There were ships from at least a thousand different races here, a fair chunk of which we’d never heard of, and histories going back at least a hundred thousand years, to the dawn of the Ruk domination of the galaxy and the fall of the goblins. We’d even seen Mythos ships here, and barking mad, Possessed Great Race were definitely unwholesome bastards to have to fight, let alone the Mi-Go...

They were all being tossed into the Solar Furnace after being cleared, interesting tech removed, unwholesome tech getting disintegrated, scans made of the whole ship just in case someone might want to know what this was and where it had vanished to.

There were plenty of human ships, and they tended to be towards the outside of the clusters as more recent arrivals... unless they phased in right in the depths of a cluster, eh.

The survey teams had identified over three hundred lost human vessels already, and hadn’t completed even a hundredth of the orbital path of this place. Given the Empire lost at least one ship doing Helljumps every year, and sometimes whole fleets, that wasn’t surprising in the slightest.

Within the month, we’d have another Solar Furnace online, with attendant refiners and cutters shoving scrap into it. Every month, we should be adding another one.

The GM was already removing this system from any human star charts. It wouldn’t stop any aliens from stumbling across us, but hopefully the horror waves would chase them off before they discovered our operation working away well inside the zone...

If they didn’t, well, there’d be some shooting. If some of these ships, especially the technorganic ones, had emergency beacons that would activate after all these millennia, there was no doubt this system might become interesting.

Whether they dared use vivic fire like we did was another matter. There was no doubt whatsoever that this was the greatest Energized Materials mine in the galaxy, and the combination of secrecy and defenses we were slowly moving into place validated this.

The number of starships in the service of the Empire was in the millions, scattered across worlds and sectors. Most were civilian, but even the warships were uncounted and too numerous to figure out. The Empire had had thousands of years and hundreds of Forgeworlds to pump them out of, and even the constant wars just meant more ships needed to be made, not reeling when they were destroyed.

While only a fool thought humanity was invincible, we were definitely the ascendant power in the galaxy... as long as the Tekrons didn’t all awaken and go on a rampage, and all the Xenos biofleets didn’t turn to the attack at once. That latter was a subject we were addressing directly right now, and the whole biovore thing was getting a good hard look at, and special steps were being taken.

------

I let the social side of Ronnie go, but our technical thoughtstreams were still going over high-end data, as I was one of the few people who could mostly keep up with her, and I could do multi-disciplinary stuff better than she could. She had the Ranks, I had the raw Intellect and ExLite bonuses, and we had a planet-wide forest computer for the crunching of multi-dimensional numbers.

Life was good. We just needed to advance our production capability to a whole new level, and that’s what we were doing.

The second TL 18 Fabber in six millenia was Gated smoothly into place in the Sargasso, and began churning out parts like no tomorrow at TL 16 with the nice fresh materials here. Specialty parts still needed devoted production lines and equipment for the TL 18 tech, but we could make the whole frame and many of the main systems for multiple ships without a problem, quickly and cleanly.

Being able to Fab the entire hull and frame of a ship for rapid assembly after the higher TL weapons and drives were put into place was a big, big thing. TL 16 was almost the best human ships ever, TL 18 was as good as the Tribute or better.

Humanity was starting to reclaim some of its heights. The Tribute itself was very happy to see this, as it was always one of the first to profit from upgrades...

------

“Is that what I think it is?”

It looked like a five-mile mountain had been sliced wonderfully free of a planet, and then engines installed on it, while every outer face was slowly and wonderfully carved in exquisite detail.

Well, except for six ships half-phased into it of various sorts, but they were distractions we’d cut off it soon enough.

“Historical records match up to the general profile of a Ruk Citadel-ship,” Mo Briggs, Natural Engineer, nodded, looking over the massive thing, like a small carved moon with ships that hadn’t landed well sticking out of it. “Helluva thing to find at the heart of it, Mom.”

“Ya think?” I eyed the scars of weapon fire gouging the carved stone, fused stone gleaming with silica, rents and craters from impacts and weapon systems. “Definitely in a big fight, they didn’t have time to repair it. I wasn’t aware they Helldove... “

“Me either. I thought they used Mass Drivers in one form or another. They were gone before we really made an impact in the stars, so the only stories we have are second-hand, and unreliable.”

“What, the Elvar don’t keep detailed records on the Ruk? Say it isn’t so.”

“Yeah, imagine that, not caring if the race that dominated them for most of their history faded into obscurity. The fact they are following them notwithstanding,” he grunted. “You want to lead the team inside?”

“Sure. It’ll be like taking a walk through galactic history... a part that we almost know something about.”

----------

It was made of stone, and even if Hardened, wasn’t exactly a high-demand salvage item. We could process it into some high grade plascrete, maybe.

Any treasures would be found within, naturally enough.

I set foot on its landing dock, my Trembling Domain working with four of my kids, and two B&R teams here for the research and evaluation aspect of things. I guess we all fit the definition of action scientists, as did everyone on their respective teams. You didn’t see many Tens with full Ranks in Engineering, Physics, Computer Tech, and similar things that were familiar with power armor, gatling plasma beamers, and Named Mindweapon or Mindshield Foci.

“Evaluation of the building material?” I inquired, looking at the stuff under my feet with new respect.

“It’s Hardened stone, Shaped somehow,” Percy Briggs judged somehow. “They didn’t just carve up a mountain or asteroid...” Giselle, Cedric, and Curie concurred.

“Tap it a few times, match it up with the scans,” I told them mildly.

With great interest, everyone who was scanning and recording tapped the ground with heels or weapons, and those with Tremblesense read the echoes carefully.

“Not seeing the difference,” Cedric spoke up calmly. “Ranks?” the others concurred.

“What do you think the hardness is?” I asked mildly.

That got all their attention. Curie was the first to snap up her Soulsword and etch a path across the material, and everyone pursed their lips when it barely made a mark at all.

She flicked up Sundering, sliced it again.

Not a mark again.

Breaking activated, and this time she barely left a visible scratch.

Considering the problem, Bane/Constructs flicked up with oily flames, and she carefully cut again.

This time there was a faintly visible seam left behind by her cut, and everyone around swore. She wasn’t using profound force or anything, simply trying to measure the hardness.

“40?” she sort of gasped, and everyone looked around in disbelief.

“Effectively Obdurium Hardened at Twenty,” I agreed softly. “This is extruded and molded Earth and Gravity-Energized Silica composite Elements, like a big granite diamond, then Tempered and Hardened after it was set into the desired form. No psi involved, pure technological engineering. They dumped crushed rocks from a mountain into something and made this, without refining out any impurities at all.”

“That’s TL 20 tech,” Giselle stated unequivocally. “Any higher and they’d be making this thing out of neutronium or something...”

“Is this actually on the same level as Necrodermite?” Percy had to ask. Necrodermite wasn’t quite this tough, but it had other properties...

“It’s stone still, because of the impurities. Effects that shape and mold stone could still manipulate it freely. If you have mass Stone Shaping effects available...” I trailed off.

“You could repair this really fast... or just squirt the pliable form into place speedily and then crystallize and Harden it. Damn... no wonder none of those craters actually breach the structure.” Rodney Crosins was a veteran Mobile Infantryman who’d Trained into Mechanical Engineering to get into the high-end tech side of things, with Psicraft on the side, making him superb at maintaining high-end combat suits. “Is this... magitech?” he actually half-whispered.

“Ah, that...” I pointed ahead of us, at the hangar doors, and amid all the scoring and scorching, what was carved onto them. “You kids take your Knowledge/Arcane Ranks?” I asked calmly.

“Damn,” Cedric said for the others, everyone tacitly silent. Ranks in magical knowledge weren’t needed in a place with basically no history or lore outside Warp Sorcery. Spellcraft would work for building a Matrix and making magic items, but it meant that non-active uses of magic were no longer transparent. “That’s a Rune-line, isn’t it? Geoic derivation?”

“Yeah, Elemental Earth Magic understanding at Twenty.” I stared at the line of symbols.

“QL 40, just like the entire damn mountain?” Curie had to ask. “Damn...”

“That was an incredibly advanced society, Sama,” Giselle murmured, also impressed. Working with that level of Quality on this scale... that was just incredibly hard. “Nothing short of the Mythos fucking with their minds could possibly have taken them down...”

“There’s no way a society this advanced was taken out. They’ve just gone underground,” I judged promptly, pointing calmly. “It’s just out of your range, but there’s a beginning of a woven crystal formation starting there, also at QL 40, in a Ward pattern. The defenses of this place weren’t just obdurium. There were internal force bracings, damage ablation, and as long as energy was pumping, basically instant reassembly of the structure. I’m not even sure you could disintegrate any part of this place while its Wards were up, the bonds would just be too strong...” I shook my head. “Trise!”

“Sensei Sama,” the Ten Beacon Psion immediately replied, coming up. Her Intellect Mark was proudly displayed inside the Decagon on her forehead, an affection only permitted Beacon Psion Tens who didn’t have external contact. It meant she had risen from the dirt and mud of the lowest Class of Psions, all the way to Ten.

The way most of them did that was bonded to a Null and on battlefields. The Rod at her side was Named and Psychic, calmly ready to help her as needed. Her husband Rikkle, a very experienced and quiet Mindshield Ten, stayed at her elbow, eyes never stopping moving, looking for threats to her.

“Nine PSP to your voice, project it directly at those doors loud enough to shake them. Say GRONTHURUK!” I ordered in a croaking basso that shouldn’t have come out of my throat, or rocked all of them as it did.

She nodded, gathering her psi, discharging her Focus, and the identical Word, but this time charged with power and even louder, came thundering out of her mouth, the shockwave of it breaking past us and crashing into the massive hangar doors ahead of us.

The echoes of the Word faded away slowly, the air stilled, and pretty much nothing else happened.

“Decayed and faded?” Cedric asked, disappointed. Carving into this stuff with a saber beam, even the improved ones they had, would definitely destroy the door, and probably take a while. This was something built to take fusion warheads going off...

“It wouldn’t be QL 40 if it had eroded, would it?” Everybody blinked at my words, and decided that waiting patiently with me was a good thing.

A gleam. Like pendulums, all our heads turned left, where a hundred meters away and forty meters up a light was starting to glow on the first line of harsh, angular characters molded from a metal that was even harder and more obdurate than the impossibly tough stone hull beneath us...