For whatever reason, the ship we were on had drifted free from the clusters of ships visible in front of us, and was spinning out on its own, away from the drifting masses.
Hundreds of great starships, of all sizes and makes. Thousands. Perhaps... millions?
They were agglomerated together in great masses by the gravity endemic to all things above a certain mass level, drawn slowly to one another in irregular pseudo-planetoids of ancient hulks drifted and mashed together by time, gravity, and psychic forces.
Above and beyond that, this had to be a place where the Warp could dump them, so the Veil was on shaky ground here. Perhaps it was the cold, dead star spinning down there and throwing out odd radiations, its albedo showing some Energized elements that just should not be existing.
These ships would come phasing back into reality, and if there was something already there, they just phased into and merged with them.
It definitely wasn’t all of them, or even a majority. Just an eye-scan said that probably a fifth of the ships were actually merged into or through one another, materialized within and through the hull of another vessel as they were dumped back into the material plane.
Another wave of psychic force broke over us, carrying the screams of ancient horrors and the damned who had faced them.
“How even is the cycle?”
“Pretty even, less than a three-second variance. It doesn’t seem tied to the star’s rotation, so we’re not sure what causes it, but there’s uneven variables in magnitude that seem to be based on echoes and random bounces off the ships. We clocked a wave at Nineteen that blew out half a dozen boards, and pulled all the way back here. Pretty sure there’s a raw winding feed coming straight off the Warp and resonating with the last echoes of the damned crews of these ships.” Carmen was somber as she looked at the incredible number of ghost ships scattered across the sky, of every make, model, and race imaginable.
Gigatons, potentially teratons, of material suitable for making starships...
“We’d have to have a Geared-out crew of Tens just to work here," Briggs murmured, studying the masses of ships. “Full Angeltech on any salvage and processing Gear at least at Fifteen, and that’s if we use cutter-beams to break them down and haul them out of effective range. Then there’s going to be both the archeological and archeotech value of these wrecks, especially the ones we don’t recognize... the alternative technologies alone could save us years in certain fields.”
Aliens just had different ways of looking at problems. Ranthas were particularly good at duplicating that kind of looking, but that didn’t mean we’d stumble into the same method ourselves. Our Skills were drawn against the Human Akasha predominantly, after all, and the other resonances we might have with other races didn’t exactly have grandiose tech levels most of the time.
The Elvar were a notable exception, but we weren’t mainlining an Akashic look into their tech, and it was heavily psi-biased, anyway, since every member of their race was an inherent psion, rather unsuitable for broad-based human production.
I addressed the space kraken in the room. “We could make a pretty big fleet out of all this... or a fleet that could make a pretty big fleet.”
The tumbling masses of vessels extended out beyond visible range, and that was at a bunch of magnifications, heading around the far side of the star.
The Warp had killed this many ships over the eons...
“Is it still too late to track down and shoot the dumb shit who invented Helldiving?!?!”
I didn’t realize I blurted it out until Briggs replied, “What are the odds they are not dead?”
My eyes narrowed. “It’s grimdark. Distressingly good...”
“Well, then, there’s just the tracking, then...”
=========
“What are you deducing?” I inquired blandly. We were walking down the main traverse of a ship, which was moaning and groaning around us with inhuman screams and wailings. When the horror waves crested past, the interior of the ship reverberated like a banshee’s screams.
“Multi-limbed, six legs, elevated at least eight feet off the ground, probably psionically or magically supported. Trilateral symmetry and manipulative digits, and three small tentacles,” he replied, spinning Beat idly as he looked about at the ancient hull of this alien freighter. The walls were occasionally moving with shadows inside of them.
No way this hulk didn’t have some sort of surprise in it.
We both paused at the same point, a set of very minor vibrations coming through the hull that definitely weren’t part of the stressed and aged metal rocking in the horror waves.
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“Hello, we seem to have disturbed something,” he murmured calmly.
“That’s a big one. Six, ten, seventeen, twenty-four... yeah, we definitely woke up something,” I agreed, as more ripples gently impinged on our Trembling Domains from all directions.
“Devolved survivors?” he had to wonder, continuing to clunk forwards, I’m Right Here, Come Eat Me. The odd forms and bizarrely non-Euclidean construction of some of the objects and tech around us definitely spoke of how advanced the species was. There were Mythos races that could stay in hibernation for eons if needed before waking up.
Whether they could survive the Warp’s Id Demons was a different matter entirely.
“Does it matter?”
“Not when they’re attempting to surround us,” he agreed. We felt the thrum and whisper of psychic forces against our Forsaken fields. “Telepathic insinuation. The forces trapped inside the walls are being stirred up...”
“So, we’re gonna be jumped by nightmares and psychic haunts any second now, and then the really tough stuff is coming after us.”
“Psy-enhanced natural weaponry?” he asked fatalistically, as his Armor began to hum in a deeper note and gleam about the seams.
“I would not argue it.”
The first shadows, some six-legged, extended triangle of a cross between a viper’s head and a spider, screamed as they pulled themselves out of the walls, and then swooped towards us, umbral legs spreading out to entangle us, rake over our minds and souls, and feed on our sanity.
The deck really began to vibrate as the creatures came at us from all directions.
My Tails unfolded smoothly, my Phoenix Cloak lit up the darkness with elemental soulfire, and my Arakne Arms had Paten and Host ready and shooting almost instantly.
“Ah, time to relax,” I sighed gratefully, and Briggs smiled as his visor came down, and the surface of his Armor lit up with writhing electrical streams of his own Thundrix Cloak.
The shadowy incorps were lit up and died in living swirls of vivus as a scuttling horde of maddened aliens with glowing, razor-tipped tentacles and cleaving, spearing legs scrambled for us from all directions. Chalice began to spit out a very harmonious song in Aklo, which was very different, and actually had these creatures screeching in pain, because nothing was supposed to be truly harmonious in Aklo...
----------
There were a lot of them, and they weren’t very smart, or they would have fled after we butchered the first half of them so violently.
I cut a narrow path towards the equivalent of the Hive Mother, Briggs pounded a much wider trail along the gap I made. I shredded her attack legs and tentacles after hewing the legs of her personal guards off in series, to meet Beat’s unstopping and relentless orbits and rebounds that were sending carapaced bodies pulping in all directions like soccer balls.
Both of us could manhandle and send these things flying tail over teakettle without too much problem at this point. I did get under the Hive Mother and heave her up into the air, much to her five-ton amazement. She landed on some of her minions with a hearty crunching of softer internal tissues, rolled, and cartwheeled her primary facing right into the path of Beat.
She came sailing back in my direction with a crunch and a shriek, and Health Qi venting wildly.
Chalice was ready to meet her with a Finish and Hew on one of her guardians, sending a screaming gout of Health Qi venting through a seam in her carapace before I rammed into her between her legs and drove into the mass of her underlings and the edge of the raised bridge or assembly area we were fighting in. Tri-bugs squealed as they were shoved off the edge of the column and went on one-way plummets that weren’t going to be friendly to their soft internals.
Hive Mom went right after them, me riding on top of her. I was grappling all six of her legs with my Tails and Arakne Arms without too much trouble, and my primary Tail was dealing with her tentacles while hissing Brands and poison were smoking into her and forcing her to vent lots of Health Qi to burn them off or become my slave.
The crunching impact didn’t do her any favors, especially when I slammed into her, too, more Health Qi venting in gooey yellow colors. Chalice was airily chanting things about broken webs, bugs crunched underfoot, dreams of happy colors and butterflies, and how Hive Mother and all her kin were going to join them.
Some of the horde was scuttling down the walls and columns, which were spaced with grips made for that kind of thing, while a large number of others were taking the fast way down courtesy of Briggs. His shoulder-mount opened up, and the first writhing mass of fine anti-proton beams turned the top of this place into a fresh new day of redecorating energy releases. The primary line of the swarm coming after us became explosions that painted the interior of the ship in steaming psychedelic colors.
Yeah, that was a nasty new toy, that was.
The bright flash of his Hornbeam cooking everything in the other direction with some point-blank corona-class flaring light threw everything into shadow. The Mother was trying to hang on as Chalice was Flurrying with raging Sun Strikes, venting almost tangible amounts of Health Qi from her as I wrestled her in a rolling ball along the floor, crushing her kiddies as we did so and ignoring the resulting sprays of steaming innards and goo...
The rasp and shriek of a carapace harder than steel taking a Sun Strike and opening up was very perceptible to both of us.
The one eye that could see me seemed to dim, and then, just before it could go utterly berserk, Chalice plunged in for the primary brain I could see crackling inside there. The Sun Strike discharged and blew out the other two lobes, and the Hive Mother’s nine eyes exploded as one.
Contrary to expectations, the swarm didn’t fold up and die, bereft of all will to live. They instead went berserk and threw themselves at us mindlessly.
Well, it didn’t mean we didn’t have to go shooting them, and Briggs could get in some mini-rocket tests in an environment of high psychic resonance.
Sparks of Sun Strikes flared this way and that, competing with strobing hard lights and deCompressing kinetic impellers and pulse grenades. Up above, Briggs was painting the walls of scuttling Mythos bug-things with computer-aided cross-patterns. Smiley-faces, glowing hearts, halos... oh, that was a very nice rose, very clean arcs and petal definition, and he wound the stem all the way down to me, only fifty feet away.
Hah, hanging fused carapaces made decent thrones, too.
I began to stack up the dead into the form of a big pair of lips...