There was a subtle shifting and swirling all around us, energies moving that had been very, very still for a long time.

“It’s hissing!” Percy pointed out sharply, squinting at it.

“Paint it with vivus,” I snapped, Paten and Host snapping out, going to low-power, basically just carriers for the vivic energy I instantly shot it with.

Violet rays of light were joined by scattered firing implements on lowest power setting, bringing up whorls of light to the first glowing Rune.

There were puffs, pops, and crackles as something dark was eaten away, and the vivus was bursting out and getting sucked into the line of Runes that glowed golden, and then very rapidly began to ignite in turn. Fine black threads hissed and sizzled and were burned away by vivus, fed into the next Rune.

A dozen lines of not-so-hard light chased the Runes over the door, separating as the streams of magic did, patiently washing every Rune down across the massive face as they spread faster and faster, but definitely in a specific pattern and energy. The corrupted mana, instead of infecting and tainting them, became a source of greater power thoughtfully contributed by the heavy Warp influence around it.

“We’re probably going to need a vivic hoser,” I said over my shoulder, and one of the support techs instantly started making inquiries and arrangements for one.

“Definitely magitech,” Curie murmured, as the magnificent glow of the ancient Runes reached the halfway point and marched on with inexorable purpose. “The Ruk definitely had to design all this before the Warp corrupted all the mana...”

“If that happened to occur in the final millennium or two of their reign... cultures with Geoic affinity are not known for their ability to rapidly evolve and adjust to changing paradigms. If the reputed psionic revolt happened at the same time, they would distrust psionics and not turn to it to save themselves, as the Elvar and other societies did, including ours...”

I was thinking aloud, but there were thoughtful hums from all around.

Unable to make new magitech, and possibly even their older magitech slowly eroding under the influence of corruption, how long could the Ruk possible endure? Egg their enemies on, realizing the weakness spreading at the heart of their society, and their decline was inevitable.

Poor bastards, having to run up against a galactic-class foe in the Warp Gods. Torn apart by treachery, rebellion of a lower clan, mutation, and war... even if Mythos races were involved as the Tribute’s histories seemed to indicate, the fingerprints of the Warp gods were all over it.

The March of the Runes narrowed down to the termination sequence, ended on one defiantly flaring symbol that stabbed our eyes with its own unyielding perfection, defying the march of time.

Something groaned and rumbled as we all stopped washing down the naturally unmarked metal, which was somehow cleaner and brighter than before.

“We need some genius to come up with some vivic pumps pronto tonto.” I squirted out some ideas, some eggheads jumped on them, and designs were proliferating through Markspace in minutes. The engineers fed them into Hulkamania to test the designs in simulations, and when viable matters were arranged, the coders for the Fabs poured out the instructions to actually make the damn things.

Elapsed time, about five minutes, as dull booms and groans from ahead and around us echoed through the ancient Ruk vessel all around us. They went into production immediately on the local fabber, and we should have the first of them in twenty minutes or so.

Unlike the Mechanists, I didn’t have to struggle with lines of authority, endless reviews, requests to access certain tech data, quorums of analysis, requesting calculation time on servers, and intellects inhibited by too much rigid adherence to defined and known technology. If my people couldn’t innovate and find solutions to weird situations, how dare they call themselves smart?

The massive hangar doors began to split in a jagged pattern around the lines of Runes, a seam that wasn’t there until it suddenly was. Like the jaws of a titanic construct, the doors rose and fell in slow, majestic fashion.

The interior was dark...

-------

The hangar went in a long ways, and got painted into the Map and scanned while we waited for the vivic pumps to arrive, moving to parallel what looked like a bunch of docking stations for smaller ships to the side of the main flight corridor.

The hangar looked like it extended fully throughout the ship, and might form a cross through the center of it, allowing arrival and departure from five sides, leaving only the peak unaccessed. We couldn’t see them joining from here, but there were landing gates on all four sides and down low, so it was a reasonably safe bet.

A cargo shuttle came zipping up with the new vivic pumps. A second generation, further refined, was being processed, and already being used to plan generations III, IV, and V, moving up the TL scale smoothly as inefficiencies were pointed out and addressed gleefully.

What we had here were five-hundred-pound engines designed to generate about 3d6 of vivic fire in a tight stream constantly, kind of like a vivic flamethrower if left open... but mostly designed to stick into a power system and help purge it of any unnatural energies.

The idea of using it to fight incoming Warp corruption and similar messing with a ship meant that suddenly just about every one of our captains and Engineering chiefs wanted a few of these in place to fight against exactly that kind of shit trying to mess with their beloved ships.

More vivic pumps went into production, and were pointedly Blessed by the GM in a passing Mnemo, so that started going quickly.

The only thing was that you couldn’t use a thing like that in the Warp, or you turned it into a bright burning Eat Me sign, blinking and shouting for attention from something powerful enough to breach a Throne field and eat you. That made it horrible for Helljumpers, but for the Tachyon Drive, it was a magnificent way to help fight off the psychic and spatial disruptions perpetuated by some of the things existing out beyond the heliosphere... and tons of powerful psychic shit that ventured inside heliospheres, too.

Heck, put one into an Alias-Class Scout ship, and it would be able to weather the horror waves from the Sargasso with help from Nulls and Sources...

The massive cavernous space wasn’t lit up, because there was no active power.

All the ships stored within were resting on the ground or in their holding claws, still and silent. None of them had fallen to decay, ample proof of a race that had completely mastered the Earth side of the tech tree to Twenty.

There was one cruiser-class vessel parked in there in its own drydock, the crystalline, blocky style of make showcasing immense endurance and defensive power, with rather fewer guns than human or imperial style, but bigger ones where it had them. Less concerned about point defenses, and more about hitting back.

You make your weapons to defeat your own kind of defenses, and trust your defenses against attacks not meant to overcome them.

“What do you imagine they used for point defenses?” Cedric asked as we stood around a pylon with a power feed, and the engineers and material Psions worked on mating the feed of the vivic pump to the power feed.

At last they reconfigured it to attach, and flicked on the pump.

There was a hiss, and everyone jumped a looong way back as shrieking blackness erupted out of that pylon. The flitter hanging above creaked, and everyone jumped again as the anchor claws that had endured who knew how many millennia abruptly blew apart, and the multi-ton flier crashed extremely loudly to the floor of the hangar.

Percy adroitly scooted the vivic pump out from under the impact point as spurts of whiteness began to come out of joints and flex points, flaring as blackness seemed to be trying to wriggle away from it.

Everybody kinda stood around looking at it.

Curie spun on her heel, looking around. “Ma, we’re gonna need more than a dozen pumps.”

I flicked my hand out, and my TK Ring detached the vivic pump. “Back away now!” I ordered, scooting back.

Lightfooters and rocket-powered grav skimmers shot backwards as they all looked up, and the holding claws of the flitters and fighters above began to sway...

What followed was loud and impressive, as fully a dozen light starships came falling down onto our access feed to the power supply, crushing it flat, bouncing wildly, some of them fracturing and breaking, and tumbling and rolling across the hangar floor... mostly in our direction.

One tumbling shuttle rolled slightly beyond what physics would allow, and its momentum expired about a foot in front of me. I had the feeling something was yipping and lunging at me, and a little frustrated as I reached out and tinged the adamant hull.

“That wasn’t ominous at all,” MI Crosins remarked fatalistically.

“Nope.” “Agree.” “Nah.” “Nopers.” “Uh-uh.” “Not at all.” “Optimist.”

“You got that ‘I got this really crazy weird idea’ face on, Mom,” Giselle pointed out.

“Yeah, the ExLite bonuses attract my attention to odd items at times, Insight dismissing what won’t work quickly and focusing on what might.”

“Vivic pumps won’t do it?” Cedric asked grimly. “What’s it gonna do, collapse the hangar on us?” There was some sort of ominous creak from up there. Probably just one of the docking claws... “I didn’t say nuthin. Honest. Wasn’t me.”

I pointed, and us and all the pumps and support crews retreated back out of the hangar onto the landing platform.

“Girls, did you feel it?” I inquired, gesturing at the runemarkings on the side of my face and neck.

They both looked startled. “Must’ve been subtle. Wasn’t looking for it, Mom,” Curie admitted.

“There’s a Curse on this place?” Percy asked stiffly.

“A CORRUPTED Curse,” I corrected calmly.

“Oh, that can’t be bad at all,” MI Crosins murmured for everyone.

“That it was Corrupted means it wasn’t set by the Warp originally. That leaves...”

“The Ruk!” Trise exclaimed despite herself.

“I don’t see any demons running at us, and I don’t see any widespread Warp corruption, not that it might not be there... but, I don’t think that it is. I just think the magic empowering the Curse has been corrupted...”

“And so it’s being twisted to act against us, especially when we started purifying it,” Cedric deduced. “Okay, so shoving vivus into the power systems is a really good idea, as it will spread to everything hooked into the power system, and possibly anything running on broadcast, if we back it with real energy. But, how are we going to introduce energy into the system to start the process going, if the system starts massively and violently rejecting us?”

I turned away from the hangar and its recessed doors, and the gentle breeze generated by temperature differentials from the dying star.

“Time!” reported Rikkle, and everyone converged on the nearest Ten Forsaken.