The energy was tempered, of course. The limit of the energy you can release from a weapon tends not to be your power source, but how fast you can cool the surrounding systems. Power generators can, in many cases, tap into nigh-infinite energy sources in multiple ways. Using that power places severe strain on whatever you are using to conduct and focus it, and you gotta give that stuff time to recover and return to optimal state, or things start going wrong... just like overheating the muzzle of a gun.
We were in effect shining down a big hot flashlight on a spot on the hull most able to handle it, and letting it carry all the vivic energy it could down into the ship's power systems. Since it wasn't meant to overheat, the Precipice could keep up the shot without too much problem, making adjustments on the fly to keep it sustained.
It was a potential tactic for washing an unshielded section of landscape with a stream of glass-making flames. The atmosphere around the drifting mountain was definitely heating up, but it didn't concern us as we watched, as the ship was actually soaking up the vast, vast majority of the energy and spiriting it away... and the atmosphere was already -100 C, so heating it up did basically nothing for some time, except generate a lot of wind and creaking in the hull.
One of the support guys exclaimed, "A light just went on in the hangar!"
Everybody turned to look that way, and sure enough, one of the ceiling panels had started to wink on.
"And it's dripping black gunk and burning..." I added, my Mask leaping forwards to get a better view.
"More lights!" another lass pointed out, and we turned to look at seemed to be signal lights winking on along the surface of the mount.
Spotters on surrounding ships protected from the horror wave confirmed that lights were beginning to wink on slowly on the outer part of the ship.
"Those weapon ports just lit up," Cedric pointed out.
"Targeting baffles up, Precipice," I ordered laconically, and the secondary fusion cores powered up the displacers that made the ship look a hundred meters to the left, complete with the beam coming out of it. "Shouldn't be an issue. If the Curse is moving the systems, the same power it is using is burning it out of the systems."
A cannon with a barrel longer then an IPBM advanced out of the gun port, mounted on an improbably large rotating mount. It started to cycle up, but pretty much everyone could see the black gunk leaking out of it, and white mist chasing patiently. The glow and ominous hum rising up from the guts of it got to maybe the halfway point of charging, and then powered down silently.
"Shooting the Precipice with its own energy is very ungrateful," Curie sniffed.
"And they got burned for it!" Giselle promptly shot back, and everybody groaned...
----
Over the next half hour, as the Precipice sent down a patient beam of superhot annihilation that didn't hurt the ship at all, various gun ports opened up, missiles and cannons poked out, powered up, powered down, and then automatically withdrew and closed.
There were occasional crashing sounds from the hangar as some of the docking clamps let go, but since we weren't standing under them, we weren't too concerned. The Curse could try corroding some of the systems here, but the odds were it had adapted its nature to the obdurate nature of the tech here, and simply couldn't change the essential systems enough to matter. Even the docking clamps holding the lighter ships were just being nudged to open up, not collapse.
When the entry area was finally cleared up, we naturally took advantage of that to plug three generations of vivic pumps in, and help the effect along. We watched the lights wink on, and black gunk dripping down... and then we plugged in the fusion core we'd trucked in, and added more raw juice to the situation.
Portable generators and vivic pumps accompanied us as we advanced through the hangar, fighting the pervasive nature of the Curse infesting us with more pervasiveness. The engineering teams were harmonizing the power feeds, infiltrating the broadcast power network, which sent it into the ships all around us it was definitely invading, too. Poofs of white mist jetted out here, there, and everywhere as the hungry vivus found something to feast on.
---
"I like this kind of fighting," Cedric had to grin, and the ex-troopers all around had to agree. While nobody was completely relaxed, letting their engineering skills battle the enemy was much preferable to shooting it... and made them feel pretty damn smart, too.
"Any motion other than aborted incidentals?" I asked the scanner teams fanning out and slowly advancing ahead, Goldilocks plugged into their Bands and synched to their sensor arrays.
The lead of the nearest team shook his head slowly, sent over his feed. I eyed the results; mostly vibrations of lots of small things moving, then shuddering to a halt.
There was a relay from the Precipice that they had to shut the white hole down as tolerances were approaching their limit. Granted, the tolerances were a LONG ways from the real limit, but when you deal with Warp influences and psychic whammy crap, if you don't have lots of tolerance cap left, you have explosions and lost ships.
We all felt a quiet shuddering stop as the cruiser stopped firing and pulled back beyond the vivic shields. It had been beaming terajoules for over an hour, and would be doing a full overhaul of the weapon systems to make sure they were good to go.
That was okay, we had series of generators and vivic pumps driving us forward slowly. It wasn't enough to purge the rest of the ship, but it could secure a foothold easily.
Mmm, best to have the Precipice fire on another facing when it lit up again, spread out the vivus for good luvvin' ship to ship...
"So, where you guessing the primary power core is?" I asked everybody in general, glancing at The Map of this place. It broke down the whole mountain pretty well, of course, with everything we'd been able to scan. However, this place was so full of so damn much ultra-dense stuff, ranged scans were barely able to tell anything.
Once we were inside, vibrational analysis was actually pretty useful, in contrast, producing pretty clear readings along straight lines.
All the engineers and ship designers took independent looks, and pretty much centered it about where I would, just left of center mass, just below and ahead of us, under the central area of the crossing hangar decks.
This mountain didn't have traditional drives, instead moving on pure gravity action. The bottom of the mountain was actual neutronium, incredibly dense, and channeling gravitational forces like no artificial material could. By acting on that superdense and heavy material with high G's, they would have been able to accelerate with high G's, and their straight Jam speed would have been very respectful, even if their maneuverability was crap. They were flying a mountain, they didn't need to be too maneuverable...
With the power core stationed ahead of us, we just had to keep on our way, ignore the feeling of something watching and very angry at us...
My Curse was gloating as it slowly writhed on my skin, feeling the darkness getting slowly burned away and forced back. It had a nice Curseline going back to another Curse that had been repurposed to a higher Cause once again, and definitely had some appreciation for using this tactic.
------
The timer to the next horror wave was thirty seconds away when a tech shouted out, "Planar breach forming! Four hundred twenty yards ahead!"
That would put it in the massive crossing point of the hangars we could see ahead of us.
"Get three pumps up here and going," I ordered coolly. The breach would blow open as soon as the horror wave shot past. I had to smile slightly as my Tails and Arms formed... and everything was burning vivic. "Ladies, gentlemen, and you Marked people too, prepare to thank the Warp for their contribution to the vivic purging."
There were quiet snickers as whole arsenals of Weapons burning unwhite misting flames were unlimbered in anticipation. The armored lads plopped down the vivic pumps, and the prototype vivic flamethrowers were attached directly to them as they began to gush the Land's favorite digestion aid.
The echoes of the horror wave were echoing through the decking, but we were so saturated with vivus that the psychic energy was flaring in the air about us, and the sound was fading in faint waves of vivus all around our position.
The shrieks of the long-damned were joined by the screams and howls of the Damned, rippling into view ahead of us in spurts of puke-rainbows, spilling out hordes of things not supposed to be material in this universe.
Four hundred yards away, nyar. Everyone with heavy weapons... oh, right, that was everyone, including the computer techs... swung them down and opened up coolly. Some hot reality clad in Hungry Land Barbecue Sauce went winging down the great open flat area.
Every shot looked much bigger and more impressive than it actually was, because the vivus was pluming about the shots as it tore through the horror wave's screaming and had it a taste of some ephemeral psychic energy and eternal pain and agony, munchmunch. The demons seemed to appreciate it as seasoned weapon fire chewed into them, and vivic energy blossomed in spurts and flowers of death and destruction... and plane-sealing The Veil Says No.
The shaking planar walls took some quick gulps of vivic reinforcement, decided it didn't like bleeding all over reality like some hemophiliac, and screaming nexus of psychic pain notwithstanding, the rips, rifts, and bulging distortions in reality began to go away rather correctly.
They hadn't even got a Greater Demon in here. Looked like a fairly random bunch, grabbing whatever was wandering about and drawing it in. Pfff.
They started to run into our direction, but even the dimension-bending they thought they could use to get closer to us rapidly was being shut down by the amount of vivus spreading out and reinforcing the Veil. Instead of getting up on us and dodging around our fire by wobbling their way along the Veil, the closer they got to us, the slower they moved, and the easier they were to hit.
I was hosing them down, spreading out the vivic love with lots of injuries, and when they hit a hundred yards the Spikes starting going out to take out everything that was screaming and burning and wailing for their mommies. Our mommies? I didn't much translate, and nobody else bothered, as the wave of techni-blahrg-colored ectoplasmic killing Sins Incarnate ran into the leveled vivic flame throwers and kinda went YEEP! and exploded.
Anything big enough to withstand a torrent of vivus to the face was pretty much dead before it could get past them, as a whole lot of autofire wound about with misty unwhiteness miraculously converged on them and helped the local space/time settle its jumpy stomach.
A couple Slaughter demons with their bigass and profitable-to-burn flaming swords loomed up through the firing line, a whole line of swollen Pusbearers the size of rhinos providing some cover. The lads with the vivic hoses just focused on them, and buried them in some venting jets of unwhiteness, almost erasing them from existence as they pounded forward. Their burning swords clattered to the decks as they were cleansed away remarkably quickly.
Percy snapshot their heads away to finish them, and all the shooting stopped in the same tenth of a second.
"Warp signatures all gone," the relevant tech lowering the misting barrel of his crystal-tipped Solar Fractal Hard Light Tactical Assault Weapon exclaimed for everyone's benefit.
We eyed the Zeks Slot Weapons, their unclean flames quickly retracted so the vivus wouldn't eat away at them. The munchable demon-wrought Weapons seemed to be shivering atop the very white floor all about them...
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Author's Note: This is the second to last chapter to be posted on Webnovel. We're moving to Royal Road! See Comments for more!