Chương 488: Limitless Path Chapter Five Hundred Ten

"Anyway, let's stash this and move on," Beth said, shaking her head and making to move to the tank.

"No," Jaq said, shaking his head before grabbing the compressed tank and lifting it up to carry it out of the room.

"This cannot be put in spatial storage; it would interfere with some of the enchantments, possibly to disastrous results."

"Oh, well, that sucks," Beth said, following along behind Jaq, her army of Ascendants mostly disappearing back into the reliquary.

"How many more parts are there?"

"If the whole system is here? There will be four more parts, making five pieces in total," Jaq said.

"At least, that's how I estimate they would break it down, as they clearly did. It's possible some other components were broken down even further than that."

"So, we're hunting for a needle in a haystack now?" Beth asked.

"Likely," Jaq answered humorlessly, heading back to his ship with the tank, which he placed in one of the two moderate-sized cargo bays his personal starship sported. Beth and Jaq updated the group, with Beth having to go into more detail as Jaq just sent them a very brief explanation of the items. Beth explained more about what they were looking for and the signs, though if the other pieces were even a quarter as enchanted as the tank, they would be very hard to miss.

The derelict had a lot of its own circuitry and mana systems, some of which were moderately complex, but even those were like comparing the penmanship of a novice to a master calligrapher. The pieces of the tank, or the whole system, rather, were also made of incredibly rare and valuable materials that were noticeably different from anything the dreadnought was made from, and it wasn't exactly made of cheap materials, either.

Beth was sure there was even more to this tank system, and to the dreadnought, than Jaq was letting on, but she would do some research on her own and ask a few people. Likely even that some of her stronger, older contacts, such as Mortaine or Zane, could shed more light on it. For now, she decided that their group knew as they needed to in order to get the job done and that would have to suffice.

She had the Empyreans out and about, many of them motivated by finding more pieces of the upgrade tank so they could study its enchanting and magics, and they were scouring the ship at an appreciable speed. The Empyreans mostly ignored the beasts, so strong that much of the 'regular' beasts could do nothing to them, as well as being restricted from fighting things outside the Ascended tier and above, and focused on scouting the area.

This wasn't a small job, in more ways than one, and even the addition of multiple extra Ascended didn't speed it up as much as Beth had hoped. They spent weeks looking for the remaining components, and it was frustratingly Jaq himself that found the next two. He had an almost supernatural sense for where they were, though he insisted it was just luck.

Beth was starting to think that he might have some kind of secret blessing or some at this point, with how he found the components in the strangest of places at just the right moment, but she had no verifiable way to prove anything. Regardless of his exceptional luck, having two more pieces of the machine let Jaq definitively declare it was five pieces, and he also suspected they had not taken the whole thing apart any further than that.

That was good news, as searching for the true objective Jaq had brought them there for was taking away from Beth's true objective, making money, and she would be glad when his fancy molecular replacement machine was in his ship and safely sailing away. Three out of five wasn't terrible for three weeks of work, not counting all the time before they found the tank, but Jaq was urging them ever faster, as they had only a couple weeks left.

Why they only had a couple weeks, especially when the derelict had been there for a couple thousand millennia, he wouldn't say, but Beth suspected it had far less to do with the derelict, or even with people finding the old dreadnought, and far more to do with some event or person that was external to all of it. When they found the fourth piece of the machine after a week, Jaq was so relieved Beth managed to pry out of him just a bit of what was going on while his guard was slightly down.

Though, with the taciturn commissar, it could have very possibly been something he let slip not quite accidentally, likely to throw Beth a bone so she would stop hounding him so much. It turns out, shock of all shocks, that Jaq had somebody that he was friends with. Even more terrifying to Beth, they were old comrades that Jaq considered a best friend, which had her about catatonic for a couple minutes.

Said friend was in pretty bad shape for several reasons, including wounds sustained in a war that Jaq had also fought in when they were both young. The long and the short of it was, Jaq wanted the tank system to both save his friend's life and to upgrade him into something far better. It lined up better when the man explained his friend was also cyberized but was having trouble with his cybernetics and with mana backflow, which is something that could happen in cybernetics.

The body would become, for lack of a more precise term, un-synced with the cybernetic piece or pieces, and that would manifest as mana trying to flow through the body and into the cybernetic but being bounced back. That bounce hurt, and it disrupted the cybernetic part's functionality, but more than that, it would do permanent damage to the person over time. Jaq's buddy had been suffering from that, as well as some other issues, for decades, and that was on top of the fact his buddy wasn't nearly as strong as Jaq.

His lifespan was already starting to run out. There was definitely more to the story than what Jaq had told her, even if she believed his little story that he had prattled out when they found the fourth piece, but it filled in enough gaps and explained enough that she wasn't really much suspicious of the motives for retrieving this thing, and doing it in a hurry.

It was more like a cosmic joke, all the pieces lining up in such a weird way, with Jaq's war buddy now being on his last legs and derelict showing up after a couple million years missing. Other treatments either wouldn't work or were too exclusive, never mind the prices, for Jaq's buddy to afford, but if Jaq brought him a full system that was totally ready to go, even including materials, that changed everything.

"So, tell me, this buddy of yours," Beth started as they were working on the fifth piece, the power system that connected all the power from a source to the tank. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Yes," Jaq said coldly over the comms.

"Well, he's hurt, right? But, uh, forgive me for saying this, but how do you know this is gonna fix him?" Beth asked.

"I don't," Jaq said brusquely.

"Okay, so, that's already bad, but, uh, this thing doesn't exactly have an instruction manual laying around, or not that we've found, anyway. Can you even put it together? Turn it on once together?" Beth asked.

"What are you getting at?" Jaq snapped out angrily.

"I'm just saying, if this plan B, you might also want to start trying to think of a possible plan C," Beth said, wincing at his cold snort, which he was somehow able to perfectly subvocalize.

"Girl, this is plan Z at this point. If I can't make this work, or make it work in time, Baz dies. That's the long and the short of it, and more like the short of it. He doesn't have much time left, thus my urgency," Jaq said.

"Well, that sucks to hear," Beth said.

"Though, the good news is, I just found the power systems you were missing."

"What? Where?!" Jaq asked, clearly fully focused on her now.

"Well, here's the bad news," Beth said, wincing as she sent it across the comm.

"You know how there's big rips in the, uh, armor plating?"

"No…" Jaq said slowly.

"Well, most of the power system is in a room here. At least, I think it's most of it. Some of the wall near the outer part of the ship is gone. I don't why they stored all these pieces near the outside of the ship, but, uh, it's not lookin' good, chief," Beth said, having already relayed the coordinates to Jaq.

"Don't touch anything! And don't let those damn ghosts of yours go poking around it, either!" he snapped.

"Okay, first off, rude. Second off, they're not ghosts. And, third off, they're allowed to fight against any Ascended-level threat I deem a danger to myself. I understand this is important, but don't give me that shit. I'll have Erosh pop your damn head like an old grape," Beth snapped back.

"Right," Jaq said, sighing heavily before taking a deep breath.

"Sorry. I'm on edge."

"It's fine. I knew you were an asshole from the start," Beth snarked back. She waited for him to show up, the man not needing any kind of suit or rebreather to handle the sections exposed to Jupiter's atmosphere. He took one look at the room and sighed, his shoulders drooping a little before he moved inside. The place had been hit pretty hard, with a large section of the wall positioned towards the outer hull of the ship having been torn away.

When that destruction had happened, various bits and pieces from within the room, hell, various pieces of the room had been torn out of the ship. That pretty clearly included some of the pieces of the power system, as there were wires and conduits that broke off rather nastily, leading to nothing but frayed ends and lost hope. The equipment that was still in the room was also jumbled up, and it couldn't have happened to a worse room or piece.

The room itself was used as some kind of electrical engineering lab and had wiring and circuits all over the place, though it wasn't impossible to pick out what was part of the tank system and what wasn't. Still, it was a damn mess, and unlike the tank, the material re-processor, or the other two pieces, this section of the equipment was all kinds of boxes and bits wired together with extra wires sticking out.

If this had been the tank room, instead, for example, the tank might have sustained some minor damage, if that, but the thing would have been largely intact, likely still perfectly serviceable. Perfectly serviceable was not how Beth would describe the mess in the room that Jaq was currently sorting through.

"This is bad," he muttered.

"Way worse than I thought."

"Sorry," Beth said with a shrug.

"Don't know what we can do."

"It's not hopeless," Jaq said with a sigh.

"I just don't know…we just don't have enough time. This can be repaired, or even jury-rigged, but figuring out what's missing and how to replace or bypass it will take months, possibly years. There's too much happening and too little time; I don't have years to work on this right now, or any time, for that matter."

"I have a group of Ascended in my back pocket eager to pick the thing apart, but I don't know how much actual help they might be," Beth said with another shrug.

"If you can keep them in line," Jaq said frostily.

"Hey, they're not my slaves or even my servants. I can ask them if they want to help you, and they can say yes or no. If they say yes, how much they do and how they do it is up to them, not me," Beth said, crossing her arms as she glanced over the mess the room was in and then stared at Jaq.

"It's…well, I don't know," Jaq said, reaching up and flipping his beret off with a practiced gesture, holding in-between several fingers while he combed a hand through his short hair before settling the cap back on his head with a snap.

"I know some people, but getting them free soon enough, and having enough time, even with your little band of pocket Ascended, is going to be rough. Really rough. The only saving grace is that moving around and smoothing power is something of a very precise science that people, especially Engineers, know a hell of a lot about. If any part had to be damaged, I'd almost prefer it be this one, as this is something we can actually fix in a reasonable amount of time.

If reasonable and 'soon enough to save lives' are the same thing, we shall have to see…"

"Hey, we'll help," Beth said with a wave of her hand side-to-side.

"All I'm saying is; don't count on too much. And if I'm helping with this, or my pocket Ascended are, then they're not working on the ship deconstruction."

"This is number one priority," Jaq replied swiftly.

"Beyond even setting the ship disassembly back, even setting it back years, this is something we have to get done. There's a lot at stake here."

"If we're gonna do this, Jaq, then I want in," Beth said. When he raised an eyebrow at her, she continued, "It's pretty clear you're not telling the truth. Sure, maybe you have a hurt old war buddy, and sure, I'd even buy the thing about other treatments not working or being available for him. But there's a lot more going on here. You just said that lives, plural, were riding on this work. That doesn't just mean an old war buddy that's lived for a few centuries and is now, sadly, on his last legs.

That means there's something else going on here that I want to know about." Jaq stared at her for a while before motioning for them to leave the room. He led her into the corridors and down a little ways into an area away from Jupiter's atmosphere, where they could step into a room and talk without using the comms. He repressurized the room with some controls and releasing some atmosphere from a set of tanks from his storage power, indicating for Beth to wait a minute.

When he was satisfied, he signaled for here to take her mask off so they could talk freely.

"No comms," was the first thing he said.

"Sure," Beth said.

"No, I mean no comms, ever. This doesn't get spoken of over comms, it doesn't go on any digital or mana-webwork system, anywhere," Jaq said, deadly serious.

"I get it, it's some huge secret," Beth said, shaking her head.

"I won't put anything about it over the Net, and I won't speak about it with anyone."

"Good," Jaq said, giving her a sharp glance before looking up at the ceiling and chewing his lip for a minute.

"We found something."

"Who's 'we,' Jaq?" Beth asked.

"Baelvyr. We're part of his team, or most of us are. Many people have large teams and groups they work with, though some stay solo forever. Tazeen and I are part of Baelvyr's inner circle, if you want to call it that, and the others, such as Navere or Elana, are more loosely connected," Jaq explained.

"Anyway, the last mission we did, before we got the 'vacation' babysitting your Hall for a few years, went like shit, for a thousand reasons. Chief among them being we found a group of extremely heavily injured giants in stasis. Real, live, true blue giants in the flesh, not their descendants or anything like that."

"Shit," Beth muttered.

"Oh, that's just the tip of the iceberg," Jaq said, looking her dead in the eye.

"We found them way out in the Deep Dark, on a ship that was trying to flee."

"Flee? Flee from what?" Beth asked with a deep frown.

"This universe," Jaq dropped a bomb on her with a whisper.