BECMI Chapter 422 – Salvager Supreme
I looked around with a small smile. Captain Emeril’s was much wider as he surveyed the fruits of his quiet work.
Among other things, he’d managed to locate and spirit away a whole lot of the point defenses, missile launchers, and secondary plasma cannons of the Barhund. The main guns had been blown to absolute shit and were little more than raw materials scattered over large areas, but he’d managed to find and retrieve the core technology and significant amounts of ammunition.
More important was what was sitting gleaming in the corner.
“You saved the Alpha Printer,” I breathed out, totally impressed. When I’d gone looking for it, it had been melted slag.
“Knowing what was coming, I made executive decisions to disconnect as much equipment from the power grid as possible, or arrange for its very swift disconnects when it was time, then purged all reserve power out to make it as inert as possible. When the disruption pulse came through, there were massive failure rates among anything plugged into the grid.
“If they were empty and off the power grid, survival rates were fifty to ninety percent.”
Given the right materials, the Alpha fabber could make anything up to TL 10 technology, basically able to recreate most of the foundational tech of the system. It couldn’t make the really complex stuff, like the main reactor or even its back-up, but anything down from that was possible.
It could also make other fabbers and thus multiply its own output potential, even if it couldn’t make quite another one of itself. Still, all the secondary fabbers outputting anything Tech Level 9 or lower was still massive.
“Computer cores?” I asked, moving to the important detail. I had preserved huge portions on my own, but wanted to see what he’d salvaged.
“As you indicated, there were Immortals who quickly contributed to the shielding on the Engineering department, wanting to save the core. I just moved the primary memory of the ship into some auxiliary cores that were installed not long before the explosion.” His smile was mirthless. “They were inside what looked like some secondary booster modules. I spirited them away and nobody has reacted, having no idea what they were in the first place.”
“Excellent. I was wondering if I was going to need to bring copies back across,” I complimented him.
He nodded once, clearly happy with what he’d done. “They didn’t want to spend the time disintegrating all the hull sections, so they mostly just buried them deep down.” He led me over to a section of floor looking out over another sunken part of the cavern, and I stepped up to the edge and looked over it.
Massive sheets of molecularly-hardened hull, originally cast in whole sheets in a production factory powered by a solar array spanning more than a lunar orbit, now rent by magical energies and anti-matter flows specifically targeting the seams and joins of the ship, lay stacked up in massive sections. Few of them were actually warped anywhere but around the edges, still tougher than anything but the most magical of metals, hundreds of thousands of tons of TL 12 hull metal we couldn’t make or duplicate to any extent… but which we could potentially reshape, if needed.
There was a lot less of the Barhund remaining buried and forgotten in this world. What we were going to do with it all was another question, of course…
Heck, he had the primary reactant chamber for the ship’s drive sitting there. That stuff was at TL 13!
“This is extremely good work,” I said approvingly. “Much of this was converted into soul crystals by the Crimson Cataclysm’s explosion, shattered and lost below ground or above. At the very least, I think we’ve the foundation of a decent airship fleet here, yes?”
“I would love to be able to make something smaller we could take into space,” the Captain said wistfully. “But there are some powerful Divinatory Formations in place looking for any kind of interplanetary or higher technology. The Immortals do not want anything of the Federation or similar powers coming in and interfering with their games.”
I nodded once at the old bitterness in his voice. He had made the very best of what was basically being marooned on a low-tech world, but he had never forgotten that it was not the error of his ship or crew. They had been stranded by an outside force, so many of them had died, and there had been no recourse, no option to leave and never come back, nothing.
Superior beings had perceived them as a threat, and then eliminated that threat, turning them into merely another test project in their games. When that threatened to get out of their control, they had been wiped away without compunctions or regrets.
But he and most of his people had managed to survive, in this timeline, thanks to an outside force coming in and rescuing them, treating them as the good and worthy crew that they were.
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He wasn’t going to let down those who had died in the other timeline, including his alternate self. Those responsible would have justice, no matter how many years it took!…
“Find out anything about the precursors?” I inquired neutrally, clearly not expecting much.
“Most of that information is secured among only the oldest and most powerful Immortals, who tend not to leave physical records behind. All I could find out is that the elves, dwarves, and hynfolk did not exist until after the precursors were gone… and supposedly not even the dragons were there. The Immortals routinely mess with memories as part of their historical revisions, you see,” the contempt in his voice icy.
“Of course.” They were trying to do so with Darkmoor, but Truth kept getting in their way, much to their irritation. “And no doubt you have a very long wait and much proving of your motivations to accomplish before you are trusted with such high and weighty things.”
He could only nod slowly. “I do not have the extraplanar home anchoring me that other Immortals do, and thus no reason to spend Immortal Power on it, but that just leaves me with more to spend here in the mortal world.” He paused significantly. “The Hierarchs at the top of the scale must have spent untold mountains of the stuff, Edge. I’ve seen some of their displays of personal power, the breadth of those who worship them all across the world. They reign over their Spheres like monarchs based on power alone, because there is nothing universal to respect other than power among them.” He sighed aloud. “They ARE the higher cause. It is… disappointing,” he admitted. “These grandiose figures, with nothing beyond them but themselves and whatever they determine their highest goals are, bleeding them down to those with less power and age.”
“Making one wonder where they originally came from. It sounds almost like cultivators, trying to escape the grasp of true gods so that they can rule over all. Certainly not much different, with this multiverse set up as it is…”
“The oldest Immortals are very, very old. Ssa is alluded to be from the age of dinosaurs, somehow raising himself to Immortality and millions of years old. Grimr, Nifl, Qaurizon, and Paras are so old they can’t remember ever being mortal, if they ever were.”
I contemplated that as I ran my visual tallies of the Barhund’s stuff. “Start using tech as part of the rewards for the Doomrose Dungeon. Should cut back on the IP you have to spend there.”
“That is an excellent idea. As long it is just charged items without a generator, not much different than finding magic Wands or something,” he said thoughtfully. “And enough of them still exist in other places that they aren’t totally unknown.”
“And high tech is even more inscrutable than high magic to the average person,” I nodded along. “Are there any powers the Immortals look up to that they spoke of?” I asked him.
“Mmmmm. Two, maybe?” he said slowly. “The first are the Draeden. They are massive creatures, looking like great floating brains miles long, with dozens of massive tentacles with jaws on the ends. They can destroy planets if they are of a mind to, and seem to have fought a war with the Immortals in the past. There’s a detente right now where the two sides leave one another alone, but they are extremely powerful, and extremely dangerous. I’ve never seen one, and given the way anyone below a Hierarch talks about them, I really have no wish to.”
I filed that information away. “Brains. That sounds like Aberrants from Outside Creation. But you mentioned the Immortals also fight against things from what they call the Far Realm, and we call Things of Mythos, Outside Creation.”
“Yes, that’s the ‘great noble battle’ of theirs, puffs them all up with the righteousness of their existence,” the Captain agreed. “They use it to justify what they do with mortals, we owed them for all their sacrifices and battles against the Far Realm and things we couldn’t possibly fight without them.”
“….” was my response to that. Leaving mortals unable to rise to a level where they could fight against such things was total hypocrisy. You started the power low and grew it, you didn’t restrict it to just making Immortals to replace those who might have died or faded away or whatever. “The second respected party?”
“The Old Ones.” I lifted an eyebrow. That was usually a term reserved for the elder gods of Mythos. “Supposedly Immortals who have gone past the limits of being a Hierarch. They are only rumors and myths, supposedly they exist past the 5th dimension of Immortal perception. There were hushed tales about Hierarchs who ascended to the limit of the power in their Sphere, dispersed all of their Immortal power, and returned to mortality to struggle to Immortal power in another Sphere, advancing all the way to High Hierarch a second time.
“This has only happened twice, supposedly, and swarms of Blackballs came for them and took them away. They may have been destroyed, but there is no confirmation of that. The Immortals choose to believe that they ascended to become Old Ones, despite there being no known sightings of Old Ones in the past, or if so, they’ve been kept very secret.”
Blackballs were rumored to be ‘alive’, not just what might be called Spheres of Annihilation, which were (forbidden) Artifice. Although there was rumored to be some Aberrant entity that was a living Sphere of Annihilation…
“So… there’s a potential higher grade of entity on the Immortal side, and it’s definitely not a deity.”
“Is that true on the Eternal side?” Captain Emeril asked with some interest.
“Eternals follow the path of the Titan, which is about remaining finite, or the path of the Divine, which involves becoming less finite, more involved with Free Will and the War of the Alignments. While there are gods who are finite and gaff the Alignments, they never become truly powerful. Of course, wars between Gods and Titans are classic tropes, too, not all that much different from wars between the Spheres in their own way.” I turned a glance at him. “You know that Immortals can also advance outside the traditional method too, right? For instance, through the Elemental Planes and affinity?”
“I seem to remember that as being a method you could access through the Elemental Schools derived from the betathauma radiation?” He had met students of all the Elemental schools brought over into Darkmoor, of course.
“Yes. Technically a recent development… except my Sims took it into the past and are running with it,” I smiled thinly. “They are endeavoring to do the same on this Shore, building up influence on the Elemental Planes instead of among the Immortals proper.”
“Using a magical discipline that can’t be imitated because the means to create it do not exist yet,” he smiled in appreciation for the trick.