Beyond Sector 4 lay two hundred meters of black server cabinets. Amber lights lit fifty orderly rows. Cyan indicators blinked behind glass doors, and cold air carried the smell of coolant.
Austin stopped in the center aisle.
“Now that is cable management.”
Color-coded straps held the cables in smooth bundles. Every overhead pipe ran straight. Dry-break fittings waited beneath each computing blade.
His system scanned the room.
Xiaoyao read over his shoulder. “Does it say which parts we can safely remove?”
“Root access puts them under my authority. I need twelve blades for Sunset Peak’s furnace, drainage, and sorting controls. Four heat exchangers will give Floor 3 some breathing room.”
Austin pulled the cart into the aisle. He was already planning where every piece would go.
Xiaoyao opened his notebook. “The sign says dual loop. Are both loops spare?”
“The core has hundreds of blades. We’re taking three percent.” Austin handed him the label maker. “Keep the numbers straight.”
They disconnected two cooling lines from the first blade. The fittings sealed without a spill. Austin loosened the thumbscrews and slid the blade onto a padded blanket.
SUNSET PEAK SALVAGE — NODE 01
Node two would control turbine speed. Node three would watch the forging press. Node four would run Pug’s feeder.
By the eighth blade, the front bay stood empty. The remaining servers changed their blink pattern, but Austin did not look up.
“Master,” Xiaoyao said, “the pipe beside that empty slot is knocking.”
“Air in the line. We’ll bleed it before we leave.”
Austin removed the tenth blade. Farther down the aisle, a pump changed speed.
He kept working. The equipment was sound, his credentials were valid, and Sunset Peak needed the capacity. He mistook permission to take the hardware for proof that the plant could run without it.
They loaded twelve computing blades and four compact heat exchangers. Austin also unfastened a thirty-foot section of cooling pipe and lowered it to Xiaoyao.
“Cap both ends. Keep the bore clean.”
Xiaoyao capped the pipe, then paused. A cold patch on the floor was warming beneath his boot.
“Senior, the return line is hot.”
Austin laid two fingers against it. His expression changed.
The overhead lights turned red.
A pump shrieked. One of the empty heat-exchanger mounts buckled as pressure found the weakest joint. Hot coolant sprayed across the floor.
Austin dragged Xiaoyao behind a cabinet. The stream struck the opposite rack and turned to steam.
“What does core purge mean?” Xiaoyao asked.
“It dumps heat into the dome. Everything alive in there gets cooked.”
Forty ceiling ports opened. Security spheres dropped into the aisles and turned their violet lenses toward the cart.
Austin looked at the loaded blades, the missing exchangers, and the temperature warning. There was no one else to blame.
“I pulled live equipment before checking its dependencies,” he said. “My mistake. We put back what the cooling loop needs.”
Xiaoyao was already untying the nearest strap. “All of it?”
“The four exchangers and the pipe first. Then the blades marked for cooling control. We do this fast, but we do it right.”
The first drone fired.