Descending the steep black slopes of the crater wall wasn't actually that difficult. Briggs and I treated it like a skiing trip, comparing the paths down we both worked out, and turned it into a 120-mph race to the bottom as the Waveskating Steps bowed to gravity and sent us hurtling down, down, down.

Now, we weren't actually using skis or poles, but we were totally 'filming' one another, and saving the whole thing to our Bands. I was pretty sure that these slopes were going to become a huge travel destination to anyone with the appropriate level of lightfoot.

So, hundred-foot falls, somersaults, spins, tumbles, stupid midair poses, layouts, funny landings... we had style, and we had an absence of style, all in good fun.

After all, if we couldn't have some fun with all the extremely superhuman things we were capable of, who else would dare? Post-human acrobatics, leaping ability, and impossibly good balance and reaction times were meant to be enjoyed.

In far too little time we made it to the bottom, coasting down the gradually decreasing slopes and out onto the sands beyond.

"Tech is still working," he said, and his armor's thrusters deCompressed, while my shin-jets did the same. Our skiing experience shifted from slopes to level ground as we started skimming over the winding dunes of the place.

We still had a long ways to go...

-----------

"You noticed?" he asked of me.

"The absence of life, or the next?" I replied, frowning.

"The next."

No biomatter whatsoever.

From everything we could tell, this was a normal sand desert. No alkalines. The water in the air was extremely low, and otherwise locked below the sands.

There was nothing alive but the most minor of bacteria. No insects, no plants, no spores, no seeds, I couldn't even see any buried bones of any kind.

There was evidence that there was a massive localized firestorm in the past, looking at the landscape, some melting and fusing. But even such a thing wouldn't have killed everything, and certainly would have left carbonized traces of them. If it happened long ago, natural diffusion and the speed of life should have replaced everything by now.

"Vivus? No, it would make more life. Virus bomb?" he asked, frowning at the sands and dirt speeding by under our heels. He was basically standing up straight while his jets sent him ahead, his Vajra taking care of air resistance, his Vajra keeping him above the sands.

I was leaning forwards, my Wings out and burning, idly banking this way and that around him as we sped along. I fluffed up my Tail to give him something to admire, which he definitely did. If there would have been a lake or something on the way, we would have been mutually admiring one another for a few hours...

But no. Just sand, dirt, and rocks, hills and valleys and seemingly endless plains...

-------

We both saw the glint of light at the same time, and glided to a stop together without speaking.

"That was durasteel," Briggs frowned. Yeah, when your eyes have more color cones, doing albedo analysis at a glance is totally possible.

"And at the locus," I agreed. Everything was diverging from that point.

"To see it at this distance..."

"A mile above the surface?" I finished, also running the math.

There were no mountain ranges ahead of us. Could there be a single, lonely mountain peak at the center of all this? It definitely wasn't what I expected.

Then again, the Warp was involved. We glanced at one another, sighed, and resumed our travels.

------------

A half hour later, as the horizon crept up and rolled past, we glided to a stop again, looking at what was ahead of us.

"Ah, shit." "Oh, Hell."

I reached back to the relay team. See, this kind of shit was why we wanted someone behind us. They also swore as the sight of what was ahead of us was transmitted back. Briggs and I calculated dimensions, approximated the design, and sent them off with instructions to find out what exactly this was... and to use non-traditional sources, or the Umbrans.

Crim scampered away with a huge load in his Visual File, a mixture of eager and awed, and Briggs and I resumed course, somewhat more slowly and cautiously.

The area ahead of us was shining and glossy, sands sweeping over it, not accumulating. It had been glassed irregularly, and not by impact.

Ahead of us was a literal mountain of metal, a full mile high, and at least ten miles long. The lines were graceful and tubular, definitely not AMT standard, and it was simply massive, large enough by itself to be a space station, far larger than any standard model ship of the Imperial Fleet.

Its durasteel was defiant to natural corrosion, and had held up unstintingly under the elements. However, there were burn lines that came from barely-controlled atmospheric re-entry, sheering wounds from stripped hull plating and extrusions... and most tellingly, dozens of impact sites and gaping hull breaches from some form of bombardment.

For all that, this fallen hulk was indubitably of human design. Anything alien would definitely show something off-kilter on sight, a psychic twitch of something subconsciously not right. TL 7+ tech was Weird Science by definition, which meant it was tied to a race's understanding of universal laws, and they would build accordingly. Trying to replicate the appearance of another race's ships was basically impossible... they were alien, and always would be.

If this was a ship before AMT, that meant before the Emperor. A really, really old ship, from the glory years of humanity's surge into space, sitting here lost in the middle of a Warp Zone for thousands of years.

Damn.

"Speculating. Colony ship?" Briggs asked, eyes sweeping over everything.

"Sounds right. We'll know if it's full of sleeper pods."

"Colony ships would also have basic supplies and production technology to set up an economy base."

"From before AMT." We glanced at one another.

No, no, the Mekkers wouldn't try to monopolize this instantly. This was potentially a galactic-class treasure, depending on the level of the tech here. The Mechanists would go to war to secure this for themselves... and then bury most of it, because 'only they could possibly understand it', and of course, they wouldn't be able to.

Replicate some of it, maybe.

This was a pirate treasure and the impetus for a sector-wide war. I was not worried about the Marked, but if news of this got out, there would be a sector fleet above the planet in no time, millions of men would start marching into the Warp Zone... and without Nulls and Sources, the Zone would freaking explode.

In trying to secure the ship, they'd blow the Warp Zone, and lose the planet and everyone on it. To keep the technology out of anyone else's hands, the Mekkers would make that choice without any hesitation.

Throne...

"So... how long do you think they've known it was here?" I asked Briggs archly.

His frown could have cracked stone. "I noticed the Throne Field inside the Warp fluctuations. If they recovered any of the debris it lost as it came down, and what are the chances they didn't?... then they've known since before the planet was settled."

"Then they've figured out that the Warp Zone is behind the proliferation of E-minerals here. A static, 'low-threat' zone put in place by a malfunctioning Throne Field."

He grimaced. "They want to replicate it to create Energized farms on raw worlds in multiple locations!"

The implications were enough to shake the galaxy, and the rewards great enough that the Mekkers would be sure to try it out, one way or another. It was practically guaranteed to be a total disaster, but on what scale, we couldn't imagine.

Well, we could imagine, and that was the problem. Because there was absolutely no way I believed this was a coincidence.

"What do you think?" I asked grimly.

"A second field will generate a resonance effect with every ship that uses a Hell Drive, broadcasting through the Warp. It will open an uncontrolled Warp Zone centered on every ship in the galaxy at the same time."

The scale of that catastrophe would be unimaginable. The most heavily protected and defended worlds would be the ones hit the hardest, and every ship of humanity would be destroyed and/or taken over by denizens of the Warp.

The galaxy would burn, and there was a good chance humanity would never come back from it.

"That's called playing a long game," Briggs muttered to nobody in particular.

"While I really, really love the idea of the Warp being a nice source of power for making Energized materials, this isn't a hot potato, it's a supernova. What's your guess on the TL?"

"21+. If it was any lower, someone somewhere would have done the same," he replied promptly.

"Check to replicate?"

"Ugh... TL 14, 15, and able to hit a 50, 55? If they are working from a working model?"

"So, any force with a working model and who is mad enough to understand Chaositech could potentially replicate this?"

His face fell further. "And wipe humanity out..."

"Wipe everybody out. That many constant and uncontrolled Warp Ruptures throughout the galaxy?"

"Mythos wouldn't give a damn. They're intergalactic. An interesting one-off experiment in Chaos causality, is all. Maybe an easy way to create a permanent rupture into Creation, give them an easy in. It's just a pocket Realm, after all, despite what the Warp gods and whatever else is here thinks."

We were approaching the blast zone, and slowed down again. I looked down at the ground again, up and the looming bulk of the ship less than ten miles away, dominating everything.

"So, what do you think the range for anti-personnel suppression is for this thing's guns?" I asked, eyeing the glassed area starting fifty meters in front of us.

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"That's a good question. More to the point, what were they shooting at?"

We were silent for a few minutes, digesting that, and looked down and around us.