There was some chortling all around, and hungry eyes on those magic Weapons. The Warp Gods were so bloody generous. That was 144k of goldweight right there, ready to be purged off and empower something else.

The Swords and other incidental Weapons dropped here and there over the white-stained backtrail were slowly and carefully gathered up for Vivic Burning, and conversion to mana crystals that would be disseminated among the team. Crewmembers left behind on the forge ships were already complaining that they weren’t allowed on this excursion... Naming Karma + Mana Crystals was going to be quite the payday!

Snark flew back and forth as we advanced steadily, the additional vivus doing a nice job, but taking no chances before we pumped our approach path full of unwhite Land-feeding yumyum sauce.

It was a couple patient hours before we made it to the crossways. It was quite spacious, easily a half-mile square, and it turned out the other crossways were about a hundred yards narrower than our own. Thus, the cruiser that was sitting silently in drydock was here because this seemed to be the repair lane, and so they’d line up ‘east-west’ here.

The floor below us was full of power conduit Runecables and transfer patterns. This place was definitely designed to focus a whole bunch of power, in both directions.

Another supply of vivic pumps made it down to us, and sped up the liberation of this general area as we claimed a section of this central chamber... and did NOT get underneath the suspended kilometer-length of the light cruiser sitting up there, just waiting to fall down.

Most interesting, there was remnant power here. The cruiser itself was in a natural null-G zone, so it ‘weighed’ nothing, and could be held in place relatively easily. There was motion at the corner of the eye, as this was the area where the black stuff of the congealed Curse was the strongest, and it was trying to figure out how to do something to us... and the vivus kept trying to eat it as it did so.

Being unable to pick on shit by manipulating causality really hampered the high-end Curses, and as long as we avoided going under stuff that could drop on us and roll our way, we were pretty safe.

There were robots and droids around, around with various mecha made for moving stuff about, all sized for shorter, thicker people than we were. Most of them seemed to run on broadcast power... and there wasn’t any being broadcast, so they were useless. That hardly meant we couldn’t give them a hearty vivic wash and watch the black shit squirm out of them and burn, however.

-------

“So, you want to go down there and check out the power core directly, or wait?” I asked around.

Eyes scanned the massive chamber around us, the TL 20 technology, and the shit at the corner of our eyes that had claimed this entire place and done something to its inhabitants.

“Pump this area full of vivus, and have the Precipice blast it again. While it’s trying to adapt, make a run for the main power core,” Cedric proposed.

“And what do we do once we get there?” I asked.

“Well, if it’s got standard power couplings, we’ve already got custom connections for vivic pumps there. We can pump a generator through them, ride the vivus right into its core, and see if we can start it up again,” Percy nodded, glancing at the Disks with the Mark IV’s on them.

“Energy signature alludes to a Dark Matter generator, which is the apex power tech on the Mass tree. Does anybody here know how to start up a Dark Matter power core?” I asked lightly.

Everybody looked at one another, tried to cheat by /sending out some urgent Marktells, and otherwise stayed silent.

“As long as we can purge the core of the Curse, that’ll be something, right?” Curie had to ask, frowning. “Just pumping some juice into the surrounding Runecraft should be enough to secure the chamber...”

“There has to be back-up power sources,” Giselle reasoned, also frowning. “They won’t run on the same tech, because they’d be designed to take over if the main core wasn’t running, and would be easier to refuel. So, probably antimatter at the neutronium level?”

“Do we know how they collect their dark matter?” Trise spoke up, curious now. “I mean, I know it’s everywhere, but everywhere everywhere?” She waved around.

I flicked up a holo of this flying mountain, and picked out a few areas that protruded for no apparent reason. “Those are likely intake valves using paragrav to draw in dark matter, probably only used when the Mount is in motion. It’s entirely likely that passive sources are primary power unless this place is actually in motion or in combat. They probably fire it up to make the neutronium for the side plants, making sure they have enough reserves to start up the Dark Matter Core...”

“Is there even enough dark matter to do that, even if we could figure out the control sequence?” Cedric had to wonder.

“Well, taking in so much other-matter in a horror zone like this would probably lead to massive psychic contamination of the power network, turn this place into a real scream factory. So, unless you can vivic it as it burns, there’ll be problems...”

“Kaiju in the room time, Mom. Where’s the signs of Warp contamination? I mean, sure, they can’t affect obdurium to any real extent. But shouldn’t this place be freaking swarming with ectoplasm, necroplasm, Warp residues, and suchlike?” Percy had to ask.

“Not if the Curse is configured to kill all that stuff. All it has to do is cut it off from the Warp, and the stuff will just go away, right? Even if the Curse has been corrupted to turn its power against everything, not just Warp influence, it can still handle this.”

“Powerful Curse,” mused Rikkle. “The Ruk did that, eh?”

“It got this ship out of the Warp. Whether it got them out... no, there’s too much death here, the air rings with it. They didn’t get out.” I shook my head.

“But... that doesn’t mean they didn’t escape, right?” Giselle butted in. “They were a culture at Twenty... c’mon, there had to be something they could do, right?”

I considered that, and all the insane stuff that could be pulled off at higher Valences of magic. The Ruk were masters of Earth-based magic and tech, had ridden that to a domination of the galaxy that had lasted for eons, building it up to the point where it was almost unassailable. It took the Mythos corrupting a whole branch of their race and the Warp Gods taking down all of magic to bring them down.

These people were seriously tough and smart, and only changing the laws of reality had done the job in the end. Yeah, they were very focused on one magitech tree, but they’d taken it all the way to the end before it basically became Play-doh for Eternals. While tech at that level could be very inflexible and almighty in a narrow vein, it could also be very adaptable if you were smart enough to apply it innovatively.

And despite itself, the Warp bred innovation, even to a race as unchanging as the Ruk.

So, how could the crew of this place give the finger to the Warp, and get out of here?

“Someone run me a scenario with top-end Earth magitech. Is it possible to petrify souls?”

Everyone looked at one another, and then the Forest-Computer on Hulkamania revved into action...

--------------

There were half a dozen possible scenarios, but the one that stood out fit the scenario of a completely powered-down ship, the Curse, and a total lack of Warp involvement.

If there was Warp corruption of the Ruk, they’d still be here... Possessed, tormented, undead, working on this tech, ready to turn it against the galaxy, something.

That hadn’t happened. They’d not let the corruption take them, and also not let their souls be captured and used to run this place.

This was a full perfectly intact Ruk Flying Mountain. It was unreal. It could only mean that the demons of the Warp, who were extensions of Sin and Id, found absolutely nothing here worth spending their time. The Curse couldn’t possibly have driven them away if they had fun things to do... but without fun, why stay and fight the annoying thing?

So, there were no Ruk in various entertaining poses around, merged into walls, still alive after being rendered into different organs plastered about the place, and similar expressions of demonic creativity.

So... where?

The Dark Matter Core made sense. So, we were going to go down there.

------

The Precipice did a twelve-hour burn on another ablation grid that should lead in around or under us. It wasn’t as long, but with the additional synchronizing data it was more effective. We watched a whole side of the Mount burn out in white worms, and sections of the hangar about us spit out whole sections and small ponds of the stuff as the double-duty of our pumps and that incoming surge did the job.

Then we headed down the lifts.

First we had to jam them, since they might suddenly power up and then come crush everyone. Then we had to rappel down a few dozen stories to the main engineering level, reading the Runes outside the doors from the inside in our Tremblesense, and then force open those doors with some psionic razzle-dazzle on some very sophisticated locks... complemented with vivic washes.

There were a lot of geomantic devices down here of impressive size, age, and still not a hint of dust on them, slumbering and waiting to be waken up. It was the first time pretty much everyone got to knock on neutronium with their bare hands.

The Seals on the primary Core chamber were pretty impressive, but they weren’t designed to deal with a Null at my level... and really, they were there to keep the doors closed, not even to keep out alien forces, magic, spirits, whatever. Almost as if it wasn’t important.

Heads bobbed when I pointed that out.

Then it was a case of giving the doors enough juice, and pumping the whole area full of vivus for an hour while black worms writhed in unwhite flames everywhere, before opening it up.

We didn’t even look inside before we just started hosing everything. The streams of vivus ignited like firewalls in a wind against the stream of outraged Curse influence that was lunging at us and trying to do Bad Things to us. Everybody had vivic Weapons out and ignited, and the pumps just worked and worked while we sat there and I organized a poker tournament in Markspace for everyone.

------

Roughly an hour later the whole area outside the door was glowing white, the ambient blackness in the air was pretty much done, and we could actually see what was going on inside.

The big dark sphere about a hundred feet in size in the center of the place, held together with the dead black of neutronium pylons, pretty much dominated the room. The floor was an uneven sprawl of some ungodly complicated mess of multi-level Runic piping, and least twenty levels of Patterns, with a few floating walkways here and there above the morass.

We found the crew of the place, too.

There were thousands of them, all kneeling, all motionless. Some were in uniforms for work, others military attire, most of it much heavier and with more tools than human stuff would be. There were tens of thousands of soldiers in power armor, corps of techies, officers, scientists, runesmiths or wizards or alchemists or something...

And as I’d expected, they were all made of stone infused with dark matter...