A few months pass...

-That reconfigurable fusion core is a thing of beauty,- I /complimented Briggs.

-The Mekkers are going to be pissed you figured out how to make the tech,- he /replied affably.

At the same time, other thoughtstreams were discussing finances, allocating manpower, gloating over our BR teams’ doings, spinning out scenarios, listening to music, greeting newcomers to Markspace, dispensing wisdom and guidance, and analyzing incoming data for purposes ranging from movements of rivals reacting to us, to narrowing down some of the stuff that needed to be solved to get to TL 11.

When we hit Eleven together, those Ranks were going to be popping off really, really quick, and production was going to get underway FAST.

It was truly a shame the only post-Tens in the Markspace were the Dukes, and they were not scientifically oriented. On the other hand, their ability to manipulate/lead/guide others was very well-informed, even if they didn’t have the ridiculous Charisma scores to back it up that we did. Their positions were providing us the backing we needed to do our jobs, and that was more than enough, actually.

In slow, boring, one-faceted reality, Briggs and I were clawing our way up a five-thousand meter sheer wall of stone, so severe it was plainly unnatural, and so hard and obdurate that even the birds found no place to roost on it... not that they’d want to touch something like this, humming with unnatural energies as it was.

The stone was hard, but Star Cored mindclaws didn’t care. We chewed into the stone like tofu, hauling ourselves up almost effortlessly. Briggs even deployed his Arakne Arms to give himself more legroom, the holes made by his Claws perfectly serviceable to the Arms, while I used my Tails for basically the same purpose.

An outsider watching would have seen us skittering up the sides faster than a man could walk. Of course, we were in camo mode, because we didn’t want a cannon sniping us off the cliff face. We would have been pretty annoyed if that happened.

Still, we didn’t waste time, and being as strong as we were, lifting our own bodyweight barely counted as light exercise. Golden Claws crunched into unnaturally dense basalt, sparked on trace elements protesting what we were doing, and we kept going up.

Dust storms raged around up here, a combination of temperature differentials and warring humidity that also sent lightning bolts crackling across the sky. This mountainous cliff, ringed by constant heat lightning and cyclonic winds, was friendly to absolutely nothing, and even the crystal rocs wouldn’t venture through this area, for fear of becoming a short-term and very bright incandescent light bulb before burning out.

Two schmooks who could ignore the lightning and the winds and weren’t trying to fly, not so much a problem.

Briggs and I reviewed the deployments happening in multiple locations around the Warp Zone. The new Hags and Hagspawn coming online wanted places to go and things to do, and well, there really wasn’t anything better. The girls were generally tough enough to survive out of the gate, the boys had to get to Three and so were delayed a bit, but generally speaking, they were Nulls and Sources who wanted to grind and power-level, and the unending minions of Chaos from across the galaxy were the perfect sacrifices on the altar of Karma.

Not that they were quite as unending anymore.

The two of us weren’t the only ones pushing in. We had started nineteen more invasion points, as all the new G&G and Marked soldiers needed some practice, too. They weren’t advancing anywhere nearly as quick as the first point, but two of the mega-cities, Jambus and Silliun, were located only a couple hundred miles apart, so the incursion points were actually fairly close by. The first priority had been to see if they could join up inside the Warp Zone, and two hundred miles of combat, land-clearing, and vivic-feeding later, the forces had linked up.

It was a small success, but it meant that along the rim, the space was indeed finite, and that meant it could be contained, and the different invasion points could expand and link together, further shrinking and containing the Warp Zone. It was nice to think that, but now it was proven... and it meant that this thing could, in the end, be beaten!

Having end goals was very motivating. However, all the Marked looked at the Map of the Warp Zone, and how Briggs and I had traveled over five thousand miles, trying to reach the center of it, and they were grateful that they had so, so much Karma they could still reap here, Omina, Omina Padme Hum.

He and I didn’t have to worry about them. They could get everything that we could. Yeah, we had some ExLite bonuses they didn’t, and we were ahead on the curve. They all still had the exact same foundation, knew it, and were chasing after us like good little boys and girls, with terrifying competency and enthusiasm.

A Legion Medicae had arrived from the nearby Indigo Hounds Legion, and helped set up the equipment needed by the new Thunder Bulls to produce more Legionnaires of their bloodline. The first recruits had already been chosen from among the young men who had not been Opened as Forsaken (generally because they were Two’s or higher), and they were undergoing the training and bioengineering that would turn them into the Emperor’s Own Legionnaires.

The Mekkers had naturally been ready to earn some big money and start supplying the arms and armor of the new Company, and to ease up suspicions, naturally the standard AMT stuff was being allocated in the way of their iconic armor and weapons. As for vehicles and other matters, the demand was low, and the explanation that they were attached to the Coronals for support was enough to deflect any attention.

The first mobile smelting factory had been constructed, the core tech installed, and was busily making hundreds of tons of refined E-silicon every day. As for the Perimeter mines, those were also pretty busy.

Those were basically being mined by ‘hand’ and mind. It was a downtime thing for the miners, as Star Core claws were uniquely suitable over pickaxes for carving through material, and Sun Strikes could chew through a lot of stone. Moving tons of rubble and ore was effectively some high-end weight training, and the wages and ore were specifically being used to buy and make Heavy Gravity belts... meaning those miners were getting very strong, indeed.

The core of the process was Orbs of Shaping Stone, wielded by the psions. Yep, they were pricey. Nope, they didn’t run out. They started out at ten cubic feet of stone affected at a time, but if continuously upgraded, could reach as high as forty. Ore and stone could be freely shaped into forms easy to move around, from blocks with handles to bricks to spheres, and even used to build up walls around the minesites very quickly... or shaped into the battlesites to make roads and encampments.

They also made tunnels and shafts to send the output on through outside the perimeter to the refining stations set up there. It was good, hard work, it paid very well and there were plenty of bonuses awarded to the workers... and if local creatures decided to bug them, more practice for Claws and Sun Shotting rifles.

Recruiting, expanding, recruiting, expanding. We could easily bring in more than ten thousand people a day, and Ranthas who wanted to expand their followings were quite happy to do so. The Map was exploding with covered areas, survey teams, and burgeoning mining magnates. Fast and efficient mini-mills were popping up to service the mines, freighter runs were being scheduled, and money was being poured into develop, develop, develop.

Ah, so proud of the kids. Making money and Karma hand over fist, leaving Mom and Dad to just lead the way so they could expound and expand upon everything.

Hey, it’s what ExLites were meant to do.

-----

Our Claws crunched, Arms and Tails heaved, and we both came up over the lip of the cliff. It didn’t go from almost vertical and gradually decline to the top... there was less than a hundred-foot rise in front of us, and it began to slope down, albeit not as precipitously as the outside.

We looked left and right at the massive, bowl-shaped crater extending out to the horizon on both sides. Sand storms were visible here and there, but the dust held no green, no water, the dark stone flowing down into the pale sands of the desert, somehow managing not to mix with them much.

We measured the arcs by eyeball, did some calculations, compared notes.

Okay, if the arc was constant, and actually formed a full circle, the center of this effect was a thousand miles in front of us. So, this crater was two thousand miles across...

More importantly, energies were roiling around us, planar physics were having a field day, and tens of thousands of eyes looked through ours as they considered the blasted landscape in front of us.

Our eyes fell on the outer edge of the waves of energy in front of us.

“That is the perimeter of a Throne Field,” Briggs stated with absolute certainty. He had been the one designing Crowns for the Legionnaires, and had made himself an expert on the things. “There’s a primary pulse radiating past us, and a secondary pulse forming an actual effect.”

I studied the on-off pulse, on about a ten-second cycle. “That’s not a true Throne field, right? It’s too big and dispersed. It’s got no Warding effects other than pushing away the Warp.”

“Yeah, I only see the dimensional lock, and it’s not even an Interdiction.” Briggs frowned. “The stronger pulse is cancelling out much of the lesser, and this is the breakpoint of their cancellation. So, weakening the bounds with the Warp outside this point, and it’s normal to slightly stronger within.”

“That’s still a big Throne field.”

“If you remove all the secondary characteristics... yeah, it’s still big,” he agreed. “Definitely not fusion powered, and even anti-matter would need to be massive. So, point singularity, quantum waves, or something of similar scale.”

“Two things. That looks like human tech, not alien.” Briggs stared at all the energies at work, and nodded agreement. “And that looks like the edge of a Ward, not a planar release.”

That narrowed his violet eyes. “It’ll cut off the Marks,” he noted.

“Which could be bad, in terms of us finding something. We need someone standing here as a relay.”

There was a torrent of /conversation in the back of our heads, and a stealth team was on the way in minutes. Tech working in the area behind us meant they’d actually make some good time, if they could avoid creatures, Freaker Storms, and all the stuff wanting to shoot them down.

Kris Rantha was Born to Fly, and quite looking forwards to it. Our lived-line tunnel a few hundred yards across would stay fixed even if the landscape around it changed, so they had a clear path. Strategic focus had shifted from going in deep to the core like us to starting the encirclement... and given the low-tech zone outside was actually smaller than the high-tech zone inside, a good idea from a logistics standpoint. We only had one base set up at the front of the First Salient in the tech zone, and while it was slowly expanding its fixation of space-time, it was more for testing out tactics and seeing how they worked, versus aggressive expansion against the Warped spilling into it.

Regardless, the Warped still came, they still fought and died, and Fed the Land. The area they had to cross to reach the Base increased, and more fortifications and traps could be put into place in the static zone.

Briggs and I sat down to wait. We weren’t bored. There was always the chance something irregular could happen in what we were watching, and there was so much other stuff happening in Markspace that downtime was basically only something our physical bodies ever had.

The Ring of Lightning around the mountain below us booming away constantly, we sat and carried on a lot of conversations.

---------

Six hours later, the infiltration team Clawed its way up the side of the mountain. Gloner Briggs was carrying Sona Chama, the Beacon Psi Bonded to Crim, the G&G ex-street punk turned Umbran Guard, on his back without a problem. T’Chaya Rantha, ebon-skinned and golden-eyed, completed the quartet, while Kris and a team of G&G’s stayed down with the extraction jet, concealing it just in case.

They set up station just inside and outside the Warding effect, as Briggs and I went in.