14: Chapter 14 Audit Log of the Medical Station

The automatic doors of the medical station were stuck halfway, emitting a dying metallic screech. Lin Yuan raised his leg and kicked the door panel; the rusted hinges snapped off, revealing a corridor filled with disinfecting mist. There was a scent of blood in the mist, along with the cloying sweetness of denatured protein.

"Three o'clock, behind the door."

An auditory hallucination whispered in his left ear. Lin Yuan did not hesitate. He raised his Bolter and fired a three-round burst through the thin sheet metal. A dull thud of a body hitting the floor came from behind the door, followed by the crisp sound of Tyranid carapace shattering. Two Worker Scorpions, the kind modified by Scavengers, slid out from behind the door, their purple-black blood forming a viscous stream on the floor.

"Left corridor, two o'clock, breathing sounds."

The hallucination came again. This time, a phantom flickered at the edge of Lin Yuan's vision—a man in a Scavenger uniform with a bullet hole Lin Yuan had personally made in his chest. He stood at the corner of the corridor, blinking at him. Reality felt as if it were being ground down by sandpaper; he blinked, and the dead man vanished, leaving only the shadow of peeling wall paint.

"My Lord, your hand," Rat Eye's voice came from behind, carrying that uncomfortable, pious tremble.

Lin Yuan looked down at his left arm. Pale yellow interstitial fluid seeped from the gaps in his Biological Armor, and the intense pain of the neural link caused his fingers to spasm slightly. A countdown ticked in the corner of his vision: 57 hours and 43 minutes. It was 17 minutes less than the estimated 58 hours; the erosion of the Gene Lock was accelerating.

"Clearing complete," Scarface poked his head out from the other end of the corridor, holding a portable STC power core. "The main power room was blown up, but the backup capacitors still work. The bad news is, to keep this old machine running, we'll burn through three liters of purified water every hour."

"Then burn it," Lin Yuan hung the Bolter back on his waist, the metallic clatter echoing through the empty medical station. "Set up the signal booster on the roof. I want to intercept District 7's frequency within fifteen minutes."

Scarface's expression stiffened for a moment. "Active power-up? Our biometrics have already been uploaded. Powering up is like holding a torch in the dark and shouting 'I'm here'."

"Scavenger tracker ships are already scanning from orbit," Lin Yuan walked toward the communications room deep within the medical station, his footsteps leaving bloody prints on the tiles. "Silence won't evade the Harvest Protocol. I need to know who the 'Shepherd' is, and exactly which side Martin is on."

He pushed open the door to the communications room. Three skeletons in white coats lay inside; they were years old, yet the backup power indicator lights on the desk equipment were actually flickering. Lin Yuan took out the signal booster he had salvaged from ARK-11 from his backpack; the Lin Industries emblem was engraved on its metal casing.

The STC neural link interface pierced into the back of his neck, a cold sensation crawling up his spine. An energy link status popped up in his vision: 62% stability, manual calibration required every 3 hours. Lin Yuan connected the booster to the medical station's antenna base; the click of the knob turning was exceptionally piercing in the dead silence.

"You will draw them here," Rat Eye leaned against the doorframe, the wound on his right arm still seeping blood. It was a scratch left by a Snotling, deep enough to see bone. "The trials of the God-Emperor should not rely on the mechanical mouth of heretics."

"Then you should use that automatic surgical table over there," Lin Yuan replied without looking back, his fingers sliding over the frequency knob, "instead of making me use needle and thread to sew your wound."

Rat Eye's face turned even paler. He glanced at the dust-covered surgical table in the corner, its AI camera blinking red in sleep mode. "That is a profane object," he said softly, his voice squeezed through his teeth. "Only instruments touched by your own hands are worthy of an Astartes' attendant."

Lin Yuan's fingers stopped on the knob. He turned around, looking at the wound on Rat Eye's right arm, which had already begun to redden. Signs of infection—in the wasteland, that meant amputation or death. But Rat Eye stood straight, his eyes showing no retreat, only that crazed, martyr-like determination.

"As you wish," Lin Yuan pulled out a suture needle and thread from his waist. "But you will slow us down."

"For the God-Emperor, slow is fast."

The signal booster suddenly emitted a sharp beep. Lin Yuan turned immediately as a waterfall of data streams cascaded down the STC interface. The encrypted District 7 frequency had been intercepted; the voice was electronically disguised, but certain pronunciation habits could not be entirely hidden.

"...LY-001 sample localization complete, biometric match 99.7%..."

Lin Yuan's breath hitched. That voice, with the specific rhotic habit unique to the Lin family, was exactly like the tone his father used when scolding the butler in his memories.

"...Execute Harvest Protocol Grade B, priority capture, crippling permitted. Status of backup sample Martin Lin?"

"Martin Lin is under surveillance, ARK-03 containment status stable. If LY-001 recovery fails, initiate backup sample activation sequence."

The second voice was colder, sounding as if it came from a cryo-pod. Lin Yuan's fingertips tightened on the console, his nails nearly embedding themselves into the metal gaps. Martin wasn't an ally; he was a backup. He was an experimental subject just like him, only with a different number and a different cage.

"Asset Recovery Department confirms LY-001 is a high-value original sample, the only successful individual of the LY-000 project. Commander Shepherd requests live delivery."

LY-000.

The designation pierced his brain like an ice pick. Lin Yuan stood up abruptly, his chair scraping harshly against the floor. He wasn't the first experimental subject; before him, there were original samples, failures, and predecessors lying in cryo-pods.

"Left corridor, three o'clock, breathing sounds."

The hallucination rang out again, this time accompanied by a violent headache. Lin Yuan looked at the surveillance screen; the corridor in the image was empty, but he clearly saw three figures in Scavenger uniforms standing there. One of them looked up, showing him a smile torn apart by Tyranid mouthparts. The dead man on the screen blinked.

"Lin," Scarface's voice exploded from the comms with static interference, "you need to see the second basement level. There's a cold storage here, and the damn access system is still lin clan bloodline verification."

Lin Yuan ripped off the neural interface, and reality returned like a receding tide, leaving a metallic taste in his mouth. He grabbed his Bolter and threw a pack of antibiotics at Rat Eye as he passed: "Eat them, or wait to die. Don't perform a martyrdom in front of me."

The cold storage door was a double airtight structure, the observation window covered in thick frost. Lin Yuan pressed his palm against the scanner; the LY-001 gene sequence in his blood was read, the green light lit up, and the hiss of the pressure lock releasing sounded like the sigh of some great beast.

Cold air rushed out, bringing a sting of forty degrees below zero.

Three rows of cryo-pods, each labeled. Lin Yuan walked over, his boots crunching on the frozen floor. The first row was LY-001-A through LY-001-F, all failures; deformed bodies were curled inside the pods—some with extra arms, some with heads swollen into irregular spheres.

The second row was empty.

The third row had only one pod, its label reading: LY-000-Original Sample-Hibernation State.

Lin Yuan leaned closer to the observation window. Inside lay a humanoid form wrapped in black biological tissue, like a cocoon or a coffin. The facial features of that humanoid were seventy percent similar to his own.

"Homologous samples can alleviate Gene Lock rejection reactions..."

A projection of the experimental log automatically activated beside the pod, blue holographic text dancing in the cold mist. Lin Yuan browsed quickly, his fingers growing colder as he read. LY-001 was not a disease; it was a screening. The Gene Lock was a safety fuse for the evolution protocol; only individuals who could endure the mutation without collapsing could open the so-called "Path of the Astartes." And the method of alleviation was to inject stem cells from a homologous sample.

"This means I need his blood," Lin Yuan said in a low voice, his gaze falling on the LY-000 pod, "or, everything he has."

The comms suddenly erupted in a piercing alarm. Scarface's voice cracked: "Scavengers! A tracker ship has locked onto us, coordinates exposed! Vanguard expected to arrive in 90 minutes, three armored personnel carriers!"

Lin Yuan turned and sprinted back to the ground level. Outside the medical station, the wasteland sky took on a sickly purple-red hue—the trail of the tracker ship's engines heating the atmosphere. The STC energy link was screaming; the consumption of three liters of water per hour was draining their reserves.

"Is the Laser Fence still functional?" Lin Yuan burst into the Control Room.

Scarface was prying open a medical cabinet; his hand shook at the words, and a metallic tube slid into his sleeve. It was high-purity anti-radiation medicine, worth half a year's rations in the wasteland. Lin Yuan's gaze lingered on that sleeve for 0.5 seconds and then shifted away as if he had seen nothing.

"The main control system is trashed, but the STC can bridge it temporarily," Scarface's voice was steady, only the cold sweat on his forehead betraying him. "Give me ten minutes and I can activate the outer Laser Fence, but it can only hold a 120-degree sector in front."

"Then do it."

Lin Yuan walked to the main console and opened the STC tactical interface. He did not expose Scarface; instead, he created a new encrypted folder in the system named "Audit Log." The first entry: High-purity anti-radiation medicine, quantity 1, location Scarface's right sleeve, timestamp now.

Trust was a luxury; checks and balances were the way to survive.

Rat Eye shuffled in, the wound on his right arm having turned black, yet he refused to use any automatic medical equipment. Lin Yuan glanced at him, said nothing, and simply threw a box of injections to him. They were old-fashioned antibiotics scavenged from a skeleton doctor's pocket, only 30% as effective as automatically synthesized drugs.

"Left corridor, three o'clock, breathing sounds."

The hallucination rang out again, and this time Lin Yuan did not ignore it. He spun around, pointing his Bolter at the doorway. Three seconds later, a dark shadow flickered past the corridor—a Scavenger scout, arriving a full eighty minutes earlier than their ninety-minute estimate.

"Contact!" Lin Yuan pulled the trigger, the Bolter rounds exploding into a flare of fire in the corridor.

The Laser Fence rose outside the Control Room window, blue energy beams weaving into a net, emitting the hum of high-voltage current. The first line of defense was activated, but energy readings showed the water reserves were only enough to last 47 minutes.

And in a blind spot of the surveillance screen, that dark shadow looked up, the comms light on its helmet blinking red as it uploaded real-time footage of the medical station to the tracker ship in orbit. On the screen, next to Lin Yuan's reflection, stood a phantom in a white coat—it was the face of LY-000 from the cold storage, smiling at the camera.

Lin Yuan's index finger hovered over the Laser Fence overload button.