters, maintenance operations could continue.

Within nine centimeters, it could not even let go.

Jiang Lin stood outside the restricted area, watched the route recalculations three times, and took down the manual rescue rope hanging on the wall.

Threading the end of the rope through the traction belt around his waist, carrying a folding bracket and two hoop anchors, he walked inward along the load-bearing ribs confirmed by the G-Explorer-C.

The maintenance platform was only 47 centimeters wide; the drainage gutter on the right was so deep its bottom could not be seen, and a row of rusted pipe clamps protruded from the left wall.

Turning sideways to step over the optical cable spool, he found an exposed structural beam behind the robot and locked the first hoop anchor in place.

The folding bracket reached in from under the abdomen of the G-Explorer-C, supporting the bottom surface of the relay box.

After the operation cabin unloaded the axial load, the three-lobed fixture was finally able to release.

The robot retracted its manipulation arm, and its five mechanical feet adjusted in sequence, but the rear-right foot still could not find a foothold.

Jiang Lin clipped the second rope into its tail towing ring, retreated to the side of the structural beam, and turned the hand crank winch.

The first turn only tightened the rope.

Starting from the second turn, the chassis of the G-Explorer-C moved laterally along the load-bearing ribs, its right casing brushing against the edge of the maintenance platform and scraping off a piece of old coating.

Forty-one centimeters later, the rear-right foot stepped onto an intact support base, and the foot-end pressure curve closed again.

Jiang Lin unloaded the relay box from the folding bracket and re-secured it into the transport box.

This maintenance operation ended here.

During the 613-meter return trip, he dragged the unrolled roll of optical cable all the way, the traction belt around his waist leaving a purplish-red mark below his right shoulder.

The G-Explorer-C followed behind with its operation cabin already retracted into its abdomen; every time its rear-right foot landed, another support verification record was added to the terminal.

The task sheet at the entrance of the equipment bay was still on the original page.

[Maintenance Progress: 64%]

[Equipment Recovery: Completed]

[Restricted Area Manual Intervention: 1]

Jiang Lin signed his name after the last item.

The force-controlled operation cabin had already given the machine a hand, but the 1 in the record sheet still required someone to walk in personally.

After returning to the Outpost, he had sketched a larger machine on the assembly table.

The new chassis had to carry the operation cabin, material cabin, optical cable spool, backup power supply, communication relay, and self-rescue winch, while also leaving enough support margin for each type of load.

The first version had an estimated weight of 1.7 tons and an unfolded width of 1.63 meters, failing to even enter the cable maintenance gallery on the west side of OUTER CACHE-07.

The second version compressed the width to 1.2 meters, but its center of gravity rose by 27 centimeters; when tightening valves on an eight-degree side slope, its six mechanical feet would be busy protecting themselves first.

Cramming all positions into a single machine ultimately resulted in nothing more than a tool room with legs.

Jiang Lin erased that general assembly drawing and wrote the four capabilities of communication, transportation, operation, and rescue separately on four magnetic boards.

The machine did not need to know how to do everything, and tasks could not collapse just because one of the machines went down.

The Outpost still preserved the complete blueprints of the reality-frozen version of the G-01C and a batch of standard joint components.

According to the delivered mechanical interfaces, power supply boundaries, and communication frame formats, Jiang Lin reassembled three chassis of the same specifications.

One of them carried the reconnaissance and relay cabin, responsible for walking at the very front to confirm the route.

One carried the material cabin and cable cabin, responsible for delivering tools, spare parts, and optical cables to the workstations.

The third usually transported the power cabin, and switched to the rescue towing module when a failure occurred.

Force-controlled operations were handed over to two newly built heavy-duty platforms.

They walked slower than the G-01C and had lower bodies; after their six mechanical feet expanded to both sides, they could deliver the operational load directly into the load-bearing structure of the ground.

The two heavy-duty platforms used the same set of force-controlled operation cabins; if either one withdrew, the other could take over the confirmed tools, motion boundaries, and operation records.

The most troublesome part was hidden between the machines.

The first task system connected all five machines into the same real-time map; if the delay of any communication node exceeded two seconds, the entire team would stop in place.

Underground curves soon taught them that such neatness was only suitable for the Outpost's test field.

After the reconnaissance aircraft bypassed a thick wall, the heavy-duty platform was still waiting for its attitude data.

When the cable machine was blocked by a falling rock, the three preceding machines lost their next step accordingly; once the G-01C responsible for relaying left its original position, the whole team would even forget where they had just walked.

Jiang Lin split up the shared map, retaining only the local information necessary for each machine to complete its current duty.

The reconnaissance machine delivered a confirmed route, the transport machine delivered materials placed at designated locations, the operating machine delivered motion results with boundaries, and the rescue module delivered a towing channel capable of withstanding a certain amount of pulling force.

Routes and tasks were handed over through checkpoints; even after the previous machine disconnected, the next one could still continue working based on what it had already confirmed in hand.

MPS-Agent α was only responsible for assigning these verified duties, while task objectives, risk boundaries, and termination conditions were still pre-written by Jiang Lin.

The new protocol originally required larger data frames and faster controllers.

Jiang Lin condensed it into state handovers that the original G-01C controller could understand, and packed the computationally heavier route fusion and rescue judgments into the standard task cabin.

What the old chassis received remained arrival, parking, deployment, towing, and return.

In the winter of the fourth year, that G-01C assembled according to the reality-frozen version was equipped with a rescue cabin, and for the first time horizontally dragged a heavy-duty prototype—which had two-foot support intentionally removed—out of a gravel slope.

Its remaining controller computing power was only 11%, and none of the four sets of mechanical locks, power plugs, and task heartbeat frames were modified.

When Jiang Lin put the test records into the reality-translation directory, he added a line of notes after the file name.

[Existing G-01C: No chassis replacement required]

From the second year to the fifth year, dozens of marks and footprints of varying depths were pressed out by the five machines in the test field outside the Outpost.

When the red mark squeezed out by the traction belt on Jiang Lin's right shoulder faded into a faint trace, the five machines were already able to drag the same faulty prototype back to the safety line from three directions, while that manual rescue rope continued to hang on the equipment bay wall, its moisture-proof bag replaced every half year.

In the earliest peer rescues, the towing machine flipped the damaged platform over, the second operating machine had also snapped its support arm when taking over the load, and the fake valve on the west side of the test field was even given half a turn by each of the two machines, ultimately being pulled entirely off the steel frame.

That valve was later placed at the entrance of the assembly room; the bent bracket was very suitable for reminding any passing machine that there used to be five very strong colleagues here who were not quite familiar with each other.

After the fifth year, reminders began to become redundant.

The reconnaissance machine could confirm the support surface and relay points before the main team arrived, the transport machine learned to leave materials in positions that would not block the withdrawal route, and the two operating machines could share the force on the same load.

The rescue protocol left a total of seven fixed actions, covering on-site situations such as broken feet, locked joints, communication interruptions, inability to release the task cabin, and capsizing of towed loads.

The eighth one always remained empty.

It was reserved for accidents beyond the scope of evidence; when encountered, the machine could only seal off the site and retreat with the companions that could still move.

In the maintenance catalog of OUTER CACHE-07, an application had been hanging with [Insufficient local collaboration capability] since the second year.

Only after the capability declaration of two operating machines, three G-01Cs, and seven fixed rescue actions was completed did that line of gray text turn into an executable state.

In the last month of the fifth year of the current cycle, OUTER CACHE-07 submitted a new maintenance application to the local terminal.

On the north side of the cached equipment bay, there was a shared cooling and communication branch that was crushed by a collapsed equipment rack during the cataclysm, and the remaining circuit could only maintain short-term reading.

After the F-2 filtration unit was repaired, data handover was opened four times a day, for a maximum of 53 minutes each time, after which both the heat and communication loads had to be reduced back to the preservation range.

If this branch could be reconnected, the frozen circuit would have an additional heat dissipation path, and communication could also bypass that intermittent old relay.

The maintenance site was located 1.8 kilometers north of the equipment bay, with a channel width of less than two meters and the narrowest corner being only 1.27 meters.

The external bypass, heat exchange components, armored optical cable, and interface tools totaled 1.26 tons, which none of the existing platforms could carry alone.

Jiang Lin split the task into five parts and sealed them into the task cabins one by one.

In the second month of the sixth year, at 6:18 AM, five machines completed their final status handoff in front of the northern isolation door of OUTER CACHE-07.

Reconnaissance G-01 C was ranked at the very front, and the relay rod on its back had already been erected.

The cable machine and the power machine dragged four low-profile material pods, while two heavy-duty operation platforms fell at the rear of the team, each retracting a force-controlled operation cabin beneath its belly.

G-Explorer-C guarded outside the isolation door, responsible for catching the local map transmitted back from the scene.

It had already changed its foot-end array three times, and the scratch on its fuselage left when squeezing past under the old isolation door was still there, with the new coating proactively bypassing this spot every time it was patched.

Jiang Lin sat at the temporary control position of the equipment bay, with the master emergency stop, manual rescue rope, and an unopened set of protective clothing close at hand.

He checked the task boundaries and opened the northern isolation door.

The five machines crossed the yellow restriction line on the ground one by one.

The reconnaissance machine dropped two relay nodes in the first four hundred meters, and its probe rods searched along both sides of the channel for structural ribs capable of withstanding operational reaction forces.

The cable machine moved forward following the route it left behind, releasing a section of armored fiber optic cable at each corner and fixing it to the outside of the old pipe rack with clamps.

The power machine delivered the bypass components in three batches, taking away the obsolete brackets dismantled from the channel on its return trip.

The two heavy-duty platforms did not separate until one hundred meters in front of the workstation.

H-01 entered the workstation, H-02 stopped at the rear checkpoint, and the operation cabin beneath its belly remained retracted.

The old branch fracture was pinned under an inclined equipment rack, the cooling pipe had been emptied, and the optical fiber exposed a bundle of whitish filaments from the cross-section.

H-01 first used two support arms to prop against the exposed structural beams, then lifted the first section of the external bypass to the right side of the fracture.

The wrist load rose from zero to three point eight kilonewtons, and the six-foot pressure remained within the permitted range.

The operation cabin sent the adapter assembly into the old interface, and the left locking ring rotated forty-two degrees.

Just as the second locking ring touched the sealing surface, a cracking sound came from beneath H-01's left side.

The low-frequency pickup first received structural delamination, and the pressure on the left middle foot and left rear foot immediately plummeted to zero.

That surface layer, which seemed to be connected to the load-bearing ribs, suddenly snapped and sank eight centimeters downward.

The left middle foot and left rear foot stepped through the thin shell, below which was still an interlayer without touching the bottom, and the two sets of pressure readings dropped to zero simultaneously.

H-01's fuselage tilted to the left, and the lateral load borne by the support arms exceeded the upper limit.

The force-controlled operation cabin unloaded the rotational torque while still supporting the four-hundred-and-sixty-kilogram bypass component.

At this point, releasing the clamps would cause the component to collide with the old interface; forcibly lifting the foot would send the reaction force from the remaining four feet into the already cracked ground.

[H-01: Two-foot support failure]

[Operation load: Unable to release safely]

[Single-machine self-rescue: Cannot be executed]

The five green status items on the work shift task list changed simultaneously.

Branch maintenance was frozen, the reconnaissance machine turned back along its original route, and the power machine unloaded the power cabin beside the nearest intact structural rib, switching to the rescue towing module.

H-02 started from the rear checkpoint and approached H-01 along the confirmed right-side route.

The system left Jiang Lin with two options.

[Terminate entire team / Maintain current site]

[Execute companion rescue protocol R-04]

R-04 had been repeated three hundred and twenty-seven times in the Outpost, and its applicable conditions were two-foot failure, measurable operation load, and the presence of a continuous lateral support belt.

The first two items on site had been confirmed, and the third item needed to be re-provided by the returning reconnaissance machine.

Jiang Lin lifted the transparent protective cover of the master emergency stop, waiting for its probe rod to extend into that layer of dust on the right side of H-01.

The first impact echo fell six centimeters below the surface layer, and the second returned along the same structural rib, with a continuous length of four point one meters.

The reconnaissance machine moved laterally by thirty centimeters, and a cavity appeared at the third echo.

Only seventy-one centimeters of available support belt remained.

This width just barely crossed the execution lower limit of R-04.

The second option on the terminal turned from gray to white.

Jiang Lin pressed confirm.

The machines took over the remaining actions.

H-02 closed in from the right, its front support arms resting on the same exposed structural beam, and its operation cabin reached out toward the section of the bypass component still supported by H-01.

The two force-measuring wrists completed docking on the same load, H-02 gradually took over the weight, and H-01's wrist reading dropped from three point eight kilonewtons to six hundred and twenty newtons.

The power machine had circled to the rear, locking two clamp anchors onto the intact structural ribs.

One end of the rescue rope was connected to H-01's tail towing ring, and the other end entered the low-speed winch inside the task cabin.

The reconnaissance machine retreated to the new relay point, and the communication signal strength, which originally had only two bars, rose back to four bars.

After H-02 bore the weight of the bypass component, H-01 retracted its operation arms, and the two unsupported mechanical feet on the left folded toward its belly.

It lowered its remaining four feet, leaving the height of the fuselage from the edge of the collapse at only eleven centimeters.

The power machine began to retract the rope.

For the initial ten centimeters, H-01's left front foot dragged a deep trench in the dust, and the fuselage tilt angle continued to increase.

H-02 immediately moved the bypass component four centimeters to the right, unloading the final portion of the lateral force pressing on H-01's support arms.

During the second rope retraction, H-01 moved laterally along the support belt confirmed by the reconnaissance machine.

Twenty-seven centimeters.

Forty-two centimeters.

When the right middle foot stepped across an old cable trough, the contact confidence dropped to fifty-eight percent, and the winch stopped.

The reconnaissance machine extended its probe rod from the side, prying open the loose cover plate in the cable trough to reveal the intact crossbeam underneath.

H-01 stepped its right middle foot onto the crossbeam, and the pressure of the four feet formed a closed support loop again.

After finishing the final twenty-nine centimeters, its fuselage left the collapse edge and stopped inside a pre-marked temporary recovery zone.

[H-01: Out of hazardous load]

[Companion recovery path: Established]

[Task qualification: Revoked]

H-01's left middle foot pressure array was damaged, and its left rear foot reducer had also jammed during the fall.

It remained in the temporary recovery zone, with the rescue rope remaining connected.

H-02 was still supporting that four-hundred-and-sixty-kilogram bypass component.

The task list reassigned the remaining work, transferring all interface records, stress boundaries, and tool statuses originally belonging to H-01 to H-02.

H-02 adjusted its standing position along the right support belt and sent the component back to the old interface.

When the second locking ring crossed the sealing surface, the wrist lateral force stayed within the allowable value.

The cable machine handed the new optical fiber to the front of the operation cabin, and H-02 completed cleaning, plugging, and Physics locking.

After unloading the rescue mission, the power machine delivered the final heat exchange component from the rear.

Seven hours and forty-three minutes later, both ends of the external bypass were completely closed.

Jiang Lin opened five percent of the test flow rate from the control position.

The leakage chamber remained dry, the bypass outlet temperature began to rise after two minutes, and the first set of verification packets on the new optical fiber crossed the one-point-eight-kilometer branch and reached the OUTER CACHE-07 equipment bay.

The test flow rate rose to twenty percent.

The temperature difference of the original frozen loop dropped by one point seven degrees Celsius, and the communication retry rate dropped from fourteen point two percent to below zero point three percent.

The flow rate finally stopped at fifty-eight percent.

The short-term reading prompt in the equipment bay that had been maintained for over four years was updated accordingly.

[Cooling branch: Conditions restored]

[Communication path: Main/bypass dual channels]

[Data handoff window: Continuous]

The writing light of the receiving array crossed the original upper limit of fifty-three minutes and continued to advance toward the next batch of fragments.

Jiang Lin stood guard until the sixth hour; seeing that the temperature, pressure difference, and verification errors were still within the limited range, he had the work shift execute recovery.

H-02 walked at the very front, its operation cabin clamping the fractured joint dismantled from the old branch.

The reconnaissance machine and transport machine retrieved the temporary tools along the way, while the support machine switched back to the rescue cabin and walked at the very end, towing H-01 which had withdrawn from the mission.

When the team passed through the northern isolation door, OUTER CACHE-07 had been continuously handing over for nine hours and seventeen minutes.

This timer continued to grow over the subsequent seventy-two hours.

The bypass temperature went through two complete fluctuation cycles, communication verification no longer experienced consecutive packet loss, and H-01 was completely towed back to the Outpost.

Jiang Lin dismantled its left rear foot, and the fractured outer ring of the reducer fell out of the casing, clattering into the oil drip pan.

The machine was solidly broken, but the main mission was still completed.

He merged the task records of the five machines to generate the first master template for unmanned work shifts in high-risk environments.

The chassis versions of the two G-01 C units were completely identical to the real products, with the newly added content remaining in the task cabin, role handoff, and companion rescue protocol.

The G-01 C units already sold, currently in production, and awaiting delivery in reality did not need to replace their joints, motors, or main controllers in order to join this work shift.

[A07 / High-risk environment unmanned work shift]

[Heavy-duty operation platform master template: Completed]

[Multi-machine task and companion rescue protocol: Closed]

[Existing G-01 C compatibility: Passed]

[OUTER CACHE-07 stable reading environment: Established]

Jiang Lin turned to the on-site personnel column and entered the number 0.

[Personnel entering hazardous area: 0]

After pressing the confirmation key, he rose from beside the console and walked over to H-01's maintenance station.

The manual rescue rope used four years ago hung on the wall of the equipment bay from the beginning to the end of the mission, with a very thin layer of dust fallen on the surface of the rope loop.

Jiang Lin bent down to untie the towing hook on H-01's belly and coiled up the rescue rope that had been used between the machines again.