Far Future Ch. 182 – The Thirteenth Hour

I had some interesting discussions with the forensic teams carting stuff off, as I had some fairly good ideas on what all the stuff was used for... and at least sixteen different items went on one-way trips to the sun when they were deemed to be passive scrying interfaces for alien entities. I could talk tech with any of them, and moreover, could sweet-talk them into approving the costs of the tech required to replace what they tearing, cutting, hacking, dissolving, burning, and shooting apart, sometimes with rather aghast expressions.

Yeah, de Krov was not going to be remembered for anything except quietly vanishing.

None of this meant I was standing idly by, of course.

A hundred of the newest Sixes spread out into Downspire from a Sword-Rift from Gloom. They'd have new identities inside the day, and the Green and Gold would have its first recruits shortly thereafter. A few got to work helping me with paperwork.

Oh, and twenty thousand men were shuffled aboard the Witch Killer discretely, Marked as crew, and got its refit of systems done in literally record time. It was only in dock two weeks before it departed on a quick mission, was gone for a month, and came back with even more crew, and a load of basic processed ore for sale.

The de Krov toadies who had been ruling his pet planets had been shot all to hell, and there were some Ranthas and Briggs with severe administrative talents and urges to build up their own planets installed to replace them. With them came some Printers for some hi-tech stuff, and within a generation, those worlds were going to take a big leap forwards.

The Umbrans went all over the Promise and its tech, and hard men winced at some of the drow additions that we removed and shot off into the sun. Nevertheless, disposable combat assets were something the Inquisitors of the Umbrans could eagerly make use of.

So could a lot of others, actually. Unleashing a few thousand combat cyborgs on a planet would really raise the old body count, after all, even if they weren't full-on brains in a box...

Two hundred Vats were quietly installed on the Glorious Bastard, and the first generation of my girls to be born on this side of the Rift were underway.

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The heir of a noble family was confirmed dead.

Mining sites and factories of a megacorp were confirmed lost.

Four colony worlds were confirmed obliterated.

Contracts had not been picked up by certain families, or had been transferred to others.

Certain individuals had been convicted of Warp sorcery, heresy, treason, blasphemy, and their belongings impounded and families dispossessed.

Worlds had died in war, sons and daughters serving on the far side of the Rift were sent to glorious deaths or glorious victory.

And money moved as the facts came out under the Mimir Protocols, and set the galaxy on its ear.

Someone had gotten through with news!

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In Gloomheart, my three girls saw the city subtly roil as they figured out that humans had managed to come through the Underweb to deliver the message. Of course, it was not impossible, as they had traitorous and deranged humans passing through all the time, but they definitely had to make sure it wasn't a constant thing.

They had very little idea that there were a lot of men and machines pouring through Sword-Rifts generally no more than two minutes long, in and out... and that the younger generations of the hyn that had escaped into the shadows of the Gloom were all leaving for, ah, brighter grounds...

Of course, Madame Lolith was looking for the girls and I to exchange views on lethal entertainment with us, but found them nigh-impossible to lock down, even with a LOT of drow eagerly looking for them...

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Investigations undertaken on the other side of the Rift dealing with cults, cabals, covens, and criminals that had been severed from counterparts in the greater galaxy suddenly had connections that could be exploited here. Six wars broke out, a mega-corp died, nine noble houses were extinguished, and all in all, something like fourteen billion people died as a result of the information being released and the investigations that followed over the course of the next decade.

And hard Rantha eyes were there to profit from all of it, naturally enough.

With three planets of my own under control, expanding the ranks of Briggs and Ranthas became much easier... which was important, as there were a whole lot of planets in the Imperium, and it was going to take hundreds of thousands of them just to get one per settled system!

Yeah, the Empire was big.

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The release of the information across the galaxy also had an effect, some good, some bad.

The information released by the Mimir Protocols was nowhere near as destructive as the release of the Vivus Care Package. The sheer amount of violence that erupted in its wake only confirmed just how important the information was, and it no time at all it became the single most manufactured form on psychic weaponry throughout the galaxy.

At least ten worlds burned when the unveiling of vivus triggered spasmodic Warp reactions. Beacons blew up, Mentat Towers came crashing down in Warp fire, and conspiracies brewing for a millennium all seemed to go off at the same time. Even on far Tellus itself, over a billion people died to Warp Events, detonated power stations, misdirected orbital power relays cooking square miles of the surface in broad swathes, biological weapons, Axiomatic reprisals, and undead animating.

And they were purged, as they had never been purged before, and the Veil was reinforced, and barred them away. Demons burned in the vivic fires, and never made it back to the Warp. Undead fell to True Death, and Axiomites retreated back to the Warp rather than face the unwhite fire.

Megacorps with any capability for producing psychic weaponry began to churn out vivic weaponry in any form they could, and the ceaseless engine of war of the Empire snatched it all up.

The laughter of bloodthirsty gods became a bit forced... and as the tide began to change, I hit Thirteen, and was stepping on the road to Fourteen.

Starting multiple wars galaxy-wide was good for the soul, I guess...

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Upgrades on the Harmonic and Tachyon Drives commenced immediately, Vakker-tech was firmly entering the sphere of totally Weird Science now, and there were some really nifty applications of edges of tachyon-influenced space that could be explored in...

Ahem!

Financial plays netted Rantha Corp billions, leveraged in trillions, and eventually quadrillions as we rode the wave of revelations and fallout with the prescient calculating ability of post-40 Intellects and Sources out to establish themselves. That was over many years, of course, but the basic fact was that money problems were not an issue. There was only time and resources... and the ability to stay out of the Empire's way.

Granted, our de facto monopoly over GAMT technology, despite the obsessive opposition of the Mekkers, meant we had a constant contract from the Umbrans, Coronals, and eventually both Fleet and even the Legions were dealing for some stuff on the sly. That was a constant influx of solid money that simply couldn't be stopped, and interfering with production of it was basically pissing off the two most powerful organizations in the galaxy.

Or to put it another way, getting authorization to deal extremely violently with anyone messing with our company was a rubber stamp. We always issued proper post-action reports, too.

Completely unknown to the rest of the galaxy, my pet worlds geared up and began the production of Harmonic and Tachyon Drives, and the ships to go with them, on this side of the Rift. The crews were recruited from the natives, who were particularly interested in mixing it up with the drow once they learned the fate of the millions of their people de Krov had sold off into the charnel pits of Gloomheart.

Once the first scout ships and gunboats were equipped, they were immediately sent out to scout all the neighboring systems, find the Phlogiston Rivers, and ride them into the stars. Every planet was position-locked relative to the wilds of the Underweb by the Tens aboard, and naturally they started finding all sorts of weird stuff out there in the stars...

But those were their adventures, and to say books were being written was not wrong in the slightest. This was especially true when they were working with Inquisitors and Coronal Knights so closely, which meant close to some real power in the galaxy.

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I moved the last rune-simulation into place with a finger gesture, and felt the subliminal hum rise as I did.

-Damn,- /murmured Briggs, echoed by a few thousand others at the massive holographic model in front of me.

108,000 different Rune Plates, powered by direct sunlight, pumping in tachyons at right angles into the Sun's magnetosphere.

It formed an Interdiction effect against the Warp anywhere within sun's heliosphere, which would effectively remove the entire system from the view of the Warp... and any form of astropathic navigation, as well. Astropaths zeroing in on non-Beacon systems looked for the gravitic distortion of the suns, and so had to Jump into the system inside its heliosphere. If they couldn't see the heliosphere, the system was effectively locked to any form of Jumping.

The only way to get there would be through real space, i.e. inertialess travel, planetary teleportation, Phlogiston Rivers, or some really long traveling through space.

It would make my pet worlds invisible to the Empire, and so basically inaccessible to them, or any species using Jumping... which was definitely not all of them, but a good chunk.

-That will make the system remarkably vulnerable to non-Jumping attack, as there would be no way to bring in mass reinforcements at this time,- Grand Planner of All the Marbles Anatolia immediately /pointed out, analyzing the implications. -We could only get it into place in a system with the infrastructure to fight off a full invasion, or if we have a full Fleet that could reach it in time.-

"Oh, you thought we could get something like this in place before we would have all that available?" I pointed out the production requirements for the plates, and breaths hissed out in Markspace. Okay, we could buy and sell a few planets for the requirements there. The plan would work, but yeah, we'd need full TL 15 to print it off, and the accompanying Energized Materials were way out there in the rarity profiles, meaning we'd have to make our own.

-Could it be done at a planetary level first?- Briggs /asked, his pale violet eyes studying it. -I mean, it looks you took the Tribute's Throne field and dialed it up to 20...-

"I did. This is the inefficient model. If we had TL 17 or higher, the tolerances and weirdness of the science would cut down the numbers and raw amount of materials, but drive up the QL reqs to match. As for planetary... I don't know. We can do a sun because a star provides both the power source and mass source for the dimensional harmonics." I wriggled my fingers as I began to do some calculations, and brought up a copy of Janus for analysis. I deployed the plates, only needed a thousand, but...

-A thousand zero point power systems?- Even Briggs had to choke.

"It's like stars pump out a lot of juice or something..." I replied with a straight face.

-It goes on the stack with the Sun Gun,- he /sighed. Why-oh-why couldn't the real cool vast stuff you could pull off in the far future be cheap and easy? Having to build up to massive scale to do things on massive scale was just annoying... I just wanted to click a button on a vid screen, and lo, I could harness the power of a sun...