The noisy machines belched black smoke as they rumbled over the broken stone roads and poured into the Golden Palace along the main avenue. Their steel shells were painted in glaring yellow and warning black, utterly out of place beside the towering golden statues and ancient relief murals lining the road. Technicians in black armor, black robes, and red robes hurried back and forth. They would not even waste time avoiding the patrol routes of the Gene-modded Warriors, simply proceeding in straight lines according to established procedures.
The main body of the Supreme Throne had already been transported out.
To accomplish this, the Mars Foundry had assembled a colossal machine comparable to Germany's Liebherr 13000 Crane. The boom of this mobile tracked lifting vehicle, used to construct large power plants, stood 250 meters high and could lift 3,600 tons at once. It took two such machines merely to hoist the throne portion of the Supreme Throne, after which platform crawler transporters—the kind used to carry space rockets to launch sites—would move it. And this was only the main body of the Supreme Throne. The even larger control units and processors beneath the throne had not yet begun to be transported.
According to the calculations of the Mars Foundry technicians, a considerable portion of these machines would have to be abandoned here to make room for the equipment moved out of the Golden Palace. Taking part in such transport work was the dream of many engineers. They completed their tasks at top speed, utterly disregarding numerous safety regulations. This included repairing damaged hydraulic transmission lines on the lifting boom without using lifting equipment, instead climbing the mechanical arm to a height of two hundred meters with the four cybernetic limbs on their backs.
When Salomon ordered the person in charge to