A breath later, the horror wave swept over us, echoing off and refracting off the obdurate hull of this ancient battle mountain. One of the engineers turned on the vivic pump, and sprayed a jet of the vivic flame into the air. We all watched in fascination as it was batted around in the air, chasing after passing psychic encephabels and wave confluences.

“It’s reverberating in there. It shouldn’t be doing that, should it?” Percy pointed out, his hand behind one hairy ear, listening.

“Psychic energy is naturally alive. It’s probably adapted itself to the natural frequency of the ship after so long. It’ll lose it once enough vivus is popping through it,” I said, ignoring the horror wave, while the three engineers close to me were hearing nothing but silence.

I looked up at the peak tapering off above the hangar doors, the stacked levels of very subtle openings that could probably disgorge all sorts of cannons as required to shoot hostiles.

Something, something...

I looked down under my feet, and crouched down. Oddly enough, the horror wave was painting an extraordinarily clear picture under me... longer as my hair suddenly dropped underneath me and spread out for ten feet all around me.

The horror wave lasted about thirty seconds in total, everybody watching my antics with interest.

-Hey, Ronnie, verify that’s an ablation field effect.-

One of our other /discussions was sidelined, and the back of her head canoodled with the back of mine. -Yeah, veeeery sophisticated...- Stars in the eyes. -Ruk tech? That’s even better than necrodermite at spreading kinetics.-

-Think this dumps into auxiliary or supplementary power supplies?- I was focusing on aspects of the circuits and conductors below not arrayed to deal with kinetics.

-I’d think it likely, but you’d have to find some kind of exchanger and filter system. Can’t just allow any free electrons at the wrong harmonics into your TL 17+ tech, you know.-

I looked up. “New plan. We need the underlying materials layout of the hull, starting with this landing pad here. We’re looking for an energy exchange, relay, or conversion node that can transfer different energy types into supplemental power for the ship.” My hair retreated to my shoulders as a modified map of the metal beneath us, and the structures within it and the hull it was laying on, spread out in The Map.

The Ten and under engineers just rolled their eyes and didn’t look too closely, knowing better. This was magic-supplemented tech, but it had corruption going into it, and so wasn’t all that safe for inspection if they made the mental leap from the Map to what was under their feet, and Realized Too Much...

Cedric’s armor hummed and Compressed into bands and plates, and Percy’s did the same a moment later. “Resonates with the horror wave and paints a bigger, cleaner picture, right?” Cedric confirmed.

I nodded.

“Set up the pumps to form a vivic screen for you all and the ship,” Percy instructed the engineers, who hastily moved to do just that, ideas hopping around between them as they worked out a good spread and how to align the venting mechanisms.

“We have to map out the hull?” Giselle asked mildly, looking down at the deck plating of the landing pad. I pointed out the relevant points, mapped it to the relevant Spellcraft, and they all nodded. This was magic fused with tech, but it had to work with some accepted principles, especially with the huge geomantic bias it had. “Looks like the primary system is about twenty feet in...” she mused, but still within range of our Trembling Domains.

We worked out a search grid, moving slowly and thoroughly. This was a Runetech structure way, way larger than anything we’d ever seen, both complex and confusing... but at the same time very orderly and predictable once we found the right pattern. Geomantic Runetech was forced to abide by various crystalline patterns based on the materials it was made of, so with sufficient understanding of the underlying substances, you could understand what was permissible and not in any particular portion of this circuit maze below us at any given time.

Just needed fifteen Ranks... so I was looking at all their stuff and pointing out what to look for as we spread out in a pattern over the landing pad, a pattern that adjusted on the fly as the circuits and layout of the molecularly-coded machinery below us did.

---

“Found it, I think?” Percy called out, looking down, and then simply falling forwards to get maximum contact with the pseudo-neutronium deck plating. He rapped his fingers, like striking hammers, to get a better look at everything, and I glided up next to him as the others kept at it, filling in holes in The Map now, trying to build a copy of the master pattern to use to center other parts of it.

My hair spread out again, reading it as the waves from his finger tapping bounced through it. “Yeah, I think so. Next horror wave in?” I asked.

“Fifty-three seconds,” Rikkle reported from way over there, /hearing my words. “Expecting a two-second variance and the echoes linger here for a good five seconds longer than normal.”

“That’s fine.” Percy pushed himself effortlessly all the way back to his feet with a slap of his palms, and glided off to help fill in holes in the pattern, while I sat there with my hair sprawled over the pad in a great scarlet net of super-sensitive vibration detectors.

The horror wave came in about a tenth of a second early, more data for the warning detectors to add to the heap, and the whole ship began to wail along with it, sending curling distortions of it off in every direction as it did so.

I painted a picture going sixty feet deep into the ship of the Runetech here, Ronnie watching narrowly as it all took form.

-Damn, look at that converter!- she /whistled. -So that’s what a geomantic ablation field at Twenty looks like...-

-The kinetic transfer is tight,- I /agreed. -The heat’s good, but the lightning is basically so-so in comparison. It’s true particle beams aren’t particularly great at TL20...-

-You’d basically have to have ninety percent of the hull near melting to actually melt it, and they could feed the heat right into some plasma relays for their guns, and toss it right back at you,- Ronnie /agreed. -It’s not self-repairing like the necrodermite is, but its way better for pounding on the stuff that’s pounding on you.-

-Agreed.- “Brainy-boys, I’m going to need the resonance frequency of a section of hullplate, right down to the atoms.” The engineers whooped and began to break out the Nice Sensor Suites.

“What are you planning on doing?” Cedric had to ask from where he was slowly skating over the landing pad.

“I was thinking that the weapon crews on the Precipice sitting out there are bored and might want to rig up a full-blown vivic generator around the ship’s main gun, then retool the plasma load for pure fusion instead of energized particles, synch it perfectly to an area of the hull, and then shoot it a bunch of times.”

Yes, I could /hear the whooping of crews being allowed to shoot off Really Big Guns from way over there. The heavy cruiser that was our main security force was parked out just beyond the horrorsphere of the system in powered-down cloaking, ready to Harmonic Drive and jump right on top of anything coming in to bug the salvage operation. Even though we were statistically set up in the section of the ring the very least likely to be near someone randomly Helljumping in here, what did that mean if the Warp was involved?

Still, the vivus being generated by eating all this psychoactive metal was sealing off this space slowly... which meant the Sargasso was going away, but we hardly cared given the amount of material we already had to work with.

Hitting that ablation field with a few H-bomb shots of pure heat energy would broadcast that heat throughout the hull, which would then convert it into usable power and send it shooting into the system... power that was going to be absolutely loaded with vivic energy.

We were going to be shooting the ship to save it. With the right harmonic frequency, the incoming heat would be conducted away so smoothly we proverbially wouldn’t even scratch the paint.

We had a pretty good image of the general form of this ablation plate now. I pointed downslope, and followed the kids down it, looking for another plate not so near to the yawning open hangar that we could blast with nuclear impunity.

Whatever had been done to that Curse wasn’t going to like it when a few terajoules and more of vivic-laden pick-me-up came burning through the system, literally.

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

The techs, engineers, and work crews were having fun with the challenge. The white hole power source of the Precipice had to be retuned for the heat venting, then all the filters and harmonic fields put in place to attune the blast, sustainability worked in, venting protocols, cooldowns, and so forth and so on.

“It’s anti-Goblin,” Rikkle spoke up suddenly, as his wife helped with some of the tuning of the sensors on the section of hull we’d staked out for the target area. “Earth has elemental dominance over fire, right? Is that why the Ruk suppressed the Goblins all those years?”

I thought that over. Goblins loved fire, filled space with plasma, fusion, burning atoms, and singing anti-matter. Going up against the Ruk, who with ships like this were practically immune to their favorite weapons, would have been rough, indeed.

“Nice. It might even be specific because of it.” I sent it off as the Rikkle Theory to the xenoarcheologists, who seized on it and began to work with it with great interest. Elvar tended to prefer plasma beams, so they would be better opponents to the Ruk... and now everyone was investigating goblin hull metals, to see if they were biased one way or the other. Of course, both races hated the goblins, but a fire-based E-materials hull would have a distinct advantage against Elvar primary weapon systems...

One of the things we’d found is that the Earth-centered tech was so hard that it affected spatials. The ships that had phased out of the Warp and into the ship had only gotten into the first five feet of obdurium before space literally closed off and they were cut apart. So, ships that looked like they had poked and phased right into and through the Ruk ship were literally only sticking out of its skin.

Man, this was some nasty-tough tech. Of course, the weapons people were naturally in a tizzy over how to punch through something like this... just in case, of course... Water-based tech with vibrational biases would be a good start... la la la...

That also meant you couldn’t spatially get around the hull and enter the vessel. That might or might not include demons trying stuff. Certainly, trying to Possess obdurium, so strongly Gravity and Earth-aligned, was going to result in a most unsatisfyingly rigid experience...

-------

We were on a ridge overlooking the face the Precipice was lined up on. Everybody who didn’t have Devasight or a Mask of Clarity with the same was grousing and using shaded visors or borrowing someone else’s eyes to watch the show as the distant cruiser lined up for the shot. Targeting wasn’t going to be an issue, as there were no active sensor countermeasures, and TL 18 Angeltech targeting systems weren’t going to be thrown off by anything but a psychic storm.

A flare of light, and then the starfire came down.

The white hole power source was our answer to a zero-point energy source. Punching a hole in a black hole to let all the power it was sucking in out was a pretty ballsy move, but it gave us access to a whole bunch of energy types, including space-time if need be, in an active state, not a passive one like zero-point energy.

Of course, it was perfect for big guns, too...