Chapter 526 - Far Future Ch. 236 – Spaaaaaaaace Huuuuuulllkkk (1/2)
For whatever reason, the ship we were on had drifted free from the clusters of ships visible in front of us, and was spinning out on its own, away from the drifting masses.
Hundreds of great starships, of all sizes and makes. Thousands. Perhaps... millions?
They were agglomerated together in great masses by the gravity endemic to all things above a certain mass level, drawn slowly to one another in irregular pseudo-planetoids of ancient hulks drifted and mashed together by time, gravity, and psychic forces.
Above and beyond that, this had to be a place where the Warp could dump them, so the Veil was on shaky ground here. Perhaps it was the cold, dead star spinning down there and throwing out odd radiations, its albedo showing some Energized elements that just should not be existing.
These things would come phasing back into reality, and if there was something already there, they just phased into and merged with them.
It definitely wasn't all of them, or even a majority. Just an eye-scan said that probably a fifth of the ships were actually merged into or through one another, materialized within and through the hull of another vessel as they were dumped back into the material plane.
Another wave of psychic force broke over us, carrying the screams of ancient horrors and the damned who had faced them.
”How even is the cycle?”
”Pretty even, less than a three-second variance. It doesn't seem tied to the star's rotation, so we're not sure what causes it, but there's uneven variances in magnitude that seem to be based on echoes and random bounces off the ships. We clocked a wave at Nineteen that blew out half a dozen boards, and pulled all the way back here. Pretty sure there's a raw winding feed coming straight off the Warp and resonating with the last echoes of the damned crews of these ships.” Carmen was somber as she looked at the incredible number of ghost ships scattered across the sky, of every make, model, and race imaginable.
Gigatons, potentially teratons, of material suitable for making starships...
”We'd have to have a Geared-out crew of Tens just to work here,” Briggs murmured, studying the masses of ships. ”Full Angeltech on any salvage and processing Gear at least at Fifteen, and that's if we use cutter-beams to break them down and haul them out of effective range. Then there's going to be both the archeological and archeotech value of these wrecks, especially the ones we don't recognize... the alternative technologies alone could save us years in certain fields.”
Aliens just had different ways of looking at problems. Ranthas were particularly good at duplicating that kind of looking, but that didn't mean we'd stumble into the same method ourselves. Our Skills were drawn against the Human Akasha predominantly, after all, and the other resonances we might have with other races didn't exactly have grandiose tech levels most of the time.
The Elvar were a notable exception, but we weren't mainlining an Akashic look into their tech, and it was heavily psi-biased, anyways, since every member of their race was an inherent psion, rather unsuitable for broad-based human production.
I addressed the space kraken in the room. ”We could make a pretty big fleet out of all this... or a fleet that could make a pretty big fleet.”
The tumbling masses of vessels extended out beyond visible range, and that was at a bunch of magnifications, heading around the far side of the star.
The Warp had killed this many ships over the eons...
”Is it still too late to track down and shoot the dumb shit who invented Helldiving?!?!”
I didn't realize I blurted it out until Briggs replied, ”What are the odds they are not dead?”
My eyes narrowed. ”It's grimdark. Distressingly good...”
”Well, then, there's just the tracking, then...”
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”What are you deducing?” I inquired blandly. We were walking down the main traverse of the ship, which was moaning and groaning around us with inhuman screams and wailings. When the horror waves crested past, the interior of the ship reverberated like a banshee's screams.
”Multi-limbed, six legs, elevated at least eight feet off the ground, probably psionically or magically supported. Trilateral symmetry and manipulative digits, and three small tentacles,” he replied, spinning Beat idly as he looked about at the ancient hull of this alien freighter. The walls were occasionally moving with shadows inside of them.
No way this hulk didn't have some sort of surprise in it.
We both paused at the same point, as a set of very minor vibrations came through the hull that definitely weren't part of the stressed and aged metal rocking in the horror waves.
”Hello, we seem to have disturbed something,” he murmured calmly.
”That's a big one. Six, ten, seventeen, twenty-four... yeah, we definitely woke up something,” I agreed, as more ripples gently impinged on our Trembling Domains from all directions.
”Devolved survivors?” he had to wonder, continuing to clunk forwards, I'm Right Here, Come Eat Me. The odd forms and bizarrely non-Euclidean construction of some of the objects and tech around us definitely spoke of how advanced the species was. There were Mythos races that could stay in hibernation for eons if needed before waking up. Whether they could survive the Warp's Id Demons was a different matter entirely.