The dead around this hotspot did not dare to go near it. That set off all kinds of alarms to him. When he had first set foot on Tellus, he had instantly been able to sense the pain radiating from this place, something cold and vast and unclean ensconced here. Tellus’ welcome to the first Void Brother to set foot back on the homeworld of the human race after millennia was nothing more than a long, drawn-out moan of agony...

His fingers slowly played on the haft of his Glaive (yes, it could go to a scythe format if need be, but normally it just looked like a staff, and glaives were much less awkward to fight with than scythes...) as he stared at the tunnel coming down from above, piercing the durasteel dome of the hotspot, and continuing down.

The path to get to this location had a lot of doors and checks, which he had thoughtfully bypassed. It was a maintenance door to the point of intersection between tunnel and dome.

Curls of death wafted from the tunnel, negative energy leaking from it. Not from just the dome, but from the tunnel, too.

He could not help but look up. According to his Boole, he was directly under one of the largest soylent processing plants on all of Tellus... manned by Steiners, of course.

He turned his head, looking that way, that way, and that way, about so far.

He sent that out to the Goldilocks minder(s) helping him out with datafeeds and stuff. Mata’s ability to get into places she shouldn’t have been able to vastly exceeded what anyone expected of her, and the maps she had of the ecumenoplis that Tellus had become had been cross-compiled from a lot of organizations who would have been utterly appalled that she’d been able to do so.

The Map of Tellus was frighteningly accurate, and there were quiet Nulls wandering all over into places they shouldn’t have been able to in order to extend it.

Those other three locations also corresponded to radioactive hot spots left over from the ruinous wars of techno-savagery that had preceded the Emperor’s return to Tellus from the terraformed cold side of Venus, the heartland of the Mechanists...

Massive Soylent stations manned by faithful, uncaring Steiners were in place atop each one of them. The Saharan Waste was particularly big.

The statisticians were immediately all sorts of alarmed. The Sahara was a wasteland long before the Empire, a literal sea of sand and desert where nobody bothered to live. Who would turn it into a radioactive hellhole, and why? Irradiating millions of square miles of dirt served no purpose whatsoever...

Unless that purpose was simply to create someplace nobody wanted to go.

Criopus eyed the unmarked tube, which actually looked like just another support brace of durasteel, descending through the dome to brace the city built atop the buried hot spot, one among so many others. If you couldn’t put your hand to it and your tremorsense feel the hollow of the lift tube within it, you’d have no idea it was there.

He reached out to the Veil, took a step, and slid along the dimensions out of there.

Veilwalking could be stopped by Interdictions, like any other kind of dimensional travel, but raising mass Interdictions down here, and keeping them in effect, would have raised massive questions about why the cost was necessary. Much, much easier to use a combination of secrecy, death, and absolutely hostile environment to do the job, and time and the weight of ages would bury the rest.

It was entirely likely that the Steiners themselves didn’t know the destination of the bodies they shipped out, and which ended up going down here.

He sent out a thought, wondering what other firms and businesses were nearby that might be shipping things down into the hot spot.

The Goldilocks rapidly figured that the Yaku and the Sweiss both had factories not so far away... and major structural braces that weren’t exactly necessary conveniently beneath them. This was repeated at the other three hot spots.

Once was chance. Two might be coincidence. Four nobody believed.

He wrapped his black and white Helices around himself, and flowed along the Veil, the material of the world, however dense, passing him by.

------

He stepped out into the darkness below.

The radiation sparking on his Vajra was far more intense now, the residual amount outside like a minor dash of rain compared to a deluge. Any human coming inside here would have needed incredibly good shielding to survive for long.

A Vajra was all that was required.

The spirits about him had shrank down in close to him. Ominous power was all around him, a presence... no, presences, that were strong with pain and fear, waiting, watching, timeless and ready...

Undead...

There were no true lights down here, as the undead didn’t really need them, and visible light was actually painful to most undead. They might be able to sense a living aura, if they were sufficiently powerful... and the other party didn’t have the Darkstalker Feat, or wasn’t a Void, especially a Bonescythe.

Large, powerful men who were not alive, humming with sophisticated cybernetics, were moving finely-preserved corpses out of the tube to the Steiners with precision and the ease that comes from great strength and tirelessness. His eyes glowed with Devil’s Sight from his Mask, giving him perfect vision in darkness, color and everything, even better than the undead.

They finished loading up the hover-hauler. The existence of it was a pure luxury, or an indication of how well-financed this place was. You didn’t need anti-grav just to haul cargo...

He could see drones flying around on regular patrol sweeps, and about them hovered death... they were either controlled by bound spirits, or animated brains. Necromantic slaves, tireless and alert, and sidestepping something like Vampire’s Veil that made him invisible to pure machines. Undead machines could see something under Vampire’s Veil perfectly well...

His leap was a hundred feet across, high-gravity training all a part of the regimen under Sensei Sama, and he touched down light as a feather atop the hauler.

The Crystal Dragon disciplines were not a natural fit for Void Brothers, as all Voids prized instant kills, intelligent combat, and controlled finesse styles over brute force and tanking hits. In Sensei Sama’s eyes, that had merely been a huge mental weakness, and if Rantha Hags had to learn them as women, so too did the Voids.

Tremblesense, the ability to read matter with a touch, was accessed through the Crystal Dragon heavyfoot disciplines. It was extremely invaluable to any and all stealth operatives. The Ocean version of it was encountered much less, after all...

He eyed the corpses inside as his Helices wrapped him in shadow, and he became a part of the darkness. The Bone and the Scythe never looked like more than indistinct spirits to the undead outside of clear light, so this darkness was very much in his favor...

The area around him was both decayed, yet preserved. He was initially going to ride the hauler to its destination, when he caught a glimpse of something down a passing side street. Waiting only a second for a flying drone-skull to whisper past, he pushed off his ride, spun his momentum away, and hit the ground, slid through an arc just above the ground, never quite touching it, and moved quickly in that direction.

He could now hear some quiet rumblings, the sound of many feet. He considered how many feet it would take to make the ground vibrate so, but stayed to the edge of the wall of a crumbling, yet still-well-preserved block of clay buildings that had to be thousands of years old. He ran a mile in under forty-five seconds, and then paused in an utterly still swirl of deathly shadows and sepulchral mists to look at the scene beyond.

His Mask glittered as he went to maximum magnification.

The ground and street ahead of him had vanished, replaced by glossy black silica-steel gridwork buildings. They were basically frames, with no doors or windows, merely floors and ceilings. They extended from hundreds, if not thousands of feet below him, and rose towards the domes up above.

Sand and dirt was being fed into a refiner swirling with negative energy, melting and condensing the raw elements into compressed silica girders and sheets. These girders were being taken up by teams of walking corpses, fit out with cybertech more advanced than any he’d seen in the Empire, literally integrated piles of man and machine, with modular fittings obviously there for weapon mounts or more armor plating.

The teams took up the multi-ton girders with ease and surety, moving in lockstep formation towards another one of the great skeletal edifices rising up towards the dome. They were occasionally passed by vehicles streaming necroic flames of black and ochre, either undead brains or bound spirits driving them with speed and surety, probably slain heavy equipment handlers or racers. They were moving bulkier groups of building materials back and forth, while endless numbers of undead, pretty much all of them male, all of them taller and more heavily built than he was, and all of them fit out with necroically-powered cybernetics, moving steadily this way and that.

No deviation, no loitering, no randomness, no fatigue. Just like machines, but the energy they were running on was not any energy used by the living.

They marched onto one floor of those gridwork buildings, and lined up perfectly behind another line of similar undead before stopping.

Lines upon lines of undead. Ceilings eight feet up, tall enough to accommodate the largest of human-size corpses. Stories upon stories of them. Buildings upon buildings of them. Square miles upon miles of them, extending far beyond what he could see...