“Hardcore,” Cedric breathed out, as he spread out across the place with the rest of the team, led by streams of vivus washing everything down.

I had to agree. I was actually running sensory filaments through my hair now, as my Trembling Domain was having trouble getting into the metastructures necessary to look at things at my level, so why not have built-in sensor arrays? Sama not dumb. Monomec filaments added to radar hair wasn’t cyborging, it was just accessorizing. It wasn’t like I was a psion and could wield all sorts of energies to send out and return... but my passive listening skills were definitely going to keep improving, damn you...

They had used Dark Matter to petrify their souls, emptying the Dark Matter core, powering down the whole ship, and basically giving the Warp freaking nothing to work with but a Curse cast at Twenty to annoy anything and everything sticking around.

All the Warp could do is corrupt the Curse and leave. Even that Corruption would have been taken into account, surely, and while I didn’t know what the Ruk could do to solve it, dismantling the heart of a Curse they had set up, even if corrupted, hopefully wouldn’t be beyond them.

My hair swirled over each and every one of them, reading, judging, analyzing, my findings joining the results of everybody else as we proceeded through the room slowly and carefully, patiently washing the whole place down over days and weeks to get rid of any trace of the Curse, until the dark neutronium and molecularly hardened pipes, wires, conduits, and crystometallic structures were washed with white and gleaming like new.

-------

The Dark Matter Core was silent and dead, and with it, so were the hopes of the Ruk to return.

Twelve of the big Mark III Cruiser-rated Pumps were now plugged into it, and veins of white were seething in the black mass, which was constantly roiling and defying the white that was eating it ceaselessly. We had other small Mark V portable pumps out on modified Disks and in patterns, slowly and continually going over every inch of this room at the heart of the Curse, stopping it from returning

Breaking down other ships and exploring them certainly hadn’t stopped, but was being taken care of by other exuberant teams happy to participate in productive and violent xenoarcheological explorations, i.e. killing corrupted aliens and seeing what stuff we could take.

The seemingly minor findings were always the funnest. A silica-based lifeform had a method for producing molecular-hardened ball bearings at 15 that was basically equivalent to a TL 17. A TL 17 version of it would basically make Eternal Ball Bearings. The engineers all goggled at the implications...

Another species’ understanding of profound refraction angles of light and other electromagnetics was clearly a step beyond ours. Ronnie went blithering nuts when she saw some of their formation assemblies for power management and modulation...

------

“So, what’s the final plan with the Ruk?” Briggs asked in Markchat, as a few thousands of people listened in on the Strategos meeting going on.

“The Curse is drawing in massive amounts of corrupted mana to stave off the vivus we’re pumping in. Even if we filled the place with vivic pumps, it’ll survive, and once they shut off, it’ll gradually recover ground. We’ve basically been forcing it out of key areas and making it concentrate in others, which are now very off limits.” Like, a closing door pulping those who tried to use it, and such fun stuff. Doors were deadly things in the Mount.

“So there’s no way to take the Mount over reliably, even if we decode the protocols and can trick the underlying tech into accepting us?” Anatolia asked, clearly discontent. A free supercarrier of that size would be awesome.

“Mom’s already painted all their tech into the system,” Ronnie shook her head, glowing with the distinctive light of a Nineteen. Studying the Ruk tech was a giddy headrush for her as she converted it into stuff we could understand. She was particularly aided by Ranthas with varied mindsets; some rigid, some flexible, some ethereal, some energetic. Elemental viewpoints on tech were definitely a thing, and all the alien tech we were pulling out required some very adaptable brains... or a bunch of brains already specialized towards that area re: Talents.

The huge range of Talents among the kids was definitely showing itself now. This was the innovative power of having geniuses, the more extreme of whom could even figure out how some of the Mythos shit worked.

It was all being rewritten and worked into the advancing levels of human tech, meaning improvement at crazy rates. The main problem was actually implementing the stuff and scaling it up. The slow and laborious process of TL 15 tech making TL 16, which made TL 17, and so on up to 20, was not a handwave. The combination of materials needed, scale of projects, people with Skills, and proper understanding of the whole things was a logistical kerfluffle that would have taken any sane society centuries to blunder through and work out via massive scale, if not millennia.

We could make small sets of higher-end tech, but actually distributing them and doing mass-production was difficult. The Energized Elements had to be made, which often required access to things like pulsars, neutron stars, red giants, singularities, Warp nodes, phlogiston rivers, blue giants, planetary cores, planet-lunar lightning storms, and constant sun flares or cosmic storms. The combination of finding such places (hopefully without any alien races around prone to shooting us), getting the stuff there to build facilities, staffing them, and then increasing size to meet demand was basically a never-ending process... and the need to defend such facilities was always a headache, as sooner or later somebody was going to start tracking us through the Void, and then things would get interesting.

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“I think we can use it to draw the Ruk out,” I proposed calmly.

Okay, a lot of eyes were suddenly looking at me in great interest.

“Have we verified that they still exist?” Anatolia asked rhetorically. Sitting on the intelligence information that we were, she already knew the answer.

“There is no way a TL 20 race just goes extinct like that. They are hiding where we haven’t looked, and basically nobody really wants to go.” The Map popped up, and I pointed.

“The Core,” Briggs agreed. The place was full of stars, which meant light and radiation that was going to be rather dangerous to the birth of life. It was also seething with energies that made it hard for the Warp to pull shenanigans there, so much Reality there and so little true sentient life that it didn’t have a lot of influence.

“The environment is hostile to the Warp and basically full of energy and Dark Matter for the Ruk. Navigating the Warp there is extremely dangerous, and the Mythos races are not foreign to those places, mining them for goods and using the singularities for communication with higher entities. It’s hostile, and nobody goes deep into it. If you aren’t real good, it’s a death sentence when Helljumping.

“The Phlogiston Rivers, on the other hand, are like highways into the place. However, odds are that the Ruk used those rivers to get around the galaxy.” There was some surprise from the gallery, as we’d patted our back on being the first to use them. “They are gravitospatial tethers. There’s no way the Ruk wouldn’t know about them, especially since they didn’t use Jumping, and their tech tree didn’t lead to massive Gating or Teleporting. I’m theorizing they harmonized to a particular system, and either were automatically drawn along the most efficient route to get to it, like opposite magnets attracting, or may even have formed their own around themselves, taking steps to avoid Dark Matter entities.

“It would be more reasonable to use the Phlos for higher speeds, and self-created ones for emergencies. Dark Matter beings are not to be idly messed with, even at their tech level,” Ronnie said, and all the eggheads agreed on that.

“The Ruk were brought down by the combination of Mythos seduction and Warp corruption. If they can stave off the one, they can deal with the other. My guess is that they are effectively now just another of the Elder Races sitting on a kingdom in the Core, dealing with those that infringe on their territory, warring to expand for supplies when needed. They won’t have energy problems, so confiscating mass would be their only need.”

“If they’ve got a long-scale automapping route for Phlos, I want that!” piped up Smith Briggs from the peanut gallery. As one of the most experienced mappers out there, with literally thousands of systems under his belt, he’d expanded our Starmap immensely, and hundreds of Scouts had branched continually off the new systems he and Jones had found, expanding our view of the galaxy. His survey techniques had set the standards, continually updated and refined by those coming after him, and his comments on updated requirements for the Alias-class Scout ships meant they were now also on their third generation, with ever-better sensor suites, speed, and stealth capabilities.

“Our ability to calculate Phlo locations is extremely good, but it is very reliant on us getting to the appropriate heliosphere, and knowing what stars are close enough to access. It is entirely possible that there are extra unknown Phlos coming out of stars that we don’t know about because we don’t think they are near enough to get a tether. It’s entirely possible that harmonic lines could form longer Phlos than we know of, great highways across the galaxy,” Ronnie agreed with a nod.

“You are forgetting about the Great Rift,” I stated coolly. “Any such great lanes would radiate out from the Core. The Great Rift would have severed any such connections, and if and when it fades away, the Phlos coming into Khagan Sector will probably form completely anew from spatial drift. I don’t believe we’ve done any comprehensive heliosphere Phlo scans within the Empire proper?”

Heads glanced around. No, all such things we’d done had been in the Khagan Sector... which would only have cut strings. It was no wonder we had found nothing.

I pointed out at Smith, who sighed and grumbled at the additional work, especially since all of his work was in the Khagan Sector, cementing our influence, knowledge, and control there. He started organizing the Scouts for the Imperial side of the Rift, while Hulkamania happily went to work calculating systems that might form ‘super-Phlos’ across the galaxy. There wasn’t enough data to really back anything, but mass exploration was momentarily put on hold for full system circumscans to generate enough data, and hopefully stumbling across one of these Superphlo’s.

“No idea of the mechanism they might have used to do this?” Jones Rantha spoke up, directed at me.

“Part of the Mount’s data centers and computer networks are in the areas we’ve sequestered the Curse off into, or are simply blocks of woven crystal networks held in isolated areas that I can’t reach and we can’t breach easily.” I flicked up a very intricate map of the Mount we’d made, extending sixty feet deep into all surfaces, and pointed at an area at least fifty feet from all other rooms inside the mount, barely allowing us to scan the surface and the single entry chamber leading in, Sealed and locked tight.

It sat atop the primary data feed to the command center, and as far as we could determine, was the main computer core of the whole Mount, although there were numerous other computer cores that could spread the load located all over the place, likely involved with the gravity manipulation calculations that was the Mount’s primary travel method.

“Awwww...” a thousand or ten of the kids muttered, backed up by their Marked geeks.

“Don’t be too disappointed. It’s likely just an advanced mapping system generated by traveling the galaxy for hundreds of millennia, and just updated by taking high-end gravity readings. So, it’s a map, and I imagine that the Rift in existence has thrown off all the essentials it is based on. My guess is that even some of the standard Phlos have shifted since the Great Rift came screaming into existence, and their data is out of date.

Ronnie nodded agreement. “We’ll have the same level of gravitic sensors once we can tap into TL 20,” she agreed, putting about the fifteen hundredth ‘must-have’ onto her list. No, no, she wasn’t always swamped with work, nuh-uh.

“We’ve gotten away from the main topic. How are you going to bring back the Ruk, Sama?” Briggs redirected patiently.

“The Ruk totally powered down their vessel... including the antimatter reactors. Notably, it is much, much easier to restart those, as we discovered when we analyzed the tech after clearing the rooms,” I explained easily. “Since nobody is going to install a generator big enough to run the place when there’s a perfectly usable set of four antimatter reactors in place to do the job, the Ruk had to calculate that any force that found their ship would eventually restart one or all of the reactors.”

“Something will happen as soon as one is fired up,” Anatolia deduced instantly. “A distress call?”

I nodded. “That would be my guess. That would bring in their kin, who could chase off any invaders who stuck around, slowly deal with the Curse, and eventually restore them to life. Even if they died, they could get their ship back to their people, while the Curse denied it to all others.”