"There's probably multiples of them. I imagine they came swarming out of all of them as fast as they could, layering on top of one another if they had to, building up in the shadow of the ship until they were given the order to go in all directions at top speed," I mused softly.
Like a knife, the blasted, seared area below us vanished, and standard earth and dust remained, still stripped of life.
Briggs studied the hull now looming over us as we skied in beneath it. "They must have engaged in a running battle with the automated defenses inside, and managed to knock out all the underside guns. They probably figured they couldn't get the rest without being annihilated for some reason, and opted to take the losses and flee rather than keep fighting."
"The Throne Field got changed," I reminded him. "We can only feel it passing, but they'd be able to feel the mounting implications of drawing the Warp here. Odds are it was driving them mad, and they had to either run, or get lost to the Warp."
"Makes sense," he agreed. "They probably burrowed out through every buried hatch and dropped out of every other one within range to get out..."
"And being rude, didn't shut them behind them," I finished for him, as we swept up on the hangar.
It was perpendicular to the ground, the ship had been designed with the prow as the top, more like a building then a ship. That said, we could still feel the faint hum as we approached, and glanced at one another.
Helluva power source. Not just the Throne field, it still had the gravitics!
Sand had heaped up into a dune, cut off at the entry to the hanger by a semi-active exclusion field, strong enough to keep out stray particles and not much more. Normally ascending the sand hill would have been an exercise in frustration, but we just slid up it, barely disturbing a grain, and flipped and fell at a right angle to the floor as we did so.
The artificial gravity was right at standard, and we both straightened, realigned our expectations and perceptions.
Briggs pointed at some major damage to one of the walls, where the levers and machinery to close the hangar doors was located. It had been seared and melted by terrific energies, forced open by psionic power and then melted and fused that way, probably to prevent the ship's computers from closing it.
The hangar was full of what looked like earth-moving and harvesting equipment, set for farms and other colonization tasks, getting early harvests in for the first wave of sleepers, who could then wake up the next wave to construct more advanced machinery, and continue the process of rapid colonization.
The stuff was pristine, barely dusty, there'd been little to no air movement, and the vast amount of the ship was built of non-corrosive durasteel. Some of the equipment looked like it had aged a bit, especially if it had organic components like rubbers and plastics, which had been removed down to the stray molecule. The machines were sitting on a lot of empty wheel wells.
"If the ship has an AI, and it's still active, it'll know we are here the moment we start trying to open doors and stuff." After our circuit of the grave-like equipment hangar, we had stopped before a large set of double doors leading out... which had been torn apart to lead into the hallway beyond, and scratches and gleaming of acid spotted the lesser metals here and there.
We studied the schema of the ship displayed next to the doors, which pretty much matched what we'd gotten off the collector's server. It meant the ship's command center was three miles above us, and main Engineering was four miles below us, where the Throne Field would be located.
It was spookily quiet. There was a quiet subsonic hum of ancient circuits keeping the grav going, and pumps balancing the temperature and air pressure in sophisticated patterns. The air temp was cool, fifteen or so Celsius above freezing, but given the lack of inhabitants, suitable for a holding temperature. The sunlight beating down on the hull was probably enough to keep the whole shadowed hulk at this level.
Oh, and there was nothing but emergency lighting, faint flickers in the darkness. It didn't really mean anything to us since we had devilsight, but it meant nothing living was around that needed to see, and so it had been shut down as irrelevant.
"You see the wiring?" Briggs asked softly.
"All mol-hardened? Yeah." That was an incredible expenditure, but it meant that there was no melding or merging of the wiring over time at all, which would naturally happen to metals in close contact with one another. The expense of wiring something this size with that... the wealth and sophistication of human society must really have reached a peak back then.
We stepped out into the hall together, looking left and right and seeing it curving away from us as it followed the arc of the ship's hull. The areas closest to the hull were generally filled with machinery and raw goods. The true valuables were at the center of the ship.
We looked one another in the eyes, turned to the hallway extending towards the center in front of us, and glided on ahead.
There were several gates and locks in the way, all of which had been torn through by violent means and fused open. Microscans showed the impact of some powerful claws in huge numbers on the metal, and the sloughing effect unique to psionics, same with the decks underneath us. We had a hundred yards or so to go to get to the central area...
We slowed down as we passed through the outer storage zones to the inner. Our tremblesenses echoed through the metal, and we could see...
Just, ah, shit...
The main doors ahead of us gaped wide open, blasted and fused. We could see the far side, but said nothing as we stepped out into the main chamber on a fairly sizable landing meant for disembarking people woken from cryosleep, one of dozens visible on the very, very long chamber extending up and down for much of the ship.
There were many, many holders for cryo tubes visible. They extended up and down, and they extended back in suspended rows, filling the entire center of the ship.
They were all broken. There wasn't a hint of biomatter left behind in any of them, we were certain. It was as cold and sterile as the deck under our feet.
Millions. Tens of millions. Hundreds of millions... maybe billions.
Every tube shattered. They'd never woken up, or if they had, it was just in time to die as a xenosym began to eat them alive from inside, or a cerevore jumped in, ate their brain, and made itself at home in them.
A monstrous tragedy lost to the ages, and just discovered by us. Was it any wonder humanity hated alien races?
We knew we were going to see it, but still, digesting the immensity of the slaughter was something we just had to do for ourselves.
"Up or down?" Briggs asked, deferring the decision.
"Undoing whatever was done to the Throne is probably going to bring in something really bad, and when we kill it, the Warpzone will start decaying, probably tossing all the shit inside it out into our reality if it moves too fast. I don't expect a collapse, but it will decay. I don't think we can do that in the middle of a fight, and we definitely can't let any other 'friendly' forces out there know about it."
"Aye. They'll want to stop us from releasing it, both so they don't have to fight, and because it's generating the Energized ore veins, and because they'd want to study the Throne to see if they can duplicate the effect."
"Nothing of which could possibly go wrong," I hmphed, and he managed to smile slightly as he looked around, impressing the remains of this massacre deep into his soul.
"Hey, Sama, you got any experience with Gamma World?" he asked suddenly.
I scrunched up my mishmash records of gaming shit masquerading as rules to live by. "That's the sci-fi attachment to D&D, right? The first post-nuclear apocalypse mutant world thing? No, nothing in particular about it, save from some cool pic of a guy in power armor riding a mutant cyborg wolverine."
His smile was thin. "Yeah, that was a cool pic, all right, I remember it, too. But I was more thinking about an item of equipment they had. Was wondering if you had heard of a blacklight gun."
For some reason, a chill went down my spine. "That has nothing to do with UV fuzzy paintings, does it?"
"No. It was basically a death ray. Anything living hit by it, died. Period. Dead."
"No save?" I was impressed.
"Nope. You just died."
I looked up at the shattered tombs of uncounted millions. "Restrictions?"
"Has to hit the flesh. Any decent armor or covering would protect you. Had no penetrative ability beyond the most simple cloth. Basically, if it blocked light, it could protect you."
"Just killed it? Didn't disintegrate or anything?"
"Nope. Just pop, dead."
"And xenosyms and cerevores don't wear armor..."
"And their ships are living things."
I thought about the fighting that was going on above, cerevores conscripting xenosym bioships called to the cities teeming with biovores converting people into more killing organisms the psychically-accelerated way.
Death rays were exactly as viable as anti-grav, FTL, and playing around with antimatter. Heck, even the Lensmen had the toy that could literally sever life with a thought... although that was definitely TL17+ tech, too.
And they'd be freaking perfect for dealing with biovores. Right tool for the right situation.
I exhaled as my thought-streams went barreling down a path that led to some very dark places. Given the Hag bloodline, those paths were wide open and willing to accept visitors, no problem. Messing around with negative and necroic energies was generally a no-no, but this blacklight was right on the border between the two.
And there was no freaking doubt whatsoever that I was going to figure out how to make it, and then the xenosyms were going to be living in terror.
I looked upwards. "The odds they have an AI are high. The odds that AI is not batshit crazy are very low."
"Trust the computer. The computer is your friend. The computer will take care of you. Obey the computer," he responded blandly.
"Paranoia, the Destroy-yah..."
"So, it's likely we're going to trip internal defenses, and then robotic guardians and automated systems that eventually were strong enough to hold off the cerevores long enough for the Throne to drive them off the ship. Shutting down the Throne will render the ship open to assault from outside forces, might even empty out the center of the Warp Zone, so the ship won't want us to do that. We're probably going to have to take out its central cores... which is bloody obvious, and the cerevores probably tried and failed."
"If the designers weren't stupid, it's probably decentralized and can be isolated from outside influences in the event of breach," I agreed. "My guess is it's all partitioned up and won't be speaking to itself to isolate any possible contaminants, so it's going to be operating on limited information filtered through a morass of Warp influence and utterly failing to protect cargo and crew. If it has any emotions or even protective inclinations, that would be enough to break it before anything else happened...."