BECMI Chapter 264 – A Cold and Lonely Duty of Scavenging Everything

There was technology laying out and around the wreck of the impossibly durable Federation tech wrought from Dura-Isotopes that didn’t really decay with time, other stuff in stasis chambers lying cold and dormant and invulnerable as long as the power held out. I was going to get a lot of that stuff out, stuff that was actually being used on the Far Shore of time, and I was going to have it ready for the future.One at a time, one spell at a time, that is exactly what I did.

I pulled out thousands of miles of superconductor and fiber-optic cables from behind the walls. I salvaged any computer tech that had managed to stay sealed up and hadn’t degraded past where a could restore it to operating condition. I removed data cores and I emptied out workstations, leaving empty shells behind that looked fine and had literally nothing underneath them.

I stripped out hand-held tools and weapons of all kinds. Just to fuck with the Immortals, I actually repaired a damaged maintenance module and the robots attached to it, updating their AI to reflect the damaged condition of the ship. Soon, those Immortal constructs were treated to the sight of little janitorial bots zipping around cleaning up the walls and floors, sweeping out the air ducts, zapping vermin, fixing the light diodes, remounting broken doors and ornamentation, and slowly and dutifully going through the corridors and polishing them up.

They were amusing distractions that worked well, entertaining and useful to the Immortals.

I moved out fabbers and printers and recyclers, alternate energy storage capacitors and batteries and generators, and tens of thousands of tons of supplies and raw materials.

Deep in the bowels of the ship, I silently killed things which should never have existed and fed them into the recyclers to remove any trace of them from existence. Mutant creatures that would have driven a lot of people mad with horror thought they were stalking me through twisted and bent corridors, ventilation shafts, elevator and monorail tubes, and instead found that they were actually just offering themselves up to be cleaned away.

I wondered who was winning between the oozes and the swarms, and then I hit them with ultraviolet burning death and they all died regardless.

The more active cleaner bots dutifully stumbled on them and trucked them off to the trash recyclers faithfully.

Quietly and circumspectly, I initiated radiation purges through sections to explain the die-offs for those Immortals wandering around, explaining the vanishing horrors, with the bots moving around cleaning things up and occasionally seen dragging roasted mutant corpses away to be processed explaining things.

I left empty mock-ups in a lot of places, and a couple of things I just blatantly stole away, like several mostly-intact shuttles, figuring it would be just like an Immortal to take a fancy to them and spirit some away without telling one another.

I also broke into their primitive attempt at computer coding from outside of engineering, reviewed their code and the insanity it was going to cause. They were trying to categorize all the different types of thaumic radiation they could find. Alphathaumic was highly mutational and had produced the mutants aboard the ship from terrestrial and random alien lifeforms. Betathaumic bands seemed far more promising, and were the type that triggered the new Schools of Magic in Zanzyr in the future.

Gammathauma was the next step they were working on. That would finally end in creation of the Radiance.

Arsehats.

There were no Immortals around.

Led by a slender and skilled elven hunter, the team of elves broke into the ship and stumbled upon the remains of its technology, which was both frightening and tantalizing. Led by random steps in explorations to the vessel, they basically followed the heat, lights, and janitorial bots to engineering, where the alien constructs prowled about and were shocked to find natives having penetrated in so far.

Fighting erupted. Skilled explorers and hunters, the elves fought back with magic and magical weapons, and these were mere Constructs, shells directed with only a tiny spark of Immortal intellect.

The Constructs were defeated, this magical ship and place were theirs, and the elves began messing around.

And then it got strange, because they activated one of the nearby cryostorage cells, and out of it stepped Second Engineer Jorg Turmalez, one of the spirited, hard-working Greens I’d helped release from stasis on the Far Shore, one of those who’d elected to stay with and maintain the there across the temporal pond after being set free.

This variant repaired and activated two self-defense stations, got a Knightbot working, and armed with a modified plasma ventrilo gun and a power spanner, took the fight to the startled elves and the Immortal fucking around with the core.

He drove them off successfully, but it was too goddamn late. Thanatos had fucked things up royally, and all Jorg could do was vent off the worst of the heat and prevent an absolute explosion of the worst kind that would propel the Core into the planet and contain most of the eruption, instead of spreading mutational energies over half the continent.

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It blew as I watched from the distance, teeth grit at the man’s heroism as he worked feverishly to contain a disaster, right up until the Crimson Cataclysm truly lit off.

Thanatos first thought He could just away, then fly away, then go incorporeal away, and, well, none of that worked, as the radiation flooding out was reacting mysteriously with the planet’s magical field and absolutely denying Him the opportunity to withdraw. He had no idea what was happening, or just how final the explosion was going to be when it went off and swallowed the completely, the elves in the area, and blew off in a scarlet cloud that launched itself twenty miles into the sky, visible from hundreds of miles away.

Suffused with enough and to tear Thanatos apart and feed the explosion even further, it changed the nature of the Cataclysm and released His Immortal energy completely as His Avatar was obliterated right along with the elves he’d tricked into doing His dirty work for Him.

As the Avatar died, He was struck with a single spell. It was Divination magic of the highest order, IX+1, striking His mind and sinking deep even as He was torn apart, plunging in for the echo of a soul He had there, looking for one simple truth… and finding it as the shocked Immortal’s mind reeled at the searing, cutting force of purity in that strike at Himself.

One Word, the first of six, something that could only be ripped out now, at the moment of death.

I closed my eyes as I watched the Crimson Cataclysm rise from two hundred miles away.

Four hundred miles away, in a deep chamber carved from the bedrock, with no way in or out, the remaining cryopods from the had materialized, where waiting plugged them into the light fusion generator there to keep them intact. Tens of thousands of tons of supplies and equipment salvaged from the were stacked up in the darkness nearby, while the hundreds of pods gleamed in the holding points made for them, whisked away by the surge of power from the Core and brought into place when none were looking or could look past the magical interference.

“Cirru, confirm you have that spell working,” I said to her, as we watched the Cataclysm through a field of force interfering with any radiation coming our way.

Her tail swished nervously as she watched that mushroom cloud raining down down upon the landscape, a ravaging of the land it would take Immortals nearly a hundred years to wear down and be rid of, concealing it as they once again remade the land about it and hid all signs of what had truly happened here.

“I have it ready to go, Mistress,” the dragon affirmed with a nod.

“We know the cloud will persist for three days. We have to act now, before the sunlight reaches the ground.

“The soul crystals will be spread around the area, and must be harvested before the natural sunlight hits them and destroys them. Cast the . Here we go!”

I reached out and touched the dragon’s wing, and sent us hurtling towards the horizon, and into the howling inferno of the Crimson Cataclysm, .

Soul Crystals were the remnants of the durasteels and exotic alloys of the , blown into and above the earth by the explosion, infused with absolute harmony to the energies of the Core… and an absolute vulnerability to the effects of sunlight, which would basically crumble them to inert powder and dust.

If we wanted to salvage some impossibly large pieces, stuff the shadenelves would never find blasted through the ground like they did in the future, now was the time we had to find them!

Immortals would be examining the site of the explosion, focused on what had happened to the Core, how damaged it truly was, and if they’d lost their precious experiment. They weren’t going to be surveying the area for someone making off with irreplaceable precious soul crystals of impossible size, and wouldn’t even notice that they were being taken, because they’d all crumble to dust regardless as soon as the sun returned for even the briefest time.

Jorg had saved their little experiment. It was now melting into the mantle, five miles deep already and increasing, the wild energies gyrating between beta and gammathaumic as it cycled through its stabilization procedures, and the wild magic seethed and boiled and leaked out of it.

They’d find it still existed, was doing what it was supposed to, and the best thing to do was to step back, cover it up, and wait to see what fun stuff would happen in the future with the unique manner of magic available to mortals that this thing would put out.

Token efforts would be made toward cleaning up the environment of hard radiation damage, mostly because they’d be altering the landscape to hide the remains of the completely, removing the blast crater and hole entirely, shoving the remains that still existed deep into the magic-infused rock, and burying the last defiant roar of the fiery heart for all time.

We had spells up to cut through wind, ignore heat, and were protected from the radiation that had killed everything within miles and was going to slowly kill everything within over a hundred miles. It would turn this area into a cold blasted landscape that was going to be covered with ash and undergo yet another Ice Age… until the magic bubbling up from below reached the surface and began melting it nearly as rapidly as it came about, a process that was going to take about a thousand years.

That an Immortal Avatar had died here, nobody but Thanatos and I knew, and He wasn’t going to tell anyone.

For now, it was dodging rubble from the heavens and scanning for slabs of transformed starship material, all of that turned into one of the most powerful and vital magical materials under the Heavens.

It was a substance that could accumulate and channel the Radiance, only the vast quantities that had fallen onto the surface had been destroyed by sunlight and time, leaving only buried veins boiling away from the force of the Core of Magic to convey vastly smaller pieces of the ships into the depths.

Nobody had managed to preserve these pieces, because they hadn’t known they were there at the time, and nothing of them had remained to be curious of. Only Gaebrel, deep underground, would discover the buried remnants though his adopted people, the Shaden, and realize what they portended.

Their lives would change from that point on, for the discovery of the soul crystals enabled Gaebrel to grant clerical spells to his elven followers...