Of course, with power came knowledge and responsibilities!

I had Philius and Sir Dorval as information sources if I was so inclined to pursue things, but they tacitly kept hands off my operations, and I didn’t inquire into the things they were doing other than to see what I could do to support them. The first Ranthas and G&G kids were entering the new Coronal and Umbral Guards to see what could happen, and senior Strikers were throwing off their mechanical implants to hit Seven and get the Null Status themselves, and all the things that it led to... especially them extra decades. The Coronal Knights and Squires suddenly had some remarkably improved members to add to their Cohorts and Striker Teams.

One thing that I became aware of more rapidly now was the status of the conflicts in the greater galaxy. There were wars and battles going on all the time, and the major and minor players of the galaxy were always going at it. While specifics were beyond my current clearance, information about who and where wasn’t that important, and indeed, most of it was simply declassified historical data. Current data had to come in by telepathic cycle to the Beacon, or be run in by ships using FTL. Even with psionics, there was no talking across the galaxy unless you were Way Up There... and wanted stuff listening in at the same time.

Human forces devoted to the Warp, stemming from the massive schism of the Emperor’s sons six thousand years ago, still existed, and infected the Empire like plague maggots, hungering for souls and immortality in service to their mad gods. Civil wars, rebellions, uprising, invasions, raids... it was all going on all the time.

The Tekrons I had run into were a terrifying, mysterious force, combining the horrors of undead, AI, and impossible technology. They dwelt in cold, forgotten places and dead worlds, stirring to life when their vaultworlds were disturbed, and generally annihilating the responsible parties. The appearance of a Tekron generally meant the extermination of everything living in the system.

I began to plan accordingly...

The third looming threat was the Xenosyms, the biological eating machines of this reality. Bioengineered for utter and total war, they were believed to be the most effective children of Shug-Niggurath, were known to work with races of the Mythos like the cerebrovores, and otherwise devoured everything the Tekrons would destroy. They were the locust horde of the stars, threatening the whole galaxy with great fleets sweeping past the Milky Way cautiously, wary only of the influence of the Warp and what it might do to them.

The Mythos races were generally split between those that venerated the Elder Gods, led by the extremely racist Great Race, Cerebrovores, and Cephallids, called the Horrors from the Void; and the various races that served the Great Old Ones, such as the Mi-Go, Yth, and Deep Ones, called The Aberrants... who as often as not loathed one another, too. In the psionic world, they were shadows and devils afflicting the psionically-aware population, even more than the Warp Gods, who could do nothing to these entities from Beyond Creation with their inscrutable motivations.

The Goblins in their tripartite glory were the rapacious barbarians of the galaxy. They were gene-coded for war, their technology as much instinct as learned. The dark-skinned hobgoblins were the most intelligent and organized, building great motherships and amassing the armies of the greenbloods on war after war of conquest.

The smaller green-skinned goblins were the foundation and innumerable troops of the race, giving birth to the other two races constantly, and blessed with an incredible idiot savancy for harnessing and using fire. Goblin engines were some of the most powerful of their types known, and their ships were overloaded with plasma-spitting cannons and fusion bombs of all types, filling the skies with flames.

The urgobs were the largest, cleverest, cruelest, and sneakiest of the goblins, but not the most organized, equal parts shock troops and assassins. On their own, their cloaked ships were assassins and raiders. As part of a goblin army, they would be the ones in power armor crashing through lines with astonishing speed and power for the glory of the race.

Eternally on the warpath for conquest and plunder, the Goblins raided and fought, driven by racial superiority and lust for territory, having only allies of convenience they soon turned upon.

Their Empire long shattered by endless Goblin assaults, the Ruk (our space dwarves are different!) were a former major power reduced to shadows in the stars. They sailed the stars in planetoids carved into massive mountains by endless labor, mining worlds, asteroids, comets, and anything else they could process and trade for what they wanted. Supposedly some core tenets of human tech were based on Ruk tech, and they were the only alien race that was not kill on sight for most of the Imperium as a result.

Naturally, there were space elves, simply called the Elvar and the Dark Elvar. A naturally psionic race, the Elvar had fallen to the Warp Gods at least eight thousand years ago as their decadent culture shattered along lines of Ennui, Death, Pride, and Hedonism. They had once been a predominant power in the galaxy, suppressing all other races and controlling the stars, keeping even the Aberrants and Horrors at bay, but their increasing self-indulgences and obsessions had super-charged the Warp Gods. When the Warp Gods came into their full power, their apotheosis instantly slaughtered ninety percent of the elvar alive, including the heart of their civilization.

The Elvar culture was now split between those pale-skinned folk trying to resist the pull of the obsessions of the Warp Gods, and those dark-skinned of their kind who sought to endlessly feed those very gods to stave off the pull on their own minds and souls. The former were arrogant, elitist, incredibly proud survivors of a fallen glorious realm, torn between trying to reclaim what they had left and evading the hungers of the Warp Gods they had afflicted the whole galaxy with. They were blessed with awesome psi-tech and an incredible heritage and lifespans of centuries to millennia.

The latter were the drow, the Shadows in the Void, the bane of every other race in the galaxy, living to feed the Warp Gods on the souls of their victims. Their arenas were the largest in the galaxy, and decent exhibitions could result in the slaughter of a million slaves and monsters culled from across the stars.

There were other minor players: the Drakken, a reptilian hegemony; the Omic Collective, an alliance of many alien races united to preserve their homeworlds in an idealist unity against the aggression of all the other races; the Singularity, the names for multi-dimensional aliens of various types who dwelled in gas giants; and the Anti-Life, the moon-sized protean beings of Dark Matter who dwelled deep in space and rarely entered star systems except to obliterate those people (and their star systems) who thought playing with Dark Matter was a productive use of their time.

Oh, and there were orcs, but they hadn’t adapted to space at all, and were basically slaves and cannon fodder for other races to throw at their enemies. Being stupid chaotic brutes didn’t work well in the space age...

------

So, those were the major players. Xenophobic slaughter was alive and well, cross-species cooperation was exceedingly rare, and everyone had thousands of years of misunderstanding and resentments against everyone else, broken treaties, rampant hatred, destroyed worlds, battles and wars won and lost...

Yeah, it was a shitty place out there.

There were two very important specifics I learned during this time period.

One, we were cut off from the Empire. Two, that Helldiving was indeed the primary means of interstellar travel for the Empire.

The first fact was because of a massive spasm in the Warp, a writhing eruption of power and hate that fairly cut across the galaxy, ripping through the aether and forming a wall of storms in the Warp that were utterly impassable, and cut off the Heavenly Compass from this side of the barrier, leaving the systems here alone and isolated from far Tellus. Only the Terrestrial Beacons were shining on this side.

It was no coincidence of timing that the Rift had taken place two decades ago...

That sward of Warp chaos only worked because it screwed Helldiving. What insane MF invented this type of travel was clearly off their damn rocker, skimming the edge of the Warp and using space bending through that dimension for stellar travel.

It’s just... The Fuck!? What totally insane bastard invented something like that? I heftily suspected Warp or Mythos intervention in the process, because Hell-diving was just plain stupid on its face. The Warp had GODS sitting in it who wanted to eat your souls, could stir up system-quashing warp storms for giggles, and uncounted numbers of id demons and psyche daemons were there to rend your minds and eat your souls if they got through the Protection from Chaos field your Axiomatic Mekker chuckleheads stuck into your ship.

If the non-Chaotic daemons got you, you were hapless idiots!

Battle reports on the Elvar made it plain they used some sort of subspatial dimension only they had access to for crossing the galaxy, its weblike structure inspiring the Dark Elvar, who lived full time in the heart of a dimensional crossroads, basically right on top of the Warp and just begging for the Mythos to come in from one direction and the demons to come in from the other.

It meant subspace travel was possible... you just had to have the power to create your own subspace. Welcome to TL 17+. No, 21+.

The Tekron had displayed mastery of inertialess travel. That meant realspace FTL was possible, without having to worry about popping dimensions and letting in suneaters or having the Warp eat your souls. But the GD Mekkers had the lock on high-end tech, and couldn’t innovate to save their lives, so any research on alternate methods of FTL went absolutely nowhere, and even their sublight systems were basically inertially-compensated fusion drives.

It made me want to tear my hair out, and really stamped home the problem with the Mekkers.

The birth throes of the Warp Gods had roiled the entire galaxy back when Amourae had Ascended, and what colonies humanity had possessed at that time had been thrown into darkness. Warp monstrosities had been unleashed on all worlds, and purely Axiomatic tech and AI’s had suddenly animated in response. The conflict between the two forces had ravaged countless worlds, with everything living caught in the middle, and only the advent of psionic disciplines, and the ruthless quashing of AI’s and reliance on cyborg interfaces and human labor saving the day.

In the meantime, the highest-Level people who had been driving the technology trees forwards had been killed by their own rebelling tech, and the cyborgs who had basically been tasked with maintaining the technology and producing it had been left behind to take over. Naturally, their own tasks became their mandates, and unable to reach higher Levels with their fusion with the machines, they instead became obsessed with older technology, preserving and finding what had already been done, and keeping an iron grip upon control of it.

That was the core of the problem now. The scientists weren’t men, they were cyborgs, and without being able to take true Ranks, only massive modifiers from their equipment, the tech of humanity had fallen from a wondrous high of blended Axiom and Psi to the current levels of Tech Level 10, with only a few rare and precious souls able to understand anything higher to anyone else, and who were certainly incapable of teaching it to others.

Without Good influences to counterbalance it, the Chaos and Evil exemplified in the Warp was countered only by the Axiom of the Mekkers, and the tech and those who monopolized it fell increasingly to Evil.

No wonder so much of the damn place felt like Hell. It was freaking inevitable.

It was this mindset of monopolization of knowledge and control of static technology that was so directly threatened by what I was doing. Vakker-tech wasn’t all that special, or they wouldn’t have sold me the rights to it. But they couldn’t replicate Rantha-tech because of the Good that was involved in its construction, and the increasing involvement of psions in what I was doing was another threat to their hegemony and their notions that fusion with the machine was superior.

They were supposed to be overseers and factory hands, not the researchers, engineers, and scientists. They literally could not think outside the boxes of their own technology, because they’d lost so much of their own spontaneity and creative impulses by being wed to the machine.

The fact that true innovators tended to be totally barking mad and the Warp pounced on them eagerly and deliberately only added to the freaking mess, and confirmed their suspicions that New Things Were Bad, and inspired people only brought disaster to themselves and everyone else.

No wonder my Rantha tech was vexing them so much. It was doing the exact opposite of what it was supposed to be doing, and the people making it were down-to-earth happy mundanes, the exact opposite of those who usually made such stuff, and were responding to the making of it by being satisfied and proud, not increasingly fanatical and crazy.

Furthermore, trying to mechanize the process and replicate it was totally impossible, even with their own psi-forges and tech-smiths doing everything I did. They couldn’t replicate the Good that was necessary to do Rantha-tech, and even if they could replicate the Vakker-tech, it was no better than what I did... and they didn’t have the coding I had whipped up to maximize the usage of it...