The horrified Goldilocks behind him were already making calculations as he looked up and back, judging the arc of the durasteel dome above, only marred here and there by descending support pillars. He could now clearly see that the darkness looming in front of him was in fact endless interconnected floors and buildings of undead, all sitting there in silence, waiting with the patience of the dead and the timeless.

He looked back at how much area was left to go. The undead were excavating deep down, using the material to make the buildings to store more undead in. Given by how close the near side of the dome was, and the calculations he’d seen for the hotspots, this place had a very small area left to go, relative to what it had covered.

He was pretty sure that in the gridwork, beyond what he could see, there were more undead than the entire living population of Tellus.

-Pure infantry force means nothing,- Anatolia’s /voice broke in for him smoothly, watching everything with a devoted thoughtstream now. An urge drifted his eyes sideways, to where the pattern partially broke, the lines of the skeletal buildings were larger...

Tank-suits, walkers, and even mecha, lined up in layer upon layer, along with hover-tanks. Quick analysis indicated no need for entry/exit... whoever and whatever piloted it was integrated right with the machine, and there was none of the life support functions that living pilots would require, resulting in the machines looking leaner, slimmer, stripped-down... yet still monstrously dangerous.

Like a pure robotic, technological enemy. Timeless, implacable... silent, and waiting...

There were three other hotspots like this. One of them covered a million square miles...

-I need you to remain undetected at all costs. If the Emperor becomes aware that this secret is compromised, it may set off his endgame.-

Criopus nodded silently. If they pulled off an Interdiction of this area, and he was absolutely sure they had the resources to do so, it would be very, very difficult to leave. Perhaps a Shadowknife could remain hidden here with all these undead, but a Bonescythe was undoubtedly the single best infiltrator possible.

-I need you to circle the entire area and let us know its size. Then we are going to need you to help put a little surprise in here.

-Once that is done, we will need you to go to the Sahara and see if there are any ships hidden there.

-We will repeat this procedure for the other two hotspots, and then we are going to need you to investigate the Moon, and then Venus, and Mercury.-

Criopus nodded without moving. He didn’t feel fear... taking the Dauntless Feat was part and parcel of serving under Sensei Sama, and given the vast scale of some of the enemies the Void Brothers had to face, immensely useful.

He supposed he felt a quiet kind of awe at the immense scale, planning, and ruthlessness of the Emperor. Even taking only a small tithe of the best corpses to animate as undead, he still managed to assemble a fighting force that measured in the tens of billions here, at least.

As a hotspot, even the Warp Gods would have trouble looking in here, but the radiation meant nothing to Deathtech or the undead. Just having them shut down and wait for further orders basically turned them into inert objects that would attract no attention from the Warp.

If the initial builders were now all part of the undead, even their souls enslaved, it was entirely possible the Warp didn’t know about this at all. Certainly no one living in the Empire did.

But the most impressive thing was... that this most certainly could not be the only such Sepulcher of such troops. That would make absolutely no sense at all. Hundreds of thousands of worlds out there, at least 100k had mega-cities and kiloplexes on them, and the dead of humanity to harvest. Harvested for thousands of years, ever since the Emperor had been reduced to bones sitting atop his Crystal Throne, and became the most powerful undead being in the galaxy.

The galaxy was a big place, and there were a lot of worlds and systems out there to feed these, and other places to receive them.

And given the state the galaxy was in, they had a very, very urgent need to Find Them All.

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

Calatia Rantha tumbled off the side of the cargo hauler, both cursing and amused, and not surprised.

She had been keeping a very close eye on the cargo container, and when the ship’s hold door suddenly opened, in the middle of a Helldrive transit, all her alarm bells had gone off. When the container with the fresh and pristine corpses was summarily ejected, and the ship went on as if nothing had happened, probably not even alerted to the event, she had already jumped off the ship to close in on it.

It was inert matter, and even if the Throne Field was gone, there was nothing for the id demons tagging along the ship to play with, when bright shiny souls were right over there.

A Forsaken Null with Null out was basically a rock, and totally ignored as she guided herself through the thought-reactive space to the side of the container.

-They just dropped the damn thing off in the Warp,- she /sent out. -That has to mean there’s something here to pick it up.-

Marks reconnected once she was outside the Throne Field, and in any event Grandmom was here, too, and had no trouble maintaining a connection to the mortal realm once it was established.

-Snuff the tracker. It will scan the cargo and find it,- came the /reply from Luke in Strategos. There were over a thousand Ranthas tracking these shipments right now. They didn’t expect there to be a thousand Sepulchers... but they wouldn’t be surprised if there were.

-How’d the analysis of the Sargasso go?- she /inquired, settling in on one face of the container, certain she would not have to wait long. A tap of the tracker remote, and it disintegrated itself into spare molecules, its half a photon flying free and dispersing as it finally hit a solid.

-They are cross-referencing with Elvar vessels recovered and lost, and of course the galaxy is big, and there might be another one out there, but so far... ten percent. The most recent is the Alcadamia’s Harvest, a cargo hauler out of that system, lost eighty-seven years ago. It did indeed have a Throne failure, like they all did in the Sargasso,- Luke /replied coolly.

Only ten percent of the ships claimed to have been lost in the Warp over the past six thousand years had ended up in the Sargasso. How long they took before being ejected once there was wildly variable, as the Warp wasn’t exactly fixed in linear time. But eighty-seven years seemed long enough for it to be sent off back to reality under its own weight, once the crew was properly greeted by the Warp.

-Any other details?- she /asked.

-None of the Imperial Ships in the Sargasso were true warships. There were a couple Marquis ships with good self-defense, but they weren’t set up for true warship functionality.-

-So, the true warships that had Throne failures... taken by the Warp?-

-It’s hard to tell under all the retrofitting and demonic possession and stuff, but they’re pretty sure about at least threescore of the capital ships of the Warp Fleet rampaging in the Imperial Sector. Most of the worthwhile cargo of those in the Sargasso is missing, too. So pretty sure that Warp ships are drawn to anything that loses its Throne field and gets taken out by demons. If they want it, they take it, and if they don’t, they take anything useful and just leave it drifting. They probably aren’t even aware the Sargasso takes them.-

Calatia though that over, her eyes narrowing at a sudden darkness in the nearby clouds of id and ego, something rustling through them with a queasy slime of emotionless apathy, dulling the wild play of the Warp in all its madness. She quickly moved her position to the opposite side of it, and prepared to take action.

-So, what kind of numbers are we talking?-, she had to /ask, watching the darkness thicken, and the boneship emerge.

The iconography had been adjusted to reflect the power flows of a system moving on necroic drives. It probably used Deathjumping, too. While it looked like an Imperial Tempest-class light cruiser, it was lined and bordered with real bones, skulls made from real ivory were prominent just about everywhere, and the enshrined holy figure of the Emperor in its shrine was a grinning skeleton seated upon a throne of obsidian... wearing the imperial crown and other regalia.

Yeah, that didn’t radiate all kinds of ominousness. Certainly not with the bale-green and ochre necroic energies venting out of it all over the place.

TL 16+ deathtech.

She hit the stim into the side of her neck that would give her a few minutes of true invisibility as it came up, her Vajra and Vampire’s Veil combining with Stealth Ranks to foil their scanners, whose radiations she was perfectly sure were above TL 15 in quality as they swept through the container routinely and repeatedly.

A tractor beam latched onto the box, and drew it in smoothly as the ship loomed overhead. She held on easily as it was drawn up into the massive hold overhead, hopping free before it broke the plane of the hull as she opted to stick to the outside of the ship.

She noted that it had no residual atmosphere whatsoever, and was literally grave-cold, radiating all sorts of squick and hostile-to-Ranthas energies as she slid along it.

She also noted that the observation platform was actually ringed by a broad veranda and balcony, and the Throne field in effect was supplanted by a Cemetery Field that basically radiated ‘We are all dead here, move along’, and the id demons didn’t stir themselves up enough to care about running into all the enervating negative energy to get a meal of inverted souls they couldn’t eat anyways.

That said, there weren’t random undead running around over the hull, nor random spirits, who would be sucked away by the Warp. She didn’t have much to worry about discovery.

The ship picked up speed again as soon as it picked up its cargo. Calatia had glimpsed a dozen other similar containers occupying a section of the hold, but that merely indicated that it had started a route, not how long it was.

In the Warp, moving from place to place was very different, depending on your tech level and intent. Using a Death Drive with a post-Ten undead captain at TL 16+ was certainly going to be speedy if, as she expected was the case, it was simply making a regular run at drop-off points of these ‘packages’.

She had to wonder if the Warp Gods knew, or even if they cared. The undead could fall to the Warp, too, although admittedly it tended to be harder; less inadvertent and overwhelmed than deliberate choice, given how hard it was to mentally influence the undead.

She picked a spot shielded from any observation ports, rather close to one of those necroic energy vents, tamped down her dislike of the sensations rubbing up against her Vajra, and sat back to wait.

The computer code they’d managed to find indicated that shipments went out anywhere from weekly to monthly, depending on the size of the habitation. That meant the collection loop had to follow similar schedules to pick them all up.

She had a maximum of a month’s wait ahead, and as little as a week or less. She might even run across one of her sisters following another load on the same loop... she was actually pretty certain of it.

She really wanted to deliver a vivic bomb to the negative energy core of this vessel, but it wasn’t the time.

They were going to find and expose a whole bunch of the Emperor’s trump cards, and then they were going to Feed Them to the Land.