Far Future, Ch. 141 – An Engine of War Lights Things Up

Whether they had sought for them or not, the survivors had Leveled up once or twice just making it through this time... and a Three or Four, even if a non-combatant, made an elite workforce member with the right training.

Training came VERY quickly with an Intellect Mark.

Tens of thousands of people were being drawn into the skilled workforce every day, and even the semi-skilled work force was increasing in competency to an amazing degree. G&G and Rantha Corp were expanding like locusts, swallowing up millions of bodies and putting them to work, while the deaths of billions actually lightened a good deal of the logistical load on the support economy of the megacities and kiloplexes. Suddenly people were productive, and once they were Marked, they were DRIVEN.

Deaths had hit everyone, be it from terror attacks in Spires that had thought themselves above the fray, the families of soldiers fighting, or the civilians caught haplessly in the middle as all-consuming biovores and the armies of Man fought with an utter lack of mercy.

There was no time for despair, no time for mercy. Those who were suffering from apathy and loss were brought down before cold-eyed Ranthas with little sympathy for them; Marked, Branded, and impelled to work until they found their anger rising, and some way to vent their sorrow and loss, taking the load for basic services off those who wanted only now to take the fight back to their foes.

The younger generation who wanted to become something great and awesome joined G&G in droves, basically champing at the bit to get Opened, Marked, able to manifest a mindclaw, and Level. The training was brutal, but their Briggs and Rantha sponsors were Right There the whole time, the wickedly demanding women and the brutally overbearing men showing them the way, wide open, right in front of them, the only shortcut being how seriously they took what they could do.

The older generations were rapidly turning into the most skilled workforce the planet had ever seen. Jobs done by the shattered Mechanist workforce in many areas were now being done by unenhanced humans with startling ability, and no desire to swap out their organics. An odd spirituality was permeating through these Marked workers, as both Soul Feats and the ancient power of ki was being tapped to refine their minds and souls, subtly enhance their bodies to endure the demands upon them, and get them through each and every day without fail.

GAMT production was increasing every day, the local and out-system demand for it only growing. The System Fleet was being repaired and re-fit at amazing speed, retooling and inefficiencies in the local supply chain being worked on with tireless zeal and amazing coordination to smooth and streamline the processes, and even build in redundancies in the event of future attacks.

Ship after ship was coming in from out-system for their own upgrades, bringing with them cargoes of goods and parts, and excess people from other systems to add to the workforces... and they usually departed with a Briggs and Rantha or two among passengers or crew, bound to a new location.

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There were several minor events that occurred in the Janus system while this was happening.

The first was a Portal opening on Janus IV near the pole. A cold, dead world with a few isolated mining locations going after deeply buried raw standard minerals, the planet did not have near the strategic importance of Janus III.

The dark elf force naturally knew this, and was very confident of being able to insert a substantial force here. Alas, the opening of their Portal seemed to pull down a passing meteor supercharged with Warp energies. It fell down right upon them, and the resulting explosion and implosion left a three-mile crater in the crust of the planet, some rather exotic materials lining it, and what havoc may have occurred on the other side of the Portal, nobody knew.

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The second event occurred out in space, at an invisible point shielded by holofields where Dark Elvar ships were wont to exit the Underweb and enter the system. This particular incursion of a fleet of drow raiding vessels unfortunately ignited a passing comet that flared with Warp energies and visibly diverted drastically from its course, as if being pulled in by the open Portal. The planar resonance from the burning comet kept the Portal open despite frantic attempts to close it, and it slammed directly into the dimensional opening.

The resulting warpstorm covered a million miles of space, lit up Janus III's nights for a week straight, was deemed a dangerous navigational hazard, knocked out huge amounts of non-vakker tech across the system, and only a single drow ship managed to get out of range before it swallowed the rest of the fleet and set them off to the Warp to be munchies.

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The third event was a couple months later, at the other system incursion point, mostly used by the elvar, and equally as well hidden. It was breached by the drow, to the annoyance of the elvar watching over it... who exited it to find that a force of Warp marauders had chosen it as a deep space anchorage point, guided there by some mysterious divinations. The rival forces looked at one another for a few trembling moments, and then violence erupted.

It would be difficult to say who might have won, had not the elvar forces in the area come swooping in to secure their easy ingress and egress from the Janus system, but a burning Warp cruiser suicidally rammed itself into the Portal while opening a Helldiving Gate. For the second time in two months, a Warp Storm ignited in the system, and really, really annoyed the elvar.

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Four months later, when the drow opened the Portal on Janus VI, and found a Thunder Bulls company undergoing high-g and hostile environment training right on top of them, they were definitely convinced that some horrendously bad luck was afflicting whatever they were doing in the Janus system. The fact that they'd sent dozens of assassins out against the human leadership in the system, and there'd been nothing heard from or about them anywhere only served to raise their hackles further.

The antiproton bomb the Thunder Bulls artillery shot through their Portal just as they closed it didn't help matters any, and the fact it was mechanically timed rather foiled their attempts to subvert its tech and neutralize it, not that anyone survived to realize it.

But at least it wasn't a Warp Event, right?

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When their next attempt opened a Portal, only to find it was buried under a sea of lava on Janus I after a few thousand years of not being used, the drow were annoyed, yet gratified. That annoyance turned into panic when the inverted Crown set up in a shielded node just outside went off, Warp Resonance flared, the Portal opened, and a whole bunch of molten rock found a new place to go at unnatural speed, while animated burning things started growing out of it looking for entertainment.

A passing Fleet cruiser on its maiden patrol, the IS Lu Dongbin, noted the burgeoning Warp Storm effect, and the captain promptly bombed the place all to hell and back until it stopped manifesting. His battle report noted it served admirably as impromptu target practice for his new crew.

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The sixth attempt followed almost a year after that, as the drow had to find the old Portal hidden in the ammonia winds of Janus VI, a gas giant. Furthermore, they very cautiously scanned surrounding space and the environs of the long-hidden Portal before activating it from without, instead of within.

Nobody was quite sure what triggered the Warp Event, although the inverted Ship's Throne waiting inside it just might have been the culprit. Whatever the results, a Warp Storm hundreds of miles across spontaneously ignited as the Portal opened, swallowing the drow ship outside, and burned an open glowing Gate to the Warp there in the banded gasses of the silent planet, like a dire glowing orb looking out from Beyond.

Six of the new vivic bombs were sent in and detonated in that gap two weeks later, thankfully no demonic fleet emerging to ravage the system. It ignited the Warp energies into a raging unwhite inferno that lasted for the next sixty-two standard years before slowly dying off, sealing the whole area within the planet's magnetosphere away from the Warp while it lasted.

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It took two months to make the psi-powered True Seeing scope set up to survey the Portal on Janus II. The observation point was from a hilltop three miles away, hidden in a crack in the mountain, and able to pierce the holofields that might normally mask the Portal.

It did not radiate a signal to be detected. The land line was bored clean through the mountain and surrounding frozen rock on the dark side of the tidally locked planet, with no surface indicators. It was a simple optical fiber sent to a laser transmitter ten miles away, locked to a tumbling, wrecked satellite in orbit whose solar power systems sparked and fluttered from wild interactions, took the transmission, and sent them on to the routine observation and weather satellites in orbit, mixing it into their transmitted signals with a complex algorithm that was removed and then decoded at only one workstation. That Marked Survey Corps operator relayed on what was observed personally, and then the record was wiped to give no indication that it had ever existed. Drow hackers and tech-breakers routinely sifting through the station's systems found nothing...

But the only viable and usable Portal the drow and perhaps the elvar could use in the Janus system was now under constant watch. They could easily and routinely flummox the surveillance satellites, but the Eye of Janus was now upon them...

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Briggs and I hit Twelve when the Main Line reached the Celestial Tribute.

The Corridor we started and punched through five thousand miles of Warped territory inside the Zone now had a comfortable hundred-mile buffer zone to either side, cleared by energetic kids and Leveling enthusiasts. The train line required multiple engines along its length, as various tech levels were allowed or not, and immense amounts of human labor which the Briggs Brothers enjoyed immensely.

A thousand people a day were streaming into the Warp Zone. A great number were soldiers, but there were plenty of workers, both harvesting raw materials from the scrap of the Warp Zone, vivic burning everything else

We were burning away a thousand square miles of the Warp Zone a day. Given that it had over seventy-five million square miles of territory, that wasn't as impressive as it sounded, but those areas were completely harvested, cleared, and eliminated.

We were aware that the distance in reality to the Tribute was not more than two thousand miles, and so the Corridor was a somewhat awkward anchor piece, as it was locking in a false reality over its distance just so we could send mountains of men and machines to the great colony ship that we were rebuilding there.

This problem was solved with My Queen and the Two Princes.

There were three Void Brothers now Opened on Janus III, two juniors and My Queen. The Juniors were the Fire and the Sword, and the Wave and the Spear. Naturally all their interests and focuses differed, but there was plenty of areas to train them both in the Warp Zone... and then outside it. The Firesword seemed to have an especial knack for Axiomatic Event butchery and fighting tech and cyborgs, while all those Xenos crawling out of the seas were meat for Brother Wavespear.

They formed the third required component of the Interdiction Corridor, using their Helices to rip apart the false reality as they paralleled the entire track of the Main Line as Briggs and I walked with them to burn it permanent and lock it in, respectively.

This required the building of an entirely new Main Line along the new Corridor, but because reality stayed constant and full Tech Levels could be used, plus it was less than half the length of the original, it took a great deal less time.

Oh, and we didn't have to kill anything on the way, either.