Chapter 532 - Far Future Ch. 242 – Diagnosis (1/2)
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 then 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.
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”Found it?” 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.