Since the question of relative capabilities --- and whether or not one might wish to risk pissing off The Thing Beneath the Temple, I thought I'd post this little out-of-order snippet. It would appear that Merlin actually manages to get himself or a remote (I say not which at this point and there has been some modest editing to acoid hints)
inside the Temple, and discovered the following:
out of order TFT snippet wrote:
The Temple was riddled with even more — far more — power sources than they'd been able to detect and track from outside its walls. They'd blazed up the instant his passives had crossed the Plaza of Martyrs.
He'd always thought Chihro's decision to plate the Temple's silver dome in eight centimeters of armorplast had been ridiculous, even for a lunatic like him. There'd been far less . . . exorbitant ways to keep that dome mystically mirror bright for centuries on end. It certainly hadn't been required for any conceivable structural reason! Indeed, when Nimue Alban first observed the Temple, she'd thought she'd seen flimsier planetary-defense command bunkers.
It hadn't occurred to her — and it damned well should have — that the reason she'd thought that was that she had seen flimsier PDC bunkers. Because even though the people living and working in the Temple and its "Archangel-built" Annex didn't know it, a planetary-defense bunker was precisely what Chihro and the surviving "archangels" had set out to build.
The Temple's exterior walls might look as if they faced with seventy-five centimeters of fine de Castro marble, but that "marble" was actually solid ceramacrete, carefully disguised to look like marble, and it was sandwiched around battle steel bulkheads that were themselves twenty centimeters thick. The central dome was a hemisphere of "marble-faced" battle steel almost as thick as the walls' bulkheads, and the skylights which pierced it were ten-centimeter slabs of armorplast, all of that under the eight-centimeters of the exterior armorplast. The "stained glass" of its spectacular windows was equally formidable, and while its interior walls were rather less impenetrable, even they would have sneered at any conceivable muscle-powered — or, for that matter, gunpowder-powered — assault. They were also riddled with molecular circuitry controlling power, light, air conditioning and heat, powered doors, fire suppression systems, information terminals, surveillance systems which obviously reported to something, and the smart walls in the endless offices and living quarters. He'd detected over two dozen separate wireless nets, spreading beyond even the walls' mollycircs, tying together literally hundreds or even thousands of high-tech devices and artifacts the Church and its servants either never knew were there or else took totally for granted as part of the all encompassing proof of the Temple's divine nature.
He had no idea, even now, how deep the complex went, but he'd come to the conclusion that it must go deeper than they'd believed. Nimue's Cave was actually a complex of artificial caverns, each bigger than most of the Terran Federation Navy's shuttle hangers, hollowed out to house and conceal the tech base Pei Shan-wei and her terraforming crews had left for her. It was big enough to provide a formidable support base and fabrication facilities which could easily have springboarded modern technology on a planetary scale, if only they'd been able to operate openly. But it couldn't have supported and maintained anything on this scale, and he'd already detected a half dozen concealed doors — concealed from the current Church hierarchy, not just interlopers such as himself, he suspected. Two of them, including one which opened directly into the Plaza of Martyrs, were big enough full-scale assault shuttles could have passed through them with ease when they were open. There were clearly ramps behind those concealed doors, diving deep into the earth, and he found himself wondering just how big a hole Chihiro had dug when he built the place . . . and what hose ramps might lead to. Since there was no other high-tech presence on the planet, they'd always known any support base for the Temple had to be under it, but they'd never suspected how big it must be or how deep it might go.
