Far Future, Cha. 68 – Buying the Stairway to Heaven

"Good morning to you all. I am Colonel Sama Rantha. You may have heard of me."

I could read the trepidation and fear on their faces like a book. It was well-deserved. In the past year, I had made a splash in Janus Prime's military forces, especially the training of raw recruits. Every commander in the city wanted to get troops from me, and the rest wanted to send their troops to me.

The kids coming to me were hammered and refined, the rebelliousness and elitism beat out of them. Washing out of my training was worse than finishing it, and one recruit was dragged by his Sergeant Rantha for a full mile on his face before he realized he could indeed get up and still run, bloody as he was, and everyone swore as from start to end, their bully sergeant Ranthas skated backwards in front of them, watching them all and never letting them falter.

But this one, this one was different.

The responsibility had been pawned off on me like a hot potato, nobody wanted the responsibility of sending a rich man's kids off to die. But the Empire had come calling, and another Janus Regiment was being summoned to fight for the Empire.

All the cities of Janus had to tithe people, arms, and armor to the endless wars of the Empire, and the taxes were basically ongoing support for the legions in the field. When their numbers fell from attrition, another Regiment was founded to keep the tithing stable, while existing Regiments were combined and their old numbers retired.

That was what a Regiment meant... ten thousand sons and daughters of Janus Prime had died in the Emperor's Service, Forever may the sack of bones on his Crystal Throne reign.

I had been pawned off the duty of training ten thousand raw recruits into soldiers fit for the Emperor's Service.

Well, eff that. I was going to train them to be fit for MY service.

"I will tell you this right now, and confirm what you already know. You are a founding Regiment destined to serve in the Emperor's name. You will be sent off to fight in His Name for the fate of humanity.

"You will be far from home, and if the numbers mean anything, less than half of you will survive that service, and less than a tenth of you will decide to come home when your time is done."

Yeah, that clearly unsettled them. I let that stew for a long, hard breath or three.

"I aim to break one of those numbers, and that is how many of you survive.

"If you want to live to see the end of your service, and retire to some wild green and blue colony world far away from durasteel and a force dome sky, you will do what I tell you, when I tell you.

"You will take all the pain and agony I am going to inflict on you, and you will ask for more, so that you live.

"There is no running away, there is no failing out here. If you can't cut it, then you will be shot in the head and thrown to the soylent wagons, because the Empire does not allow you to quit." Which was absolute policy. And then your family had to pay for someone to replace you.

"A soldier does not need to be strong, fast, clever, or smart. They don't even need to be superbly skilled, although all of those things help.

"A soldier needs to endure, and to survive! If you survive, you will become stronger, faster, sneakier, smarter, and more skilled. But first, you must survive. You must be tougher!

"That is what I am going to make you. Oh, you will all be trained to the Empire's standards in guns and combat and whatnot before you ship out. But you will be tough, tougher than you ever imagined you could be, so that you can survive what is coming!

"Soldiers of the Empire, I salute you!" I gave them a perfect salute, and the one thing their sergeants had managed to drill into them was how to return it. "You will not disappoint me, because I will not allow you to do so!

"Dismissed!"

The softer ones who'd trembled at my words had already been marked out. They were the ones who had to be broken down and rebuilt, or they were just going to wash out and die.

But these were all Ones. They could be Opened as Nulls, Marked, and Awakened. The trifecta had already made my trainees the toughest to ever come out of the Janus Prime training program, and I wasn't going to do any less for the Empire.

Deep bellows and cutting curses warred through the air as Ranthas and Briggs herded their companies and platoons this way and that, off to the training fields for the first part of physical manhandling that would break them down and turn them into something they never thought they could be.

Basic training turned a One into a Two, and gave what was effectively the Elite Array of 15/14/13 for the physical Stats, spread out by body type. Advanced training turned a Two into a Three. The full-contact training was going to add to their Archer, Scout, or Melee Primary Level a Level in Psion and Soulshaper. Psychic and Soul-Fortified bodies turned the relevant Feats into Health bonuses. More survivability. Exposure to ki gave them the potential of a Vajra. More survivability.

Being Opened as a Null meant inherent bonuses to Constitution. More survivability. Being Opened as a Source meant Strength instead, also good. The Marks were all Constitution, and if they fed them, would end up at +4 Constitution... and with direct Marklinks to their sergeants, telling them what to do and how to survive and progress and make it through the hell that was coming. We'd see what stacking morale bonuses on top of all that would do on the future field of battle!

-------

A hundred Ranthas and Briggs each were in the Regiment, the 2247th Janus Regiment to be mustered, all from Janus Prime. They were looking forwards to heading out into space, hoping they didn't get blown out of the damn void before they had a chance to fight.

Having a hundred Sources along would go a long way towards bending the small odds to make sure that didn't happen, but still, I wasn't going to take any chances with incompetence on the part of the commanders. Tabitha and Tiffany Rantha were both graduating from the Admiralty Station in orbit at the tops of their class, and would be assigned to a ship in Gunnery and Command, respectively. Azure graduated from high-risk racing and had naturally blown through Piloting School and had been given her own squadron of fellow graduates. What she would be flying, now...

Fyr would be joining in the tank crews, too. I wouldn't be in command, but I'd be with my people one way or another.

-------

I literally could not be expanding fast enough to use all the money being thrown at me. Vakker-tech had hit the battlefields of a dozen conflicts, outperformed standard tech, and Rantha Corps tech had outperformed that. Naturally everyone wanted the best, and was willing to pay through the nose to get it.

This meant my expansion was relentless, and prioritization of that expansion basically steamrolled any opposition. I was expanding through Blokward after Blokward, given carte blanche to eliminate trouble... and that was what we did. I focused on areas in decline to double down on the mandated Revitalization and Recovery program subsidies, and now I had recruiters going across the city, looking for them precious gold and silver auras, and for young greens who might become gold.

Every four months, another batch of Ranthas and Briggs were hitting the street. The Brothers Briggs had the problem of coming out as Ones, which really annoyed them, but we had early Leveling paradigms all worked out. Alas, no Level every day did slow them down a bunch, but time to branch out and develop their own personalities and Talents was hardly a bad thing.

The key thing was that new Ranthas and Briggs couldn't Marktell with their sisters and brothers respectively... or Mom and Dad... but they could do so with their opposites. Those pairings were awesome in all the best ways.

Briggs himself was a bit blown away by being the dad of all these fellows, but that hardly stopped his enthusiasm towards learning them Night Rose disciplines.

Naturally there was huge competition among the girls for their own Briggs, as they significantly outnumbered the brawny Ancient lads at this point. Complementary Talents were the main mode of comparison, and any of them who set up a partnership were also obligated with helping their fuzzy Signif Other Level up. Given everyone was specializing more than generalizing at this point, save for a certain someone at the top of the ladder, this wasn't too much of an issue. The efficiency of buying things piecemeal meant a lot less Karma was wasted, so more bang for the buck. Even if they all had to go back and take lots of Secondary Levels later, they wouldn't have to be paying the same premium they would if it was Levels instead of benefits.

Aura negotiated my first not-really-friendly acquisition, which was a factory facility that made replacement parts for Axiom Modular Template wargear and vehicles, including starship parts. The Mekker's Guild was not happy to see me repurpose a bunch of those lines to (horrors!) new designs and models of weapons and vehicles of all types designed to maximize the usage of Vakker-tech... and even less happy to see the Coronals promptly buying everything as fast as I could make it. One of the very best sellers was simply armor plating with both the mandated Axiom Rune structure... and Sacred Runes on top of it.

Vakker-tech's ability to convey more power meant making weapons with higher power thresholds was entirely possible. Working psionic energy in there to apply cooling easily offset the heat at higher cost, and the speed and ease of replacement was even faster with simply having to see what tech had gone dark and burned out to pull. Even the parts themselves weren't that difficult to fix, since it was only swapping out the tubes most of the time, meaning recycling and repurposing was even better.

All of my thoughtstreams were on full drive now, as I was doing design and refinement work full time at the high edge of TL 10 on a parallel tech tree, and juicing the tech with increasingly refined modifiers to ever more efficiency within the limits of my Level.

Power systems, anti-grav systems, drive systems, shields and wards, sensory suites, cooling systems, Interdiction systems... I dove head-on into all the key tech, and the blocky, gothic ship designs simply did not work with the Rune arrays I was working with, so for the first time in thousands of years, major capital ship redesigns had to take place to accommodate what I was doing.

I wasn't going to give Azure anything but the nastiest gunboat to work with, and meshing some of the TL12-15 tech they had available and accentuating it with Vakker-tech was very nice, indeed.

---

Too, my conscription of the Beacon psions had never stopped, and a year after I had started, less than a tenth of the numbers who had once been slaving away for eight to twelve hours a day for shit wages were now dropping off psi into the Capapsitors I was making with them, and they were working on some of the most cutting edge stuff in the whole Empire.

When the first Beacon Seven walked into the Mentats to receive his Septagon, it sent waves throughout the whole organization. It repeated as more and more of the formerly worthless and untalented Beacon Psis began getting repeated increases in their Tats.

I now employed more psions than any other organization on Janus Prime, and they were doing great work for me, important work... and being both paid well and treated with camaraderie and respect. There were also a number of special project teams working with Coronal and Umbran requests... which rather throttled a lot of Mentat umbrage at these minor psions suddenly doing so well.

The Beacons were also very, very tight-lipped about the benefits of partnering with a Null Psi, and realized how dangerous such people were to them... and paradoxically, their very existence meant that they could suddenly once again become part of the normal people, as everyone was potentially a psion now. The elitist and isolated mindset of a psion, especially the overarching, ever-looming threat from the Warp, was basically non-existent with a Null partner there, and the lack of fear a Null had for them was strangely refreshing...

The stress relief and freedom meant my Beacon psions were some of the most approachable members of their ilk around. Their increasing Levels and approachability also meant they started reducing demand for Mentat services for basic tasks, which the higher Level psions could hardly complain about, as they were all members of the same Guild.

The Stars of Mentats versus the Shapes of the Beacons was never something they thought would be an issue, but the Beacons were rising on a tide, hungry for the recognition and power of those Levels in a way the gifted Mentats had never considered.

Of course, they were civilian psions, not battleminds or combat psykers, but now they could compete in the civilian arena, which they hadn't been able to do before, increasingly shoving the gifted psions into the more dangerous combat roles... which they really didn't want to focus on, surprise, surprise.

It wasn't like they could lock the Beacons out, because I could employ ALL of them. There was an unending thirst for psionic circuitry and Rune crafting, and I had enough work for all of them. I didn't want to employ Mentats at all for this kind of work, and the fact my Beacon psi-techs were so skilled meant other employers were contracting them off for specific applications dealing with Vakker-tech.

My reach was growing...