An alarm went off in Mechveister Kiang Fo’s sidebrain. It was an annoying distraction, given that he was overseeing the dissection of one of the fleshtanks scavenged from the xenos attacks. The para-psychic means by which they channeled their plasma cannons was not beyond the science of the Imperium, and the cranial bore they had retrieved was being hurriedly set up and tested to see if there were any greater efficiencies they could discover out of the thing. Surely discerning some proper efficiencies or finer attunements for the Guild’s own cannon designs would generate some positive merits, and he had not lost his ambition for attaining Archveister.

Alas, he was spending time on this planetary backwater, a mere mining world whose only positive edge was enough technology to engage in repairs of Fleet ships. Also, it did have a fine supply of Energized materials suitable for use on his laborious experiments on energy manipulation and condensation fields. He had already spent hundreds of thousands of man-hours on the subject, and was certain his skill in this field was among the highest in the entire Guild Mechanicus. It would certainly be his ticket into Archveister...

The beeping alarm didn’t silence itself. He glared at it, and spared a moment of his attention from the mounting wave-form algorithms and field interactions to see what it was about.

The Celestial Tribute name search alarm has gone off.

So great was his focus and distaste for the interruption to his beloved experiments that it took several seconds for the vastly irritated Mechveister to remember what this portended.

Suddenly the experiments concerning what millionth of a Baud adjustment in cycling power modulations was suitable for Pyruranium-generated plasma were shunted off to the side.

Someone had gone searching for information on a ship named the Celestial Tribute, and in some very old databases.

The Mechanist Guild had naturally infiltrated all those databases long ago, and what information was in them had often been placed by the Guild itself, to mislead those doing the search. After all, outsiders finding out the truth of the ship was simply not permissible.

Perhaps it is merely an error, he thought, pulling up closer records on the search.

A survey team! Mechanical organs fibrillated, and scattered remnants of long-discarded emotions scattered his thoughts unreasonably.

He easily broke the government coding schema, as the Mechanists had supplied them, and quickly read the situation report and all relevant data.

Not a survey group, but a scout team, investigating xenos incursions into the Wastes. He felt the coolants churning through his systems seem to chill as he marked the location and vector... it was certainly possible it had fallen off the stricken ship as it plummeted, and micro-coding on the hull plating would be enough to indicate its origin and date of manufacture.

There were ships from before the Emperor was crowned still sailing in service in the Empire, but almost never so far out into the galaxy. Finding the trail of one was a great event, and even learning that the ship might have been in orbit here would bring treasure seekers crawling here from every system the news spread to.

Thus, all records accessible outside the heart of the Guild’s most secure systems were filled with erroneous information on what exactly the ship was and had been... a simple freighter frequently used to transport tithes and tax materials from frontier worlds back to the heart of the Empire. There were reams of hard-to-find data on shipping routes, cargoes, and crews, subbed for other ships, and going right down to crew names, service records, and worlds reached... and all those ancient records had been meticulously modified as well.

As far as the Guild knew, there were no electronic records accessible to the public anywhere that showed what the Celestial Tribute actually was.

Of course, that didn’t mean it was completely hidden. The core systems and files of the great noble families were closed to the Mechanists by psionic Seals, and surely hid information that would be of great value and benefit to the Guild... and the truth of the Celestial Tribute. Likewise, some of the other ancient great guilds and megacorporations certainly had records going back far enough to indicate what the flagship of the last true Duke Corunsun was.

The last recorded appearance and cargo of the false Celestial Tribute could all be discovered if one looked hard enough. It had been lost in transit over three thousand years ago, it had passed through what had been the primary mining station in this system before Janus III had ever been considered a mining site, and even false calls for help, jetted buoys, and some wreckage were logged and recorded. Blast damage had indicated Dark Elvar corsairs, and the total lack of survivors bore it off, likely swept off and used as slave fodder for their arenas.

The workstation doing the information search didn’t have a monitor, or he would have keyed directly into it. He did have profiles of the entire troop that had recovered the plate, and none of them stood out at all, simple PG members of a half-destroyed mega-city who’d stumbled across some wreckage turned up by the sands, and were investigating if it was something of relevance with the tools at their disposal.

He could almost see the simple trooper going through the faded records of a fallen ship from three thousand years prior, yawning as he did, flicking through the pages. The Mechveister watched the pages cycle, and then start getting skimmed faster and faster as the technical aspects of the report were too boring. Those, of course, would have been the areas where some slip of an error might be found, but Kiang Fo was icily sure no such mistakes had been made. His Guild had been very, very thorough in its cover-up.

The only way to find the error would be to go searching non-existent data logs of ship travels from three millennia ago, and realizing that some ships had missing transits that were nonetheless logged together, and one ship had somehow managed to acquire all those missing transits. You would have to know what ships should have had the data, and now did not, and realize that the records of those ships might have continuity errors, and try to find those errors off other falsified records at other sites, and then keep going five or six stages deep until the deception was revealed.

Which would never happen, as nobody cared about a lost ship that old taken by drow and never recovered.

There it was, being closed up and discarded as worthless. His phragmic motor pulsed as it eased his minor need for oxygen, given how much left of him was still organic. Would the soldier log a search and recover order? If so, it would have to be buried far, far down in the queue of matters to attend to, and deftly accelerated into irrelevancy, or simply stamped done and unable to be completed, so disappearing into the depths of the deleted files, to be purged completely upon first opportunity.

The soldiers could be eliminated one by one in random ways. Traffic Control was ideal for such errors, but luckily there was a war going on, and accidents happened all the time...

Eh? Other alarms?

What remained of his face couldn’t frown. This was becoming a distressing day. What was happening now?

Sharp sounds arose outside his lab, and he whirled around.

[Sir, we have intruders! The Black Moon is here!] he finally heard the incoming report.

The damned shadow-skulkers of the Emperor were here?!

The secured portal to his chambers danced with discharging voltage, frying the systems holding it closed, and the doors lotused open as polarity reversal retracted them. Two of the finer Sentrybots of the Guild, holes blasted right through them, were crumbling to the sides as a team of very fast-moving organics in black moved in.

He fired automatically, armor-piercing darts shooting out as a spray of poison grenades that would reduce these intruders to sludge was ejected from his clattering form. His shields sparked up, and his dendrites heaved a skull-backed autolaser onto his shoulder.

A force shield snapped up, took the impact of the darts and bounced them off shrilly. A gauntleted hand thrust out, seized the grenades in a telekinetic grip, and squeezed tight, bringing them in tight together as an ectoplasmic force screen materialized around them. They detonated loudly, but the elastic shell held, and contained the poison.

Rapid-fire gyros went off, shining with the Stars and Suns of advanced psionic charging.

His shields sparked, flared, blazed, and collapsed under the detonations and volley, and then a fifth shot expertly picked off his autolaser just as it was cycling up.

A spiral-helix particle ray slammed into his chest, and he gasped as the pulse tore through his systems. Even shielded and buffered, there was a wild fluctuation and screaming of stressed technology trying to overcome the disruption.

Two Sun Shots of particle beams and anathemic, rigid black Banefire slammed into his limbs and dendrites, tearing through his systems with more electrical distortions and field manipulations, blowing out circuits and buffers.

A fast-moving form slammed through tens of thousands of credits of advanced monitors and databanks, scattering them without a care, its shield leading the way. Mechveister Kiang Fo could barely open his optical shutters in time as the glowing edge of the force shield slammed into his cortical bracing, and psychic energy blew through it, severing most of his access to his body’s systems.

A glowing blue-silver hand equipped with glowing claws of transpsionic force punched into the back of his head, severing three data feeds and two control cables, and punched into the side of his head where his Boolean relay was located. It shorted out instantly, and the shock went through the remaining half of Kiang Fo’s brain, and all of the cyber-cognitive hardware that had replaced it.

The Mechveister went dark.

------

Jamal chopped deftly, his Starcore Mindshield and Claw easily dealing with the steel and alloys of the Mechveister’s shell. He had come a long way since being a gangbanger with Sensei Sama, and leading his own team of Strikers was very much living the dream.

“Secure this,” he said, tossing the head to Prima, who caught it, swept it with an Assay, and wrapped it in a time-dilating shell of ectoplasm.

Without stopping, his team retreated from the laboratory, but they did not let down their guard in the slightest.

There was intensive shooting ahead of them, coming this way, as the Cyberii, the devoted defensive force of the Mekkers, were activated and coming to deal with the intruders, regardless of who had dispatched them. Waving the badge of the Umbrals right now would just get them shot, and insincere apologies would be made for the accidental deaths of the tech raiders and terrorists sabotaging the war efforts of the loyal Mechanist Guilds, so sorry, you should have told us you were coming...

The EMP went off three seconds after they powered off their gear, and all the lights faded as subtle vibrations through the floor went silent. A second later, back-up lights went on, not that they needed them, and they rolled out.

Borgaii in all their many-limbed and garishly painted mechanical glory were staggering here and there as they tried to reboot their systems. Sun Shots precisely placed into cybercores made sure they wouldn’t be coming back, and none of them stopped as they quickly cut a path through the Mekker defenders.

Prima slapped her palm onto a sealed security door, and it cycled open under precise telekinetic prodding and a bit of electrical ionization, revealing a full company of cyberii drawn up outside, struggling to level ordnance at the group of them.

The telekinetic blast from the psion was supercharged with more electricity to make things difficult for the cyborgs, and they were ripped apart and inundated with considerable amounts of psychic lightning as they were blown out of the way.

Jamal let go her hand and they charged forwards on lightfoot, moving twice as fast as humans were expected to move.

Shaped charges blew out security windows, and they joined hands and leapt together out the thousand-meter side of the Mekker building.

Two seconds later, teleportation whisked them away with their prize. As they did, delayed acidic fire baptized the Mechveister’s lab, and reduced anything which might identify him to less than slag.

Just data thieves and tech raiders, after all...