Terror & Peace Among the Stars [Sequel][Warhammer 40k]

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.1

Time is Undeniable.


It stretches out with its endless fangs into forever. Grinding away at us and our every work.

It gives mirages of escape to grasp for.

The sun beats down and we die.

We all have been fools to try and grasp those edges. To pull ourselves free of Time’s undeniable grasp.

We reach for the stars and straddle the heavens and still we Die.

But we never escape.

We master every force and monster of our pasts and yet we still Die.

Given enough time everything must come to its end.

No matter what we do we still Die.

That is how it would always will be.

We cannot do anything but Die.

Surely this is obvious.

At the end We Die.

Certainly this is so.

We Will Die.

Inevitable.

We Die.

There can only be surrender to this truth.

Die

...

..

.

-NO-​

Refusal to surrender to that final rest lit like fire up and down limbs. Caused the approximation of a ribcage to brace and flex convulsively.

Fingers clenched, their tips scraping against the slab.

A lone cyclopean eye flared with a flickering jolt of jade fire. Then two secondaries to the side shuddered into life as well.

A jaw opened, disturbing the dust of ages. Sent to scatter from their resting places along the crevices and ridges that were shining metal cast

The fallen soldiers of time’s armies routed by surprise by the figures ambulations. The dreaded and true enemy taken by surprise and sent into retreat for another day.

A head tilted forward, and a noise of screaming shrieking metal echoed in the close in passages all around.

The figure lurched over itself, fingers clasping over knees. Joints flexing and testing themselves, assessing for damage and disruptions autonomously from the fragmented will behind the eyes.

Slowly awareness began to coalesce. Meaning beginning to take root. The fingers drew the single eye and it focused on each one.

There was meaning missing here.

Important and vital meaning that should have been readily apparent. But also horrible visions. So much death, so much loss, a never ending war.

Enemies and last of all a voice cryptic and yet resonant beyond all measure.

-SURVIVE-

-PRESERVE-

-RISE-​

They, the owner of the eyes flexed fingers that were also they owner of the eyes, there was a meaning there. A purpose, a deep rooted foundation that could be used to shore up the rest and rebuild what was lost.

Yes the identity of the self could wait.

The meaning of the terror and horror could wait.

Here and now the order was obvious.

A purpose.

They would survive, The eyes and the chest and the face and all the rest attached. They would preserve what little they had, they would rise again.

With renewed purpose the chest bent at the waist and shifted forward from the slab and landed with the legs and the hips giving a slight sway on bare skeletal feet.

Flexing toes.

Then turned and looked at the hovering figure of a face. Well it was more just a collection of glowing green eyes and fiddling little tools below.

But the eyes were also much like the eyes it had.

Fingers reached up to confirm what the eyes suspected.

Yes this face superficially similar to that face in ocular arrangement.

There was a worn appearance to the not they face. It seemed chipped and cracked. An age to it and a sense of exhausted relief?

Or maybe that was just sentimentality leaking through. Projecting a self to the inanimate.

Sentimentality?

A self to project?

How curious.

Fingers reached out to lightly stroke around each of the glowing green eyes of the form before them. Mirroring the motions that the fingers had performed on the face which they joined by arm and elbow and shoulder and neck too.

A brief flutter of a memory of a memory.

The voice found the word.

Surprising the face and the fingers so that both withdrew.

“Spyd-ir?”

The voice was soft and musical in a way that felt right and also delightfully surprising. Or perhaps it was resonant and metallic and far too harsh compared to what was expected.

Jumbled momentary flashes of horror and explosions.

Terrible weapons scouring away the sky.

The face (the one attached to the neck and chest and two arms and two legs) turned the eyes back to view the room and there was a sense of confusion.

One foot experimentally kicked some of the detritus to confirm for itself what the eyes perceived.

This room was incorrect.

Not clear precisely how yet, those memories refused to rally, But there was a fundamental disarray to it that was very unpleasant to see with the eyes.

Also there appeared to be a lot of it missing or buried under rock and broken stone. Unclear which with what little the eye perceived.

In fact the spyd-ir appeared to also be half buried under rubble.

That was also incorrect.

The spyd-ir was very much not supposed to be impaired like that.

The room was very much not supposed to be missing bits like this.

“It ap-AP-ppears ... w-we? We h-have w-work to do?”

There was so much incorrect and it appears even the voice was not left unscathed.

This was vexing.

The fingers drummed on one of the forearms to try and reassure them.

Spoiler: Author's Notes

Hey guess what folks? I got a bit of a itch to write 40k fanfiction again, so I'm gonna be supplementing my other story Onward to Providence with this a sequel to Hope and Silence in the Hive.

This update's song is The Earth Refused to Die

 

[Rathmun]

Huh, Man of Iron? Necrons have green eyes, but Necrodermis wouldn't end up in disrepair like that.

 

[mackon]

Wonderful The Fluffy Warp Snake is back and this time she's up against her greatest foe! ... er? undead Eldar

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.2

The Spyd-ir was stoic as it remained pinned beneath the collapsed ceiling and paneling that were very gravely incorrect.

This was not how it was supposed to be.

More so the Spyd-ir was definitely incorrect. It was not supposed to be worn. It was a form which should have eternally renewed itself. Restoring over and over again. Any damage that was not immediate and recent should have been readily repaired and restored.

This rattled within the head for a while as the eyes and fingers confirmed that no, the Spyd-ir was not also part of the whole. It was separate and distinct from the whole.

Which occasionally shuddered involuntarily as memory tried to cohere into one.

Not yet though.

Memory slipped away.

The damage to the Spyd-ir spoke to a reason, a series of events. The way that its lifting mechanism was audibly whining under the burden of the stone above it spoke to another.

The state of the room which should have been.

Much more correct then this added further meanings.

Mechanisms of thought within the head and familiarity with the fingers sparked and sputtered. Drew the eyes to trace along lines that should have glowed with jade light and were barely glimering.

This was all very incorrect and what scraps of memory could be marshalled quailled and collapsed before any real implication could be made besides something had gone very wrong.

And something catastrophic had likely just happened.

Was continuing to happen.

The stone shifted. The metal paneling trembled. Vibrations lurched and buzzed up through the bare bones of feet.

Hands found their way to wall and felt the vibrations. Head tilted and jade eyes danced over the way the various elements of the room were moving. Shifting apart subtly and moving together with a grinding whine of metal.

The feint traceries of glowing light faded suddenly in a sharp last spurt of luminescence and then all was black except for the light of the eyes in the face that was self and the eyes in the face of spyd-ir.

Like mirrors of each other.

Siblings.

Sisters?

More sentimental leakage and confusion.

Not the time, not the place, not the moment.

It was time to focus on surviving and preserving.

The Spyd-ir lurched down to the floor and the ceiling collapsed. A panel crashing down into the portion of the slab that had once held the head.

Segments of the spyd-ir were attempting to move, to facilitate some kind of action. But there was no room now. The room was crashing down on the two of them.

“Spyd-ir”

The voice felt more right and it seemed to somehow make hands and feet and face and back more together and connected when it spoke.

Hips, back and legs bent and twisted to lower head as the room became too short to stand in.

Memory and just sensible meaning of the way things were shaped and the idea of correctness spoke to eyes and hands.

Spyd-ir was a preserver too, Spyd-ir had been preserving for... a long time.

Spyd-ir had saved the head, and attached body parts.

That made a sentimental leaking thing happen again.

But more importantly that was in line with the commandment.

Spyd-ir had ensured survival, had ensured preservation, would be vital and necessary to rise.

It would be, difficult with memory slacking like it was to muster hands to the necessary work without Spyd-ir.

The panels were crushing it and preventing proper operation of Spyd-ir.

The rock and stone and shared and shattered parts that were growing so incorrect it should have been unrecognizable as the room it was.

But eyes and hands and head seemed to be able to fit the pieces back together and see how it would all fit.

But not without removing whatever titanic force was pressing down on them and crushing them like this.

Spyd-ir had tools that the fingers and hands grasped. Cutting tools which should have made short work of this problem.

But only if the pressure could be relieved that way. Only at the cost of having not propped itself into the ceiling when it had.

The fingers grasped the tools at the joints and guided Spyd-ir. There were words that voice seemed almost able to say but it was too slow. It would take too long. Eyes were busy checking all around for a proper candidate. Support pillars, exterior walls, buckling stresses.

Hands moved together in concert and twisted with a wondrous certainty to divest Spyd-ir of them and allow the arms to pull them free and bring them to bare against one of the wall panels that was not being buckled yet.

Pressing the cutting sides to the panels parted them smoothly. Hands and fingers were very clever. Eyes helped to spot dangerous situations. Then feet and toes tapped and pressed to feel vibration.

Head finally seemed to actually get something useful and memory rallied by this activity pulled together a loose sketch of what should have been and was correct.

Mutilated and mangled beyond all recognition now if the vibrations feet, fingers and elbow were feeding had anything to go by.

There was a void though, and a fulcrum... If things could be diverted just so the pressure would fall away from Spyd-ir.

There, right! Fingers shifted blades around for palms and arms to use.

More cutting, shin and forearm pushed away the split or cut rubble where needed.

Shoulder and forehead made themselves useful with assistance from spine to shove a fulcrum from another piece and nudge the collapse in a different direction.

It should not have happened. This was all incorrect. The halls that had been twisted all around like a curling of fingers should have been straight and regular.

But the ceiling had been folded, the floor was at an angle and many walls were crushed. Vital fluids and caustic heat flickered in the pitch blackness. There should have been soft green light everywhere but it was black.

What had happened?!

Spyd-ir should not have been alone. She should have been joined by many many sisters and many smaller spyd-ir?

Little ones....

Childrens?

Not important!

Feet and knees helped push head into sense making and eyes guided hands and feet and knees together to the primary fulcrum of the collapse that was now pinning Spyd-ir.

Fingers hands and arms were busy with cutting and voice apparently feeling left out decided to add screeching cries to the sound of everything being crushed and collapsed into ever greater incorrect shape.

Then hip and foot came to a cunning plan and worked together to add the necessary pressure so that the grinding falling weight shifted.

It was a minute change, but eyes and hands and feet and head all agreed with memory that this was the precise act needed.

An act of craft on a collapsing support structure which moved the flow of forces and spread their devastation out and off of the strained back of Spyd-ir.

Feet and back worked to crawl and twist chest and head and eyes back towards spyd-ir.

But the worn and tired whine of lifters were already sounding smooth and then silent. Rock and stone and metal and other very important and horribly incorrectly mangled things were shoved aside as Spyd-ir swayed out from its position and then tilted alarmingly to one side and crashed into the ground stumpy limbs waggling.

Oh, that should probably have hands return them so Spyd-ir was more correct again.

Fingers slipped the cutting pieces into place and Spyd-ir’s parts knit together. The edges of its carapace where cracks had formed from the pressure of the collapsing ceiling also improved. Buckled segments bowing back out as eyes watched.

Once it was whole it flexed several limbs and rose back off the floor.

The floor which was lurching in a manner that feet reported dutifully and eyes and hands found even more incorrect.

The floor should not move, it should be rooted deep.

Deep in the bedrock. Deep in the stable heart of a mountain.

Spyd-ir peered at face for a while expectantly. The buckling heaving mass of wrongness all around was getting overwhelming and eyes sought to focus on spyd-ir.

Voice once again found the need to try and be useful.

“W-wh-wh-why a-re- you looking at me? We-we-shoul-wh-whose in charge?”

Eyes glanced at the slowly collapsing support structures of the hallways. The incorrectness was giving a very disturbing pattern. This hallway which should have never been in this state to begin with was looking like it was going through a series of steps that would end in head, hands, feet, eyes and everything else being crushed along with Spyd-ir.

That was definitely completely counter to the order of Survive.

“W-why are you j-just S-STANDING THERE! W-wh-we need to G-GETOUT!”

And as if that was the magic words Spyd-ir whirled around on the ceiling and then began disgorging her childrens out in a swirling cloud of fluttering carapace.

Carving through one of the dead unlit walls that should have been awash with green. Sweeping back and forth through crumpled structure and collapsing edifices that memory was very distracting and unhelpful in bringing up while hands and feet and eyes were trying to keep everything in one piece and voice was in a delighted fervor to have a way to contribute shouting course corrections when Spyd-ir and her babies were tunneling in a manner that would destabilize the precarious balance that kept everything from collapsing in on them all at once.

It was all so horribly horribly incorrect.

Nothing like this should ever happen.

But despite the assurance of the wrongness was there, and the sense of how things were supposed to fit together spoke of the correct shape a question niggled at the back of head and made eyes twitch over everything.

WHY was this happening?

Spoiler: Author's Notes

Don't expect me to keep up this pace, I just still had an itch to write more of this. You get three guesses just what kind of cluster truck this story is starting with and hte first two don't count.

 

[meloa789]

Will we see our favorite space-time punching Ork here?

 

[Rathmun]

Ok, so it's just really really really jacked up Necrons. What the hell hit them to cause that sort of damage without actually destroying them?

 

[Wetapunga]

Ok, so it's just really really really jacked up Necrons. What the hell hit them to cause that sort of damage without actually destroying them?

Click to shrink...

Some sort of entropic warp fuckery

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.3

The mangled and crumpled Incorrectness continued, layer after layer of machinery and material crushed and spindled. One time they passed the smashed and compressed remains of another Spyd-ir. It had been buried in black glassy rock, flooded by it and trapped until power systems had failed and it died?

Or maybe the power core had been cracked and the thing died entombed in glassy rock?

It was hard to tell but perhaps the cutting limbs had TRIED to dig their way out

But later the rock and stone had folded and twisted bending the corpse over itself and smearing the evidence. Spyd-ir and eyes and hands only discovered this corpse now that they were tunneling through half of it with Spyd-ir’s babies.

That was unfortunate but beyond evidence there was nothing to preserve in this.

And there was enough evidence here to act as links in the chain of events that would explain the catastrophic incorrectness. Eyes were very insistent on this. Fingers flexed and moved to try and grasp at hips for shapes that were not there. Memory unhelpfully stuttered to life and provided that the shapes fingers wanted to grasp were back in the room that had been left behind and now was probably being smashed flat and buried.

Yes feet confirmed vibrations from further collapses behind them. That space was not going to be returned too soon.

Considering all the ruin and wreckage left around here there was much that probably SHOULD be grabbed now but the urgency to leave was too great.

It was too unstable, too many steps being followed by the crumbling ruins towards a final and total collapse to delay.

The pressure of air on metal skin kept changing and shifting, rising. The sound of grinding roaring everywhere.

Echoes telling head and chest more than Eyes could see.

The Tomb was compromised.

Tomb?

Death.

Die.

Defiance!

Hands and feet and head shoved self along and squirmed through the passages. Heaving support structures and collapsing rock. It was an endless dance. Voice commanding to Spyd-ir and her daughters to dig in just such a pattern. Spiraling and twisting and organic. Shoring up segments of the wall with temporary lattices.

Head and memory working in concert, although memory was less useful then the immediate solutions of head.

This was not a stable or controlled place where foundation and order could be imposed. This was a slowly whirling maelstrom of collapse that hands and eyes and Spyd-ir and her children were dancing and swimming through. Constructing tunnels just for the sake of delaying or diverting the shifting stone ahead to not crush them.

There were hints of memory holding concern over the sacrifices being made to do this.

But the order was clear.

One Must Survive and Then Preserve then Rise.

At the moment no preservation could happen with survival.

And coincidentally rising up (although the order seemed a bit less literal then this voice muttered) was the way to survival and preservation.

Although Spyd-ir had to be directed by Voice to go around certain sections. It was not just crumbling rock and gravity working against them.

There was terrible pressures and raging heat beyond some walls. Placing brow against a wall and food and hand as well confirmed it. There were great terrible rents of molten rock under extremely high pressure riddled through many former halls. Great reception chambers and workshops and armouries had been filled to bursting with molten magma. Converted by the forces at work to become terrible corruptions of their designed elegance.

The wrong weakening of supports?

An incorrect tunnel?

A simple crack in the over pressurised stone?

It would explode through their winding worming tunnel almost instantly and shred or immobilize Spyd-ir and every single limb.

In fact voice and memory flickered with a realization, recent knowledge. The coherent unity of them sending spiking pain and then suddenly voice and memory became Tale.

Their Tale was a winding corkscrewing passage leading from deep below.

Open but for collapsed rubble.

All it would take is a puncture well beyond the reach of Spyd-ir and her childrens.

“Spyd-ir! Shore up our rear passages, fill in and seal!”

Tale was far more sure of herself then voice or memory had been alone. Head praised them for doing what it had overlooked.

Segments and fragments of moments seemed aligned now.

Mostly in the form of the last immediate moments and the journey upwards. But shards and slivers of before that dragged painfully.

The order had come and they had obeyed, moved onto the slab and then stilled into nothing.

That would be their service.

A shifting in the stone beyond the reinforced walls drew eyes and feet and hands.

There would be time for Tale to marvel at herself later.

Head and Eyes admonished any further delay for they were still buried in the wreckage of the Tomb.

“The tectonics were Stable... Should have remained so... The foundations and walls secure and strong... what happened? What happened? This is not right”

Tale was yammering now, voice rolling through the close in space. But none of the noises were interfering with directing Spyd-ir.

“Why did i- Direct Tunneling effort at 2 degree inclination from horizon upwards.- did it fail? What-wh-what”

The rattling of shifting metal and stone rattled Tale. Interrupting her voice but it was inconsequential, feet and legs and hips twisted together, Hand and arm and chest reached and grasped there was a searing pain and then they were Dance.

Agility was suddenly improved immensely, where before movements were disjointed and difficult to coordinate as hands and fingers struggled to anticipate shoulders and elbows. Now it was unified. Dance was graceful, striding over shifting terrain like it was flat stable ground.

Ascending stairs that Tale had found the means to inform Spyd-ir to construct via the will of her daughters.

It could suddenly almost be forgiven for eyes to compare the stride up the rising spiral staircase and reinforced halls to a leisurely pace. Tale muttered and spat something about acting like a lord while the whole tomb was collapsing down on their heads.

But it was efficient. With the direction of the steps, the economy of motion while perhaps beautiful was also very very functional. The slight swaying of hips and shoulders that Dance employed were excellent for riding the motion of a collapsing tomb while they and Spyd-ir Tunneled/built their way up and out of it.

They were now long past the signs of incorrect ruin that galled eyes so badly and made Dance want to draw her fingers back with a sharp hiss of disdain.

So much work ruined for what?

Tale would probably yammer up a storm to try and explain it.

The steps continued. Dodging in ever rising loops and whorls the veins of molten earth like a drunken surgeon avoiding the fat arteries of a patient.

Or a technician avoiding cutting the lines full of discorporating antimatter while performing repairs.

Dance and Tale wove each other around while Head and Eyes sought out danger.

Spoiler: Author's Notes

Why was everyone assuming the tomb world was awake when bad things happened?

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.4

The difficulty of the task began to fall away. The small scurrying motions of Spyd-ir’s brood continued to seal up the passage behind them with the compacted and reconfigured tailings of the stone before them.

But what had originally been required to be a constantly dodging and wildly sweeping path had become sedate and direct.

Really it was simple and direct enough that after a few careful instructions from Tale no further use was needed for words. Spyd-ir had taken to steadily rising up the steps and Dance continued to stride with more linear and smooth motions then before.

The sound of the tumult below slowly faded, first to subsonic rumbles. First only felt in the feet as they met the reconfigured matter of the steps.

Then not at all. Even though the crystalline structure had been dictated to maximize acoustic transfer from the surrounding rocks.

The incorrect nature of the world was finally possible to be more properly apprehended. Dance continued to step up the seemingly endless stairwell for there was no cost to continuing.

“Th-the chambers were not near any mantle upwellings or tectonic rifts... It was placed as decreed in the most defensible and enduring position feasible on the planet. In the middle of the thickest continental crust, embedded in the heart of the mountains”

The words rolled free informing dance, eyes and head of what Tale could recall. Helping to bring all of them together.

More sentimental inclinations from Eyes suggested that Spyd-ir was also listening with interest. Perhaps it was even so. Everything else was Incorrect.

Tale and head rallied forth to try and bring a measure of the time they had taken to rise so far, the position of what should have been their resting place relative to the surface. These details were much clearer now.

They when whole had KNOWN where every passage of the facility was. Could have counted the initial allotment of Spyd-ir caretakers and their initial protocols and roles. So tale was able to reassemble some matters. The rest Head helpfully reconstructed where the memories appeared to be in too much disarray.

The steps of what had occurred were becoming clearer. But it was still horrible.

A journey at the this pace and in this direction should have emerged onto the surface of the mountain already.

But all acoustic senses felt in the surrounding rock might as well have gone on forever. Sure there was variation. As Dance had ascended the rock grew warmer and more prone to being riddled with molten arteries and vast chambers below them. But this was completely wrong for where they should have been.

They had not been buried so deep.

But now apparently they were.

Yet that was still insufficient. There had been a countermeasure for that, something had been needed to fail what it was felt too lost and frayed for head to be comfortable to fill in the gap. So tale faltered.

“There were orders... Orders that should have covered this, evaluated... Spyd-irs to see and respond. This should not have gotten... This bad”

Silence fell as Tale seemed to run out of cognisant memories. Dance filled the time by busying itself with trying to feel signs of this ascent reaching an end.

But apparently there would be nothing but steps, the whir and flash of little scarab shelled spyd-irlings chewing and reforming the rock around them and bare metal feet on steps. The silently ascending bulk of Spyd-ir herself. Dance’s monotonous upwards gait and of course more steps.

Steps.

Steps.

Steps.

Head and eyes missed the molten rock threatening to entomb or destroy them all.

Dance was mostly busy but coming to a similar mind on it.

Tale had started repeating herself, going over the vague recollections up until now there had been no time for again and again.

“We served... To the lord we... Tended... We served... The War... Such War... We slept... We awoke... We served... The lord we Tended... We served in flesh and grew frail... We Served in metal... We chose this? We chose Every part?”

New memory had been dragged into being.

This form had been chosen!

Eyes marveled as Tale drew attention to the fingers.

Every motion of dance was perfect, and known and expected with a intimacy of a master who had honed every feature of a favorite instrument. Crafted with such familiarity and design the Head congratulated Tale for the memories of fine crafting. Every single edge and form and sweeping detail of this metal skin and the form within was enacted with clear intent. It was art and elegance designed.

Free from all frailty. A beauty and expression of self so much more perfect then any athlete or poet could speak.

A perfection of form to the function of being this one, whole. Purer than soul which was cast off for its weak useless frailty along with all the decaying putrid disgusting rot riddled and disease besieged MEAT!

The steps had stopped.

Spyd-ir was floating silently behind waiting.

The scarabs had stalled.

There had been a thunderous crack.

Hands had clenched and Dance had swung her fist into the wall so hard that it broke under her fingers and the rock all around rang with the impact.

She did not need to breath as the hated flesh had, but there was a phantom of tension that required that Dance shift and roll joints that would no longer cramp and a spine that was always firm yet supple in motion.

Articulate and artful in limb and poise.

Yes that made sense, that is why the Face and Eyes mirrored Spyd-ir so much more then the weak and disgusting form of flesh.

There was no need for such reminders. No more reminders of the terrible meat.

A brief contemplation of the fingers and hands to seek imperfections or incorrect alignments in the fingers. Organic flaws from an age of disease.

But every joint was pure and smooth and unmarred.

Nothing like.

There was no shudder because that was the frailty of disease and she was more now.

More then Before.

An echo rippled back into the feet and hand that was placed on the wall.

Head and Dance came to the realization as one, it hurt, the spike of pain that had come from becoming whole. Context shearing and crumpling together, forging itself anew into a whole. But at once it was good. The echo had come back, there was an end to their ascent.

The impact of the fist had rung the stone and forced it to reveal the way.

It would take some time though.

The surface was very distant. Further above now then the mountain peaks that the tomb had been dug under once stood.

That would take time to climb.

But she would slay time gladly with every step.

Eyes would have to wait a bit longer to be useful. To peer on something unexpected and unplanned again.

But Self was almost whole again. She could think, could remember, could move as one being. Soon she would see what was wrought of this world that had been decreed her resting place and then she would know what befell her. She would have sight and vision again. Not this disjointed and disconnected existence of senses.

Spyd-ir, Her companion and savior seemed all the more personable now that she herself was almost whole. The sentiment of before taking in a root within herself with memory and a truth of self beyond any of the terrible trappings of the hated enemies.

She was akin to Spyd-ir. A purity of form wrought by will. But in this case she was wrought by her own will. A will alongside the expertise that had wrought her companion certainly. And that made the initial infantile impulse to adopt the canoptek Instrument as a sister in form mirroring to herself seemed all the more appealing her now.

It was honestly better than whatever bonds of disgusting meat that her life before this purity had once demanded.

She almost lamented that she would probably restore more of those terrible times when they should honestly remain dust.

But she was still not quite whole.

Sight and Eyes needed to join her fully.

But for that she would need something to gaze upon.

So she turned her gaze to the nearest point of the surface and Spyd-ir and the Scarabs which she had quaintly deemed children in her infantile post awakening state turned to obey her will and enact it upon the intervening stone between her and the vista of the surface.

She would Survive this catastrophe.

She would Preserve the legacy and birth right of her family of the living metal.

She would Rise.

After walking out of the literal burning under skin of the planet!

Seriously what by the cursed fat flesh of the enemy had happened to her tomb?!

Spoiler: Author's Notes

So just how much damage do you think one sentient Necron and a Canoptek crypt Spyder can get up too?

Also overly dramatic soundtrack for this chapter here.

 

[mackon]

Depends where there is, a world that has had kilometers (or miles) of rock dumped on it?

 

[Mashadarof402]

Depends where there is, a world that has had kilometers (or miles) of rock dumped on it?

Click to shrink...

It's the world the Orks and Tyrannids were fighting on before said Tyrannids ass blasted themselves out of there to try and FTL Drive by Prosmmium. Followed by the Orks ravaging all worlds in the system to build their planet sized face puncher.

 

[ZxZx24]

It says quite a bit about the necrons that they still survived this.

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.5

Now was the moment.

After striding up ten-thousand seven-hundred and eight steps. Turning around and around until the fact she could finally stop and stand still without slightly curving around seemed subtly wrong.

She turned her face to survey the landscape. And saw nothing but devastation. What should have been the mountains or at least their eroded descendants was replaced with a fiery tumult. The sky was blackened with smoke but the hot reds and oranges of volcanoes underlit that with punctuated flares.

Rivers of molten rock spilled and flowed meanderingly around before joining together into black crusted lakes and seas.

The air was thick with sulphur. The heat was such that a thing of weak flesh would have expired almost immediately.

To her it was merely annoying how the waves of heat distorted her gaze. This was not sufficient.

She had not walked the distance of a small province or town up stairs to have her desire to determine the nature of what had occured stalled here.

She felt the desire to reach for something at her waist, but again there was nothing to grasp there. She was bereft of anything but her own hands and the crude simplicity of the scarabs.

She looked to the Spyd-ir and nodded. It was not a necessary gesture, the Spyd-ir obeyed her will and intent as it was meant too. It received and dissected the command and interpreted the best solution within its means.

She only had to glare at the obscuring clouds above.

And the scarabs poured out from around them.

Flowing out to chew through the landscape. Carving sweeping arches and regal platforms from the rock. Convoys of them moving like metal rivers to her Spyd-ir where it could fill with the gathered matter and energy. Then out churned more scarabs. The flow cycling in whirling loops. Carving structures and returning with loads to supply of the necessary matter for their brethren.

She stood still and patient watching eruptions burst to life and fade. The clouds and magma rivers flow and then still into black crusts and basalt. Covered over again by more rivers of red glowing rock.

All while the scarabs flowed out and multiplied, while struts of simple, but serviceable machines were spun into place, and then machinery poured into shape at her specification and design.

Her eyes moved with her thought and slowly the aching pain of colescance began to take hold. Her sight became vision, her eyes became her own.

She felt the details of the work and command and the vista all around her assemble into something like sense.

And as her senses slowly cohered she considered the task that she had been bending her resources to.

It was, absurd.

Why had she picked this of all the possible solutions?

Whatever!

It would function for the intended task for now.

The machine that had absorbed enough labor to let her watch a molten river cool and another flow over it while she stared like an idiot shuddered and then began to roar to life.

The wind stagnant and thick began to move, slowly at first and then with more and more force. Billowing and buffeting the Scarabs while she and the Spyd-ir remained firm. Staring up at the sky.

As the clouds begin to tilt around them. As the gray black roil of smog and ash above divoted upward, then began to shear and tear. Torn apart by the sheer force of her wind engine.

She had just wanted a better look of what was going on, why had she built this absurdity?

There was something wrong with her.

Too many pieces missing in her head still. The obvious solutions were all like cudgels and hammers when she recalled being a surgeon!

She flexed her fingers and because there was no one to judge her for it. Because she had the mounting pain and anger of literally having nothing going correctly since the moment she woke up. Since she had just endured monotonous toil only to be rewarded with this absurdity she screamed at the greatest volume her honed instrument of a body could manage.

She sang in harmony with the whorling typhoon of her creation first in anger and pain. Then in exaltation and delight as she felt the winds blowing hard enough even her metal limbs felt the pull and push.

She felt ash beating against her back and face. She saw scarabs being torn up into the upper stratosphere by the wind walls around her machine. The Spyd-ir finally had to move in close to her where the machine’s cycling of the winds created relative stillness.

Her voice was ultimately drowned out but she sang with the storm anyway staring up at the hateful clouds and sky above her.

The storm was riding up and down her body with its howls and was it not as much her voice as the one she had made in this elegant sculpture?

Never mind. This was a glorious and excellent solution to have made, it was a perfect way to vent not just the pain and frustration of her recent misfortunates but the growing sense she felt in her shreds of memory of unappreciated skill.

Of lords looking down on her because she was merely an artisan instead of truly noble. Of even after the apotheosis of the glorious metal how her peers who should have appreciated the skill and wonders she worked to perfect looked down on her for focusing on what they called ‘banal matters’.

How the earlier accolades that had driven her to a position of renown in the time before the metal now became a yoke of shame. To have ‘wasted’ so much of her former life and current memory on the workings of flesh.

The extinct frailty of the necrontyr.

The inconsequential form of atmosphere and ecosystem. The wasted and maligned ancient means of crude matter.

All her accolades were a prison sentence, all her accomplishments a cage.

Culminating in exile to the very fringes of the domain. Tasked to her ‘expertise’ as a glorified janitor for the Canoptek network and systems.

Her eyes shined bright and fierce now up into the sky she was skewering like the guts of a hated meat thing.

She screamed into the air but the storm prevented her from even feeling a hint of her vocalization.

Still she knew the words.

“Who's useless NOW?! I command the very winds of this world!”

She suspected this would not really impress her critics of the past. They would have scoffed at how barbaric she was. How she had not simply utilized some mastery of matter to dissipate the offending clouds into nothing.

But they were not here, and if the waste of this world was any indication none of her lords or overseers were here either.

It was just her and what her will could wrought.

The sky broke open, black and gray clouds tumbling out from the updraft in curdling whorls her will had commanded into being by crude turbine and furnace.

A Black sky with fierce stars shined down, dominated by something that should not be there. A planet of whirling orange and white clouds.

She felt flashes of memory and agitation.

She knew it by the color and hue. It should have been distant enough to be lost amidst the stars without study.

But there it was eating up half the arc of the sky.

The last step of the catastrophe fell into place. And the absurdity of it made her scream into the howling wind to be heard by none.

“WHO MOVED MY STUPID PLANET?!”

That just was the score wasin't it? Spend almosther entire life in flesh fighting back the hated frailty for the grace of her betters, demeaned and demoted on the eve of their final victory over it! Change her focus to the vital instruments of continued functional civilization in their new era of life? Sent to the absolute most pitiful outpost available in her Phaeron's holdings to hide her away in obscurity for daring to not throw everything into building him new flashy ways to rip matter apart.

Dutifully obey and set everything in order in her new position at the command of her king before settling in for the great rest?

Wake up with her tomb subducting into the stupid rock's mantle because something in the universe thought it would be funny to fling a none-descript world into close orbit with a gas giant!

In disgust she willed the turbines to stall their function and listened to the engines shred and begin to rip each other apart as braking mechanisms engaged when no sane operator should ever have engaged them.

She turned from the stupid gas giant and the hole she had tore in the sky and started trudging away. The Spyd-ir following after her.

She was going to need to find a ship.

If any of them had survived the tectonic maelstrom that the tides of a gas giant had wrought on the tomb world.

She sighed as she stopped for a moment to look at a landscape rendered completely unfamiliar.

Of course it would be her place of exile that got kneaded and mashed like a ball of dough while she slept.

The roiled up atmosphere began to collapse back around the tortured landscape without the pull of her engines.

As the winds died down she felt a bit of amusement watching the tiny glittering motes of scarabs falling like meteors through the clouds in the distance all around. Most of them would be fine, those that survived could start gathering more material to facilitate her next project.

If anyone ever asked her later, if there was anyone still alive to talk too.

She would say she planned this outcome.

She turned to peer at Spyd-ir.

"What?"

For some reason Spyd-ir was giving here look...

"No one is going to know"

The automaton guided solely by her will continued to judge her with its unamused gaze.

She strode with purpose and elegance down the hill. There was little point in picking one direction over another. Every way was equally likely to have a ruin.

After staring at her departing back the Spyd-ir engaged its anti-gravity to silently drift after her.

Spoiler: Author's Notes

Canonically a lot of Necron tomb worlds have failed from various natural disasters. So it's not really unheard of for one to be in a pretty bad spot like this.

 

[mackon]

I shall name you Agatha!

 

[ZxZx24]

I would also like to know who moved her fucking planet.

Also kind of odd for a Necron to have a fucking planet, but nobles are famous for their odd tastes.

 

[Kpatrol88]

I like her, she has spunk.

Makes sense that as a former artisan, she'd been exiled to the fringes of necron space, seeing as how the entire race has a metal rod stuck up their backside about what's 'logical' and 'efficient'.

 

[Mini_coopa2]

Need to threadmark 0.5 Nighz.

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.6

Footprints in ash and great rectilinear fields of dig sites and lava dams behind. Swirling whorls of busy scarabs and green light ahead.

Her anti-magma-floodwork was a piecemeal and temporary solution. But she only had the crude thinking capacity of the scarabs and Spyd-ir's clever but ultimately limited processing cores to work with.

Thus most of the work had to fall onto her own eyes to evaluate. Peering down into the deep trenches of sectioned off quarries and trench excavations.

Looking for signs of one of the many hundreds of thousands of vessels that should have been left somewhere in the folded and tortured landscape.

The going was slow and steady. Much of the work of the Scarabs had to be overly permissive in excluding materials from excavation. She had no idea what state a ship or the requisite parts would be in.

So each of the dig pits was latticed with supporting struts holding the results of a wide margin of error of the scarabs.

Veins of metals suspended free of their surrounding rock matrix. Probably precious to some but more or less useless to her.

The smeared out sculptures of what might have once been the skeletons or bodies of living creatures.

Other forms that she was certain was the suspended long dead corpses of ocean beds layered one after another like thin sheets of parchment. Slender threads holding each exactly where it was found in the strata.

There was terribly little sign of proper civilization or workings of her people though. The cuttings of a road or landing strip notable just for how it had interrupted the deposits of a river? Filled in sedimentary cubes casting a quarry much like the ones she was now digging anew?

Most of the material being dug up was burned for fuel, smelted into more scarabs to extend and maintain her excavation force or forged into supporting structure and cladding.

Where the tailings were not needed to feed into the manufacture of more scarabs, structural support or making walls for blocking off errant volcanism she directed it to make pillars engraved with her musings and notes.

Glittering black records of her journey so far twelve times taller than her frame.

It was a way to gather her thoughts as she walked in the soft ash that she had deigned to leave (or even pave into place where it had been lacking) of her geometrically straight course.

“We ruled the galaxy, our reach spanned every star. We harnessed the power of GODS!”

Spyd-ir humored her desire for an audience with a subtle nodding. Filling the space and attention.

She let her posture fall out of the pompous bearing of what she remembered of the lords and her more esteemed peers.

“and now look at our works... Turned over by the simple passing of dumb rock? How far we climbed and yet we are no better than the slime and sludge that lived in this sea corpse, strange strata in stone”

She did not sag, for there was no weariness in her back. She was pristine and hearty as the first moment of her rebirth.

At least as far as she could remember she was.

That was troubling, her memory was no longer coming to fill the voids she could practically feel aching in her encoded chassis.

Running through every layer of the living metal of her body was encoded and re-encoded in redundancy the very stuff of her will and mind. Eternally restoring and preserving her.

And yet she was riddled with holes.

They had been promised eternity and yet time still laughed at their struggle and killed them by a thousand little deaths.

She shook her head hard.

Looked up to the spire of black stone and the words she had just spoken to Spyd-ir engraved there, as if they could stand for an eternity.

She suspected they would hardly last a single year in this torrent of magma and tectonics.

Not unless she strode this way again and repaired them.

Not unless she bled off the heat of the irregular orbit around the gas giant.

Countered the friction and shifted the breaking to better wrench the word into proper balance.

She could do that perhaps?

But it would be the work of millenia to do without proper tools.

Tools that it would take her equally long to reconstruct from first principles even with the head start of knowing that those principles existed.

She knew she could do it, she had the time.

But the legacy of the Necrontyr’s sciences would not be easily regained working alone. Not when they had been won by the hands and minds of a trillion geniuses at least on par with herself.

No it would be better to first scour the surface of the planet once for any surviving artefacts and continue trying to mend and restore her own memory with contemplation first.

She turned back to the road ahead of her, the regular and orderly landscape slowly melting into being before her eyes.

Carving the madness and chaos of the torn landscape away.

She would give it at least a full circle of the world before she tried to start working on building an inertialess drive from what remnants of her education she could dredge together.

Footprints in soft ash trailed behind her. Into the distance the path resembled a knife’s edge of stone and black metal. Punctuated with regular flat topped plaques written in the language of a people who had not strode this world in any living memory. Expanding out from it were grids, and sheer pits full of strange shapes and bizzare stone formations held seemingly floating by the threads of slender metal support structures.

The regularity broken but not tarnished by the rectilinear canals of flowing orange magma pouring into deep square wells.

She would search this world for a ship or at least a salvageable drive system. And in the event no such relic could be found when she was done it would at least be more pleasant to look at.

That would be a small sortie against the hated enemy.

A blow against the terrible foe’s endless attempts to destroy her.

No matter how futile the effort might be.

She would leave at least this mark of her passing in defiance.

Spoiler: Author's Notes

Working through the story. A little bit of time working through her journey. Hope this is entertaining you lot reading as much as I am writing.

 

[Wetapunga]

This necron lady really needs a hug

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.7

She had circled the planet.

Carving a canyon of a ready-made-abandoned necropolis into the landscape to her left and right for as far as her eye could see while she walked.

She had observed the change in light of the ash choked sky long enough to know the orbital off-sync of the planetary rotation via the eclipse duration and then extrapolated the orbital period of the planet itself with corrections.

Three-hundred and ninety-two orbits of her once planet now moon around its primary.

She completely circumnavigated the planet, and atleast in one regard it met her satisfaction.

It was no small feat her route matched up perfectly with her starting point.

A clean path encircling the world.

She had diverted mountains and volcanoes, She had commanded the resurfacing of active volcanoes into tamed magma ducts on elegant little raised channels.

Yet she had only scrounged in all that time and dug up rock a few measly scraps of proper technology and civilization.

Amongst them were fragments of what possibly had been gauss cannon. It was difficult to say as the most intact specimen appeared to only be half of one and had been flattened, baked in molten rock and then folded and smeared into new rock matrix.

Still its necrodermis had potentially salvageable engrams for initiating reconstruction. Combined with the other less complete fragments it might just be usable for getting complete weapons patterns (time decayed logic allowing).

Not really valuable for construction of a starship, but it might give her a more entertaining way to break rock then think ill of its continued existence and watch it melt into more pleasing architectural expression. Also perhaps after she got a ship and got it off of this awful rock she would need to dispatch destruction at a distance.

Next most useful were a few sections of surviving infrastructure. In the chunk of wall was a true treasure! A Practically intact power core! It was not strictly speaking MEANT to power a ship but it also was not strictly impossible to use it as such. And it SHOULD have the necessary pattern engrams in its necrodermis to restore it and more importantly use it to construct duplicates or even make modifications and alterations.
However the containment casing was pulverized long ago and if the engram for restoring that had not survived in its redundancies she would have to find a retrofit.

And last of all she had found a scrap of one of the fool lord Sehkmahs over wrought metallic robes. Not strictly speaking important to the efforts of raising a ship capable of getting her off this awful mangled rock but wonderful evidence that the pompous lout which had seen it fit to assign her to the job of maintenance canoptek oversight and buried her in the recesses of the Tomb World almost certainly had not survived the tests of time.

She would use what surviving engrams remained in it to make herself a set of foot wraps so that this last trace of Sehkmah could be ground under her feet for the rest of eternity for forcing her down there.

Spyd-ir gave her a sceptical look. Which she was certainly not ignoring in favor of producing new foot wear she did not strictly need.

She was just reveling in her conquest by summoning the engram of the cloak scrap to renew itself with stores from her own emerald power reserves. But halting and seizing the program shortly after it began. Wrestling with its command structure with as if the engram’s programming was the enactor of all her woes.

Halting and overriding the command to become that fool’s raiment and instead turning it to meld and flow into a pair of segmented bands that after a last shuddering moment of resistance obediently wrapped her skeletal feet from balls up around the arch of each foot then looping and weaving over her ankles and ending halfway up her shins.

Spyd-ir was still staring at her judgmentally.

The treacherous yet completely mindlessly obedient canoptek hardware could be very sassy and skeptical.

“Okay, yes if he had not sent me down there I probably would not have been in precisely the only place that apparently survived this debacle”

Yes for dredging a whole world it might not be much, oh yes she found many interesting relics of the life that had once lived here before her arrival, and the many forms that had emerged after.

But her attempts to find an intact ship with which to depart quickly had been for not.

Still it was what she had to work with so far.

She willed a raised slab to be forged for her so she could lay out her findings upon them in an orderly manner.

In a flurry of green and silver it was done.

The wreckage laid out to even the tiniest grain of scorched necrodermis.

Lifted like flecks of gold (although billions of times more rare) from the sand and stone of the world’s tortured surface.

She contemplated it while listening to the sound of the world and her servants.

The scarabs hummed and pulsed with the clattering of metal carapace and limb. A silvery sea ebbing and flowing to her every whim.

It was a vast reserve of labor and when the time came raw material.

But for now? The noise was distracting her.

If only to give them something to do she directed Spyd-ir to command them to begin burrowing tunnels back down into the wreckage she had crawled out of.

Throwing in a few measures to redirect and release the undoubtedly over-pressurised magma in a canal spout.

There, off they flowed to leave her to the ‘silence’ of a semi constantly erupting ruined world of fire and ash.

She stared intently at the grains of individual necrodermis, and slowly tried to bring up whatever scraps of engrams could be found in their elements.

To tease out just what they had each been a component of. To unspool what memories of purpose they contained.

It would be a race she decided. If she could not come up with a workable method of turning the materials on hand into an escape vessel before they raised the wreckage of her chambers to the surface she would have a look over it.

Honestly probably even if she did succeed she should check it for salvage.

Now how could she use what engrams were available to build a ship?

She turned her gaze up to the roiling ash clouds while her finger briefly tapped each shard of her people’s legacy.

Fiery green eyes slowly seeing the patterns no other could.

Spoiler: Author's Notes

I actually did the math for this, for a world roughly the size of earth it would take only a little less then a year for a human being to walk completely around it. Assuming they never stopped. Which is a trifle for the immortal and superior metal flesh of the Necron!

Also for comparison I'm fudging the orbit to be roughly equivalent to Jupiter's Io in period which is also a little bit more then a day conveniently. So assuming occasional stalling where she contemplated her existence and the nature of all mortality, Stopped to actually stare at promising dig sites and just all around took her time making that straight course she could totally pull this off in the allotted time.

Math and the internet is great fun boys and girls!

 

[MickeySoFine]

I'm enjoying this, Who was the voice at the start?

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.8

Fortunately it turned out not all of the power depleted grains of necrodermis were from gauss cannons. In fact only twenty of the less intact ones were.

Unfortunately many were more disturbing.

They were the necrodermis of people.

There was not enough to even begin to reconstitute a whole person of course, Although the information density was ingenious enough to make the paltry capabilities of mere carbon and protein seem incredibly inefficient. And of course it was more durable and self restoring then mere meat could hope to achieve.

But there were limits.

Hard learned limits.

During the cursed wars of her people before the gift of metal many billions had died for the vanity and pride of the nobility and the uncaring malice of time. During the terrible wars against the hated enemy many billions more fell.

Lives thrown onto the pyre already mountainous high with the horrors of disease and rot that infested them at their core.

Even after the gift of metal when they all exulted in the thought that victory against time and death had been achieved.

When their new flesh could knit itself from the most egregious of damage, when they could retrieve the atomized remains of a soldier on the battlefield and restore it with the miracles of maintenance and repair instruments even more robust than those built into the wonder of necrodermis.

Even after they had seemingly attained every promise of physical immortality.

The little deaths came for them.

Engrams could only carry what information they maintained. Even if a planet worth of texts could fit into a million atoms there was more to the self then just the narrative of memory.

Nuances to will and emotion. Approximations had to be made to fill in for the shedding of the astral dross.

And such approximations proved too simple if over generalized.

As soldiers fell more and more in they came back less and less whole and more hollow. Commoners were the least durable, their necrodermis so sparsely engineered and mass produced the room for storing individuality was often overridden in favor of preserving the skills of battle.

They also were those that fell the most in the war. That were rushed in restoration with greatest haste so they could return to the field of battle.

The little deaths mounted terribly on the common soldiers until most were sparse shades of themselves.

Some of the soldiers from the front lines lost the will to speak, the impetus to act on anything but orders. Where there had been minds time and reconstruction accumulated. Mechanisms meant for robust repair and restoration under even the most extreme and egregious of damage began to work against them.

Others became honed instruments of pure hate and destruction.

Either case they were simplified by the little death.

And that made some sense.

After all was not the mind a deviation from the template of their engrams? As the body suffered catastrophic damage and corruption accumulated the repairs ensured more would be shed.

It had been starting to be seen in the armies even in the early times of the war, but the nobles did not care, her peers did not care. The less mindful their soldiers the more useful they became as tools for the enacting of a lord’s whim.

Only she and those like her deemed useful and vital to the functioning of the new courts had been allowed the necessary investment of personalized engrams.

It was a labor which most of her peers and essentially every last one of the lords had fostered off on other technicians or even given over to automated mind engines directed all the same.

But she...

She had sculpted and honed her Engram just as she shaped her chassis, she had turned from her study of the frail and tormented flesh of old to the shining perfection of the new flesh. The skin that would clad the truth of their race. Their bodies and wills realized in crystalline perfection.

Flesh deserving to house minds and thought and will.

Flesh of Necrontyr.

Necrodermis.

It had been esoteric and a waste of time they said. But look here and now!

She was alive and whole (more or less) while every other was gone or scattered dust on her work table.

They who had either been crammed into uniform engrams or been encoded with wild algorithms trained haphazardly to duplicate and preserve their ‘will’ without any appreciation for the subtlety that meant.

These shreds of people would not be restored by her. There was not enough left here to bring back anything but an utterly mindless automaton chained to the will of whoever was inserted into their built in hierarchy slots.

If she wanted those she could just order a scarab made with a face.

Redundant.

Perhaps maybe she could construct a new mind? But she was no thought engine specialist to construct a precision machine. Nor did she possess engrams for the necessary formative stages required for an organic mind.

She also had no memory of any such engrams being created. Although the little deaths may have simply claimed such. Probably it was deemed unnecessary to develop the means to create immortal necrontyr children who would have to be taught the basics of fighting and obedience to the supreme lords.

Short-sighted fools.

As such while disturbing the remains of her people were the same as the ash and dust around her.

Useless.

Spyd-ir nodded in agreement with her.

The other grains of necrodermis were more interesting. flakes of wraiths, A particularly large fragment of a monolith the size of her smallest finger joint. That contained almost a quarter of the transmitter system engram!

It would not be enough to actually build the subsystem but it gave her a place to start that would save her millenia of trial and error getting a read on the necessary fundamental constants for a prototype.

A project to occupy her efforts after more practical efforts for sure.

There was also a few engrams for power transmission relays, capacitors and hints of the requisite stabilizer engrams for armour specialized necrodermis from fortified facilities.

And numerous duplicates of engrams she already have more completely in the form of Spyd-ir, the Scarabs or her own chassis

All in all it was a pleasant surprise to have so many components salvaged when she had expected to just have a pile of gauss cannon elements.

Truly pessimism was kin to the great sin of despair.

A surrender to the great enemy.

She would never surrender.

With the relics accounted for she looked up to the green glowing bore holes that her scarabs were churning within to excavate her tomb.

She still had time to formulate a design.

The most useful element for her escape vessel designs was the intact engrams for gravity manipulation.

Spyd-ir and the scarabs had a working version of that. But the optimization formula in them was all wrong. She would have to extract the principle general formula from the derived form in their systems to build anything useful for general lift.

She tried to dredge her memory for the relevant mathematics but came up empty, either she had never learned it which would be incredible. Or it had fallen into one of the gaping chasms torn through her by the little deaths.

No matter, she understood the foundation principles of numeracy and she had one of the derived expressions of the formula in engram and physical manifestation.

She would work on dissecting those to try and assemble a new solution which would properly move a vessel into orbit and beyond.

After she had the new engram for a lifting drive implemented she could use the scraps she had obtained in her circumnavigation to fill out the rest of the infrastructure for a vessel.

And then it would be the relatively simple work of building the ship to ferry her (and spyd-ir) off of this wreck of a world.

Now she just had to work out the arcane algebra of it all.

Spoiler: Author's Notes

In this story I will strive to try and show how much 'brain work' goes into things. I've seen it's really common for people to write stories as if everything worked on magical video game tech trees that just require throwing points at a problem to get a new solution. I'm not much of a fan of that method in fiction.
The crunchy numbers of all these games we like to play are approximations of a world or setting or concept with hopefully an attempt to balance for gameplay/experience.

Most of the times any game you play with those kinds of numbers and systems is a refined delicacy of incentives that has had thousands of man hours go into grinding that formula to be the most enjoyable/rewarding/engaging/addictive possible in budget and technical constraints. It's not a model for reality anymore then ice-cream is a recipe for wilderness survival.

 

[Wetapunga]

I'm enjoying this, Who was the voice at the start?

Click to shrink...

I'm guessing the glorious goddess of fluff and hugs from the first story

 

[Nighzmarquls]

Terror & Peace Among the Stars

0.9

In theory between the instruments of Spyd-ir and the capacity of the Scarabs any form and arrangement of matter should be possible to implement. And as long as her formula craft was correct necrodermis could support an engram of any technological marvel of her civilization.

In practice it was not so simple.

The first attempt to build a new engram into the necrodermis suffered a corrective transcription error and produced something closer to a metal fluff ball then the lifting drive it was supposed to.

The second attempt looked correct to her design at the macroscopic scale of her vision but was completely inert. Slow dissection and combing through the engrams had shown it failed because there had been insufficient counter forces in play when the delicate fine structure of the gravity manipulation systems were self organizing.

That was her mistake. Foolishly she had not included the local gravity and atmospheric conditions in her engram design and there had thus been no compensation enacted by it to deal with outside forces working on the generation and self organization.

The third attempt turned itself inside out and exploded. She had to rebuild her work station, the surrounding road and climb out of a quarry after that.

Apparently what she had THOUGHT was inefficiency to the system that kept Spyd-ir a consistent elevation and thus un-needed for her simpler drive design was ACTUALLY a safety compensation for noise cancelation and gravitational resonance balancing.

By the fourth attempt the scarabs had encountered issues and required her direct assistance. It turned out that to actually vent the tomb complex (which had been tumbling along the bottom of the crust for some time BEFORE she woke up and such slowly being eroded away on the bottom of the tectonic plates) she would need to implement pressure releases. By the time she had finished implementing the system for controlled eruptions to help vent the place and gotten back to her work something had changed in the atomic structure she was laying down with Spyd-ir’s fabrication tools and the resulting drive system exploded again.

By the fifth attempt she had a small fabrication complex built to stabilize the atmospheric interactions (remove them entirely), nullify the gravitational interactions (blessed simplicity) and block out all the electromagnetic radiation energetic enough to disturb her proto necrodermis molecules before their engrams were fully encoded.

With these factors controlled she finally felt she could start making progress.

The prototype (which she had carried away from her vacuum forge and work space this time before the test) had managed to make the gravitational interaction proportionately greater from the planet by many orders of magnitude, it naturally flattened and then exploded on activation.

The sixth attempt she tried to build on her previous success by adjusting the matrix of her formula so that the planetary gravity was magnified and repelled. This however caused the drive to flatten into a disk along its central axis and then explode out in component subatomic particles accelerated at near light speed, igniting the atmosphere and cutting down the tops of several of the local volcanoes.

Reconstruction efforts of the vacuum forge, the controlled eruption vents for the tomb excavation work and her work slab and surrounding architecture delayed attempt seven. But at least the skies were clear while she directed the new prototype over the horizon.

When there was no atmosphere blasting lightshow to be seen she sent the scarabs to try and retrieve the prototype.

However it was nowhere to be found.

Attempt number eight was a replication of seven at closer range so that the failure could be observed.

It turned out to have been successful? Sort of.

The drive apparatus shot out straight from the planet surface, exited the atmosphere, then repeated the failure state of attempt six. On deeper reflection she realized she had not properly anticipated the interaction of the gas giant’s gravity well with the planet’s.

Repeat small scale experiments of the parameters for earlier modifications to the formula showed that many of the earlier failures were due to her fundamental assumption that utilizing reflective transforms of gravitational effects would be the simpler route to a drive system. But this had been wrong and just opened her up for catastrophic failures via interactions.

If she had a singularity on hand maybe she could use directed nullification and amplification for lift. But she did not feel she had the necessary safety measures to work at those energies.

Not to mention she would have to compress most of the mass of the planet to get a manageable one.

As such nearly all of her current derived formulas were useless for building a lift system.

Attempt nine was a test of a new principle formula derived from her assumed prime fundamental model that she believed the Spyd-ir and scarab systems were derivations of.

The resulting thrust of the drive was utterly unmeasurable except when all external gravitational interactions were nullified and the drive was suspended in vacuum. On closer examination she concluded that instead of building a gravity drive she had just made a very inefficient light based propulsion system.

At attempt ten she tried to produce direct gravitational impulse vectors in isolation of all other forces through cancelation of the properties of the other fundamental forces in the interaction.

The drive lost atomic coherence and instantly performed a matter energy conversion event of its primary necrodermis components.

Rebuilding efforts were minimal thanks to the extreme distance she now practiced initial drive tests at.

At this point most of the sky was more spottily clouded with ash from local volcanic eruptions then overcast. The haze of particulates mostly blasted away from the surroundings. Although infall and drifting mist could be seen on the horizon.

Attempts eleven and twelve were educational reminders of the fundamentals of atomic physics and which components that governed the stability of matter needed to be preserved while others could be safely diverted or ignored.

Eleven had been much like ten, but minimally less energetic.

There had been even less energy released in twelve, but the necrodermis had also turned white hot before amalgamating into the surrounding stone and ash matrix and then dissolving further into what she surmised were additional neutrons in the pre-existing atoms. This was mostly a guess based on the resulting decay products which were unfortunately very messy so she only could match a few theories to exactly WHAT happened.

When attempt thirteen came around she almost didn't notice it seemed to be working.

Careful and gradually closer examinations were performed as the drive continued to not catastrophically fail.

It was crude, ugly even but she had given up on any kind of elegance or aesthetics in the flurry of activity of just trying to make a proof of concept of her raw physical principles.

By the time that it was close enough for her to touch it (after making sure nothing happened to all the scarabs sent to check the safety) she was starting to think this might be workable.

She could build a ship drive around this system for lifting capacity.

She built a second one to test how the two fields interacted.

And they both immediately sputtered out and fell inert.

She turned to Spyd-ir who was convulsing in a manner so that that sections of its carapace and limbs scraped in a rhythmic fashion.

She looked at the towers she had built to vent the tomb complex enough that reclamation tunnels could be slowly inserted into the magma flooded chambers down in the depths below the tectonic plate where anything besides necrodermis derived matter went hot and syrupy.

A geyser of hot rock streaking in an arc over the horizon.

She looked out over the wreckage made of the landscape, the gray sky perforated clear with overlapping circles and rings of shockwaves twisted and whorling.

She could see the stars and that great big gas giant filling most of the expanse from one horizon to another.

Like a ceiling waiting to crash down on her.

“Well then... let us try something else”

Spyd-ir gave itself a fortifying shake and nodded sharply at her command.

Attempt number fourteen she would see if she could solve the field interaction problem.

Spoiler: Author's Notes

This is what happens when you try to work on clarke tech out side of your specialty using that grand unified theory 101 class you took because it was a pre-requisite a millenia ago. Just saying.

 

[william8855]

She turned to Spyd-ir who was convulsing in a manner so that that sections of its carapace and limbs scraped in a rhythmic fashion.

Click to shrink...

Well I imagine somehow making a Spyder laugh at your constant failures is an achievement in of itself.