“So... we’re going to be mashing on robots, service droids, internal defenses, and death traps, depending on how much shit has been repaired.”

We both looked up and down at the size of this place. If this place had any kind of production tech, and the chances it did not were infinitesimal, that meant unlimited amounts of stuff to fight, as long as its energy held out... which it had for at least six millennia, so it wasn’t going to stop any time soon.

“And we don’t know where the computer cores are.”

“We don’t,” he agreed.

“This is post-TL 10 stuff. The odds of me being able to hack it are nil.”

“Oh, how unexpected that is,” he rolled his eyes.

“On the other hand, there’s damage the computer either can’t or won’t fix. So there’s probably a bunch of automated stuff it has lost control over. I imagine the crash didn’t help,” I mused thoughtfully.

“Assuming we have a hostile AI, what we want is contact with non-hostiles. Ship’s logs, potential psi-records, and the like.” His head tilted up.

“The bridge and officer’s quarters, then,” I agreed.

“Bit of a climb,” he noted.

“What, you don’t want to set off a hundred alarms by setting off your boots and anti-grav? Come on.” I rapped the side of his breastplate, and he nodded despite himself.

“Techno-Briggs not stupid, arrgh.”

“Not seeing any bots floating, but there’s bound to be something gonna wake up.”

“If we get construct-swarmed, I blame you!”

“Hags can shoulder lots of stuff. Blame weighs nothing!”

“Ah, not fearing consequences. You live in a blissful state of mind,” he sighed, but his eyes were gleaming.

“You are only now figuring that out?” I sniffed in return, sliding over to the nearest support beam extending up into a dark spot. “It’s time for a spider monkey impersonation!” My Tails rose out of my backside, found holds, and began to lever me upwards weightlessly.

He just laughed, came up the beam after me, and like a big metal-covered ape, swung up after me without much effort. Easier than climbing that cliff, after all...

---------

It was a slog, but we always had stuff to talk about, even if being in this desert was minimizing contact with the outer world. Our relay team was running back and forth, bringing information about the greater conflict going on outside.

So many of them were getting to use Talents that were only applicable or important in war time. It went without saying that a lot of them were having a great time.

Briggs’ Gentle Giant technique could have been useful as a Warlord, but the boys had it down, the Sources had their Oaths up and things were lining up against the marauding aliens in a really bad way...

==================

Back in Janus Prime...

Egil Rosenblaum groaned into the darkness.

Crushing weight loomed down on him, and all sensation below his right knee was cut off. Circulating his Vajra, he took stock of the situation with calm irony.

---

Suborned humans, crazed by the psi-virus that had rewritten their brains and turned them into enslaved berserkers, had invaded his blok by surprise, and the alerts sent out in the Markspace had come true.

Lepido had been on his shoulders as he had gone out into the corridors, and commenced proper operations of the Office of the Exterminatus. The alien cat hissed and indicated perfectly whenever one of the pslaved citizens was nearby, and Egil had put them out of their misery. Man, woman, child... he did it without batting an eye, looking past the faces to the miserable hands of the cerevores behind it all.

Lepido almost screeched when she sensed the brain-eater leading this batch three floors down. The blok was a riot of fighting going on, as Marked folk, a very large number of them with mindclaws, and pretty much all of those also armed and very dangerous, were going at it against spillover from a neighboring blok that had been almost completely infected by the virus. He thought about how they might have caught this thing even earlier if the Ranthas had expanded in that direction, but they’d picked his blok as an outlier and had been filling in the area in between Guvnahblok and their main holdings.

No doubt the aliens sensed them coming and had withdrawn their people from areas occupied by psensitives before they were alerted, too. Only the dumb luck from the alert at Jonglerblok had set things into motion, and forced the aliens to action.

While he couldn’t turn a mindblade as yet, still laboring at the barrier to Seven, he and Serena had been doing a lot of work getting him ready to break the barrier.

Ah, Serena. Even someone as job focused as Egil Rosenblaum had his mind drift a bit at the very idea he was sharing his bed with a Rantha...

His gyropistols had been Named, Calm and Lucid, and while he wasn’t the most naturally dexterous person around, especially after he’d removed his Wired Reflexes, the Dexterity Mark had taken care of that problem for him, and the whole art of gunslinging dual weapons was a mental art, not just higher coordination.

Calmly and lucidly, he pulled the triggers. Rocket slugs ignited, wreathed in the pale blue of Phrenic Banefire, and shot out as visible tracers, striking their targets with remarkable precision before exploding in gory displays of flesh-shredding and bone-ripping microbursts, basically every hit a kill on a normal human, whose psi-fried brain hooked into the pslaver virus meant they now qualified as Phrenics.

New slugs cycled smoothly into the chamber, the action reworked, humming with psionic efficiency, almost no vibration, no powder build up, all the momentum and force redirected forwards with only a small fraction coming through to his hand, more an acknowledgement that it had fired than anything else. Of course, his Vajra was wrapping it, and he wouldn’t be mistaken about such things anyways.

Every six seconds, another gyro formed in the bottom of the eternal magazines. Cool mist poured off the muzzles of his guns, and despite firing off over a hundred rounds each, they were now ice-cold and having no problems with jamming or overheated barrels.

A crowd came at him, twenty-some of them, screaming, eyes bloodshot and lit up with odd lights within, hands warped into empowered claws capable of tearing someone open.

Calm and Lucid oriented, and Egil pulled the triggers as fast as he could adjust, while Lepido and his psicrystal Egg kept watch behind him.

Exploding once-people blew apart into those behind them. It didn’t matter how fast they wanted to charge, the ones in front kept staggering as frozen blood, meat, and bone smacked into them painfully, and then it was their turn to get blasted apart and slow down their fellows.

His magazines emptied, the psionic templates of new gyros taking time to gather new material and bring them together. That was fine. He switched to Force from Frost on his gyros, and this time there indeed was no kick, as basic slugs of solid force shot out now. There was no recoil on them, but they were still trailing banefire, and these people had no armor to speak of... and if they did, he shot them in the face.

The four who’d managed to live through the crowd of frozen bone and bloodspray had their faces blown out, pok-pok-pok-pok. Egil stopped going backwards and reversed direction, proceeding along his original course as Lepido indicated the cerevore was still below him.

-I am on 64 and making my way to the center,- he /said into the Markchat, and minds all around him lit up with recognition and not a little relief.

Lepido’s hisses and empathy picked him out targets inside rooms he passed, while he counted off the seconds as his Magazines refilled, shot by shot. The Plunge was right in front of him, and he could see people on the far side, screaming, fighting, dying; mindblades in gold, green, blue, and white flashing; and the occasional gathering point centered around a mindshield. Lasers strobed, slugthrowers barked, and autoguns roared and chewed up scenery.

Distance and Accuracy were two of the major enhancements to put on any ranged weapon. The first doubled the range of the weapon, nicely modifying the precise killing range he could pop things at without difficulty. The second one ignored the range modifiers for the first three range increments, i.e. it eliminated a -6 in range penalties, basically turning 120-yard shots with a pistol into point-blank range, gyros staying straight and true on course for improbable distances. It wasn’t as good as a sniper rifle, but for something as destructive as gyros, it turned that area into a potential slaughterfest.

Greater Soulbound Banefire Distance Accurate Force-shooting Pistols did their thing, and he was out onto the promenade around the Plunge, his firing never stopping.

Left, right, picking off every target on approach to him on a clear firing line, as some of the Pslaved still had enough awareness to use the firearms they were equipped with. At the same time, he had plenty of targets across the way, and was not slow to pour fire into clusters pressuring in on any defenders.

The streaking banefire drew attention friendly and not, and people started moving towards him. Some were stupid and blocked his line of fire, until a shot went past their ear and they decided that hugging the walls was fine. Green and Gold survivors noted where he was, and as he began to move, they made their way towards stairwells, trailing their own groups of survivors.

Voices were calling through Markspace, and Egil calmly told them to head towards the areas designated as hardpoints, get the survivors there, and make damn sure no infiltrators got through. There were no healers who could cope with the pslaver virus once someone was bit, so anyone wounded was to be put down before they could infect others.

Nobody could see his heart bleeding as he made the call. They weren’t men, women, or children anymore... they were just puppets of meat, strings being pulled by the bastards below.

The Pstatic Surge as the telepathic disruption went up across the city only fizzed the Markspace a little, since it didn’t operate on the same wavelengths as psionics. However, the Pslaves immediately started keening as the guidance from their hivemind controllers was lost, save those in the most immediate area of the cerevores. Coordination and information exchange naturally suffered.

Yeah, it wasn’t like humans hadn’t been attacked by things in nightmares or psychically before. Humanity didn’t rely on telepathy to communicate, so shutting it down didn’t really hurt primary communications at all.

Naturally, the Pstatic hubs would become prime targets, but that just let humanity know where to kill things. The enemy did have so many prime targets, after all...

There were screams in Markspace that the xenosyms were here. Sixty floors up, Egil could only calmly order people to converge together and get to the safe zones, now being rapidly cleared out by the first arrivals to the area, and held against all comers.

At least a person every breath was taking The Plunge, often with a snarling Pslave or two in their grip, dying and doing their best to take someone with them. Even the old and decrepit were using the move, hands fixed in deathgrips and rictus grins on their faces as they plunged past, even as they were being ripped open in midair.

He didn’t have the intellect to watch the deeds of others in Markspace, so he couldn’t track progress except by the words and rough positions of the Marked pulling back to fortified areas where they could present a united defense, succor civilians, and then push out again.