It was a good thing that I never lacked for things to do. Or rather, that I was doing so many things simultaneously that the idea of sitting there and waiting tensely for the kids to find out where all those corpses were going was something I could actually do with one thoughtstream, even while all my others were planning the shiznit out of what to do when we actually found them.

Undead can be ferociously dangerous opponents, as they exist to prey on the living, where the living most certainly don’t prey on the undead. They lacked all the weaknesses of mortals, while getting most of the strengths. It was very difficult for them to truly grow in power, save by sucking in a whole lot of negative energy, i.e. murdering countless numbers of people and riding the death juice that started flowing. Even then, making permanent improvements instead of just enjoying a temporary rush was difficult.

That being said, undead are also some of the easier opponents to optimize against. Positive energy, radiant energy, the Light, Good, Holiness... all those things worked against the undead just fine.

Oh, and vivus. Vivus loved undead as much as eating Soulborn. The Undead and the Dead were favorite munchies for the Land.

Still, the numbers were saying that the Emperor had been spiriting away corpses and animating them by one means or another for millennia. The amount of undead at his command was easily in the dozens of billions.

If the numbers were right, at least half the missing ships in the Warp weren’t because of Throne failure. It was because the Emperor wanted them missing. It had either arranged for them to be lost, killed everyone aboard them, or simply sent them somewhere and had them conveniently disposed of at the far end.

Missing capital ships for thousands of years, their crews probably converted to undeath, building up a fleet in secret who knew where.

The ships probably had cargoes or goods essential to the process of converting the ships when they were lost, too, double-dipping with their losses.

If I was making an undead army powerful enough to sweep the galaxy, what else would I do...

Legionnaires. I would make some from Legionnaires, most definitely. Supposedly the corpses of their predecessors were interred with honor on their Marshal Worlds... but what if that wasn’t the case?

That armor they wore established a psychic record of its wearer. That record was more than enough of a link to capture and enslave the soul of the Legionnaire. Delude them into thinking they were fighting a great enemy in the afterlife, and they were already brainwashed and would fight forever.

Capture them in the right necroborg shell, and you wouldn’t even need the body, just the souls.

Sure, why not enslave the valiant souls of the Emperor’s gene-kids forever?

So, a massive hidden fleet, built up over the millennia. It could be two or three times the size of the current Imperial Fleet. It could be as big as every human ship still in service.

A conservative size of the undead base was a hundred billion. On worlds they could get away with more, they could harvest more and not be detected, plus they could clean up after Omega Sanctions with impunity.

Very conservative estimate. A trillion bodies would not surprise us. It was another form of biovore, cleaning up the dead...

Battlefield losses and wreckage that wasn’t exactly recycled, but sent off and misdirected into the making of necrotech. There were entire Interdicted worlds shut off because of contagion or Warp Events or similar things, that could be Sepulcher worlds laboring away in the gloom, in fanatic devotion to the undead Emperor Eternal, possibly not even knowing they were dead.

Were the frequency of Dead Walking Events tied to all this? Test runs, perhaps, of mass undead creation tries, carefully controlled, or maybe just escaping control and randomly happening?

The discovery of vivic fire must have set things back on their ear. Permanent disposal of bodies, freeing of souls, total reprocessing of the undead, just as effective as against the Warp. As agents of the Emperor, no wonder they would oppose its use so much, if they were aiding and abetting the undead regime!...

They would be eradicating all weaknesses of the flesh. It would not surprise me at all if conversion to necroborgs was the final ultimate goal of the elite of the Mechanists now, and had been for thousands of years. Totally escaping all weaknesses of the flesh and defying the Warp... what was there not to love?

Let’s say the Emperor was Eternal. When He became a lich, He would have lost affiliation with humanity’s natural tech tree in favor of Death and Shadow, perhaps Dream/Nightmare. He was high enough Level that He could probably fake it... but there was probably no way He could Grow to any significant Level, so He couldn’t add pure new Knowledge, He could only swap around Ranks, replacing old Ranks in stuff with what He wanted to know now.

Undeath was death. Death didn’t grow.

He would and had started exploring the necrotech tree. He probably went after the Tekrons and did some in-depth analysis of them. He didn’t have the resources to make necrodermite without the help of the Anti-Life, but the kids were reporting that Solar Decay power sources were definitely at work on the ships they had glommed onto.

Bonescythes traveling the worlds and moons of Solspace had discovered sixteen different locations with massive amounts of undead and mothballed ships in cold storage, with undead crews waiting with timeless patience at the controls to get them restarted.

Some of them were starting to get fired up.

Very importantly, those ships were toting Blacklight Beamers, which meant the Emperor had Blacklight ammunition. It had the technology to fight the xenosyms with ideal weapons, and simply wasn’t doing so, because there might be consequences for revealing this sweet TL 16 tech not given to humans.

One Blacklight Beamer with the right configuration could Omega Sanction a planet by itself. Anything not covered by at least the equivalent of a foot of stone, would die, right down to the level of viruses. Stay inside or underground, or you were dead. Xenosym fleets basically had no chance against such weapons, as I was proving repeatedly.

Where would I hide the fleets?

Well, obviously in plain sight, right where nobody would bother to look for them.

We had found over a hundred different systems scattered through the Empire that were not on official Imperial star charts. We had been to all of them.

They weren’t all being used for secret schemes, but a lot of them were. Some were secret testing facilities researching weird stuff, and the ruins they’d left behind when they failed were interesting. Some were production facilities for dangerous or outright illegal tech... including vast amounts of various drugs.

Some were mass Vatted production facilities on worlds with tons of harvestable biomass, raising hackles as we all now wondered where all those Vatted/Clones had gone to.

Some raised alien races like cattle and harvested them for experiments. I’m sure they appreciated the irony. Some were storehouses of nasty powerful stuff, trying to hide it away from the power-hungry eager to use them, and often not succeeding, if some of the remnants left behind were any indication.

Some might have been used at one time for some reason or another, but had been long abandoned, or were pristine worlds preserved untouched, perhaps as escape worlds or private sanctuaries for the powerful... and often as not covered up terrifyingly powerful weapons hidden there.

But this... this was far too massive. It would be very hard to conceal such things.

So, what I personally would do is pick systems that literally had nothing in them but the most common carbon and silica, just rocks drifting around a useless sun, and build there. And I would make sure to keep all the public files updated for those worlds with ‘regular surveys’, so that nobody would bother to investigate them more closely...

Bonus if those systems had asteroids or extensive rings that could be used to hide ships and containment facilities; if anything happened to drive by the system they would see nothing there but the same thing the ‘survey ships’ had reported.

That many undead and the amount of negative energy would sing out to any of the Brothers, not just the Bonescythes.

I had Hulkamania run some calculations along the parameters I’d set, sifting the official and regularly updated primary star charts of the Empire.

One hundred and ninety-six worlds hit the optimal qualifications for hiding an undead fleet at a solar level, scattered throughout the Sectors of the Empire.

Our best Scouts were winging out to investigate them within minutes, with some new Stealth tech online designed to be optimized against undead and necrotech sensitive to the presence of souls. Tellingly, once again no psions were allowed to be part of what was going on, and the kids were warned to not even discharge a Nimbus if they could help it.

Nor were they allowed to make approaches along Phlos. They essentially had to freeform approach for at least the last light year, with a Source piloting. Everybody was singing the Paranoia song, and doing exactly that regardless...

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The first of the kids tagging along on Death Ships were coming out in real space as the scouts were converging on their targets. They had done careful walk-arounds on the hulls of the ships they were on. Identification numbers on parts don’t come off just because you added some necroic trimmings to the durasteel. Those numbers were read and relayed off, and held dates of manufacture, location, and maker.

Match those up against ship records, and lo, look what happens... more ships lost forever to the Warp. Calatia was riding the animated and much made-over corpse of the free trader Phaestos, lost 4209 years ago in the Warp, with a full load of machine parts, while Hellbound for Gombuerdonspace.

A couple times, the Scouts gliding into the system on full gravitic suppression and cloaking everything even saw the ships coming out of a Necrojump.

Mythos tech. Looked like the Greys. They were the most humanoid, probably the easiest version to master.

Locations blinked on in The Map. The earliest ones were all in my statistical sample.

Calatia popped up in Ugivirmspace. It had been caught up in a Warp-sponsored rebellion almost five thousand years ago over in Pharoahspace, which had spread to six neighboring systems before the Imperial Fleet could come in and fight back. By the time they made it to Ugivirmspace, every planet in the system was infected with the Crawling Plague of Riggibuhl and had to be Omega Sanctioned.

The system was Interdicted to the harshest degree possible, watches posted, and it was basically watched over and otherwise abandoned. The regular renewing of the Star charts, plus the occasional stories of potential raiders and looters going in after the cities cleared by virus bombing and atmosphere stripping and whatever materials and goods they could salvage, then getting infected and dying horribly, kept any close investigation of the system down to nil.

Nobody wanted to go to a whole system infected with a Warp-powered plague, after all.

There was no visible sign of the plague, of course, and it had probably been suppressed under the sheer amounts of negative energy Calatia could feel in the void... such sensation full of the sensations of the screaming damned, which would be enough to send any Mentat that wanted to keep their sanity in the other direction...