Temple of the Machine God

Set between the towering bulk of the two main plasma drives, a cathedral like space is set aside for worship of the machine god, the vast floor area can accommodate several thousand people, or be used to strip down larger items of machinery. The buttressed walls are the ornate casings of the plasma drives, laced with gantries and decorated with prayers, sacred diagrams and Adeptus Mechanicus iconography, every rived inscribed with its own tiny prayer. The ceiling, nearly a kilometre high, a web of ornate crane booms and I beam dolly tracking.

The forward bulk head caries a huge cog mechanicus, with a balcony in front of it where a priest may stand a hundred meters above the ground back lit in red and in the glare of many spotlights, yet still be dwarfed by his surroundings.
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 The plasma drive of even a small starship produces and channels more energy in the span of a journey than some civilisations ever master and apply and the Pious Lament is no small vessel, no mere system-monitor or patrol boat. She is a pinnacle of the shipwrights are, millennia old and hallowed beyond words, filled from spine to keel with ancient technology and  hallowed to the singular purpose of crossing the great spaces between stars in the service of Mankind and the Omnissiah.

 Igniting those drives is a task both holy and profound.

 For the last fifteen hours, teams of tech-adepts and servitors have scoured and scanned countless miles of primary plasma conduits and performed test-canticles over ten times ten thousand magnetic containment modules.

 Five great motive prayer-cycles have been performed, the call-and-response at the peak of each three-hour cycle permitting the divination of which of the thousands of machine-spirits involved in the activation of the drive most needs solace and attention - the placating of one often unveiling the needs of a dozen more with the next cycle.

 Three dozen sweating, chanting men and women encased in protective suits have walked through the cores of a dozen great initiator-chambers whose powerful sparks will light the blessed artificial suns of the fusion reactors, there to manhandle the great blocks of dense metal into their places and lower them into their sarcophagi of water and carbon - burning their lifespans in willing sacrifice to the great machine, for none but the holiest adept may walk their path more than once in their life.

 The motive force their labour generates grows and sings through vast cables of braided superconductor and into the enormous sphere of the blessed Engine-shrine itself.

 At the peak of the sixteenth hour, to the massed song of ten thousand laymen and engineseers that fills the precisely-mapped space with overlapping waves of piety and sound Explorator Teslas voice rings from a thousand voxes, tuned with piety and perfection to meld with the prayers, every machine-spirit and vox speaker shouting in unison with the hands that perform His work "The Beginning and the End are in your hands, O blessed Omnissiah! In our hands you have placed the power of the suns! We, who having been tested have your gift of both creative and destructive power by your will, turn to you in sober fear and intoxicating hope. We ask for your guidance and your blessing in this use of nuclear force. Help us to light the spark of atomic brightness that illuminates the fog of darkness between the stars, so that all eyes may see by your pure light. Bless all of us who work today in your Presence and who dedicate ourselves to achieve your intended purpose and rightful understanding. In the Name of all that is holy and all that is understood. Amen!"

 With the great 'Amen', he presses the sacred initiator switch and in the depths of the Enginarium, a new sun is born.

As the thump of the last missile is felt through the ship alarm bells and sirens screech out across the vast hall. Although causing no physical damage the blast destabilises one of the thrusters which is spluttering and blasting intermittently while its machine spirit calls out in desperation and serious vibration issues are felt through the deck plates. Some sort of resonance has been introduced into the firing sequence which could lead to a catastrophic failure if not dealt with quickly.

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OOC: Missile..?

 The abrupt transition from safe voyage to a combat footing (well, abrupt by the standards of void operations, in which 'swift' is a matter of minutes instead of fractions of a second) took considerable work to manage, with teams of Engineseers and acolytes racing from post to post in order to ensure that life-giving plasma could be sent where it was needed, exchanging unnecessary fripperies for greater protective strength in their manoeuvring systems (since void-shields are powerless against the great mass and predatory hunger of a manoeuvring torpedo).

 From his place in the Enginarium, communing with the high altar, the Engineseer Prime is immersed in the wails and moans of tortured machine spirits and feels the internal wounds inflicted upon the ship as rents in his own skin and bone, but the self-same communion that causes him to suffer so permits him to respond with greater alacrity and completeness than could be managed by any not willing to make his sacrifices.

 Damage-control teams are led to the machine-spirits most immediately ailing by swift eruptions of binary cant and systems on the verge of overload automatically purge in rapid succession, time being bought not by reinforcement but by controlled bleeding-off of power and pressure as Jak uses his hard-earned knowledge of the plasmatic arts to damp down runaway reactions and moderate the offended rage of the group-mind of the machine spirits of the Pious Lament.

 The only question being, whether it will be enough!

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Add a degree of success to both those tests if Unnatural Intelligence(2) applies. Else, Jak might not be much of a fighter, but he's a great engineseer. ^_^

16:58, Today: Jak Tesla rolled 27 -- 6 degrees of success using the Warhammer Test system with a target number of 96.  Tech-Use.
16:57, Today: Jak Tesla rolled 73 -- 1 degree of success using the Warhammer Test system with a target number of 86.  Forbidden Lore: Archeotech.

Sorry, I assumed you were following the events on the bridge, missiles fired from the surface of the planet have been intercepted but the last was very close, it did no physical damage but the blast destabilised the plasm flow.

Slowly, under the administrations of Jak and his mechanicus followers the vibrations are reduced and the machine spirits calmed, soon the output has stabilised and the joyous ferocity returns to the mighty engines as they bur with star like energy as the Deus Mechanicus intended.
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OOC: I try to avoid following threads I'm not in so I don't have to worry about accidentally metagaming. The first I knew about this was when something hit us. ^_^

As the Pious Lament ponderously returns to is proper course, close up images of the crab mines on the hull are being relayed to various displays across the bridge, meanwhile, in response to the Captain, Mr Maverick, the Chief Bosun is assembling his crews and relays a message to the Mechanicus for advice and assistance.

The mines are black, angular things, more or less square, about eight feet across and two to four feet deep, at each corner is an articulated leg each with various means of attaching the device to a hull, in some cases magnets seem to be used, in one case it appears to be an adhesive, in another place the tip of the leg has drilled into the hull material but in the majority of cases articulated fingers have clamped round some protrusion or feature on the hull, a porthole frame, a gap between armoured plates, the base of an antenna, there seems to be no end of options.

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 Munitions that are merely a few feet across are vanishingly unlikely to do significant damage to a vessel such as the Pious Lament. Even atomics (which would quite certainly have shown up on an Auspex by now) would be of limited value (beyond the disruption and madness they spread through adjacent machine-spirits) through yards of solid Adamantine, most of their force wasted into the void.

 On the other hand, if there are enough of the things and they have emplaced themselves in locations of importance - such as void screen projectors, weapon mounts or the like - then repairing any damage they do would be a considerable chore and so Jak calls up several groups from the Engineerium with both vacuum ratings and some degree of experience in the matter of explosive devices (a comparatively small overlap) then assigns each team a couple of servo-skulls through which he can provide direct oversight and advice drawn from more experienced minds within the vessel.

 After all, it's not as if they're in a rush since they're still days from the Mandeville Point.

++All hands prepare for Warp transit, I repeat. Prepare for Warp transit.++ Alexei her voice rang out over the ships intercoms.

 Across the length and breadth of the great ship, massive capacitors greedily draw power from their plasma conduits and generator feeds and the immense energies that would - outside the Immaterium - power the void screens instead go to initiate and sustain the hundreds of Geller nodes situated in key positions throughout the ship, each of which is being supported in its holy work with the offerings of prayer, incense and binary canting from the pious crew, ordained and lay alike who set their souls in its care.

 In a matter of mere minutes, the Pious Lament goes from being rigged for void-running to being ready to make a warp transit and ten thousand speakers begin to sound out the golden tones of 'The Omissiahs Shield is a Mighty Protection' to indicate their readiness.

A message comes through from Gregory Asgard ++Enginseer Prime, the Lady-Captain informs me that we may have potential xenos aboard. I trust you will see to the defense of your sacred spaces.++
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 The warning is answered with an affirmation-cant and Jak sets about putting his affairs in order... A process which is not a matter of simply 'standing to with all guards', because that's a good way to have some intruder wait four or five hours until everyone is tired and then sneak past the bored patrols.

 Instead, instructions go out to add auspex scans to checkpoints throughout the ship - at whatever level is necessary to detect the most common Xenos strains - so that a measure of containment can be affected.

 Repair teams and assessment groups which already have servo-skulls attached to them receive additional instructions to have their skulls conduct random scans of personnel in their area when not in other use - taking advantage of their otherwise idle time to add security to the ship.

 A low-level lockdown is called for Geller node chambers and key points - nothing that will prevent their function, but a reduction of their religious use in favour of local shrines and offerings.

 A general raising of the alert level for the long-term, in other words rather than a rush to try and guard everything which can be sustained for no more than hours.

++This is the Captain, all hands brace for Immaterial breach++

Jak gets the signal to press the big red button.
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 To the resounding chorus of a thousand voices raised in prayer, Jak raises both hands in benediction to the great shrine of the Engineerium, his own voder producing brassy, impressive tones that fill the great chamber from floor to ceiling. The overlapping prayers build, moment after moment as huge capacitor banks come on-line and - at their culmination, the Geller fields thrum into full force.

 His time split between working on his duties to coordinate efforts to maintain and repair the great ship and his nominally leisure-time activities (which are at the moment restricted to recreational artisanship, meditative systems repair and escorting his occasional guest through the of the sacred spaces while discussing his work and theirs), Jak has little time to waste on sleeping - and as the organic parts of his brain begin on more than one occasion to attempt to flood his mind with the ghastly, tireless forms of the Men of Iron or the whisper of corrupted binaric hinting at the secrets to be found if he'll only permit just a small experiment or relax a few restrictions.

 Naturally enough, that's something he mostly deals with by just shutting down the organic parts of his brain during sleep cycles, but he tosses and turns nonetheless, and must spend longer each morning purging sweat from the remaining organic pieces of his body before he can robe himself.

 Duty goes on, however.

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17:01, Today: Jak Tesla rolled 19 -- 1 degree of success using the Warhammer Test system with a target number of 37.  Sleep Terrors.