[SFAP] Chapter 14:19

This is the nineteenth section of the fourteenth chapter of Sonnets from a Proton. The novel starts here.
The next section is here.

“Bloody hell” exclaimed Martin staring around the room “It’s changed a bit since I was last here.”
“It’s massive isn’t it?” said Iz staring around the bay. The air was thick with drones fresh off the production line heading to their jobs and thousands of others ferrying materials to the production plants. Martin couldn’t begin to count them but there were hundreds of thousands of drones here and more joining them every second.
“Oh it always was big, but this has been extended quite significantly, and there’s a lot more stuff.”
“You think it’s designed to impress?”
“I’m not sure of anything that the Habitat does, but yeah there’s a lot here.” Martin grabbed his visor and seemed to stare briefly at a building in the distance partially hidden in the mist of drones. “Yeah that looks like the hub control, coming?”
“Yeah.” Iz clipped her belt to the conveyor and was tugged along on the pathway “How far does this actually go on?”
“I’ve been told the factories continue into the pylons, so hundreds of miles for all we know.”
“Ever fancy trying to map it out and answer that?”
“Not really, it’s always expanding so kind of futile really.”
“Or so we think, it could be a big hoax by the Habitat”
“I don’t think so. I just wish I knew quite what it was doing with all this workforce.”
“Well it’s still constructing itself.”
“No I saw this thing building itself in the early days and I just watched it build a city overnight with less than a hundred drones, no whatever is going on here it’s bigger than what we see on the Habitat”
“You think it intends for us to see this?”
“I do, we’ve got in here far too easily, it’s planning something and I don’t know what.”