Teleport Foci were all in place. We could Teleport from the Blast Wall all the way to the ship in one go, although I hadn’t put it inside the ship because I Not Stupid. We had to cross the Warding Zone to teleport further, which actually meant having to go down the mountain... or would have, if we hadn't already started on boring a hole through it to cut down the annoyance level of getting here.

There was going to be a LOT of traffic going to this place, after all.

------

Briggs and I arrived back there with T’Chaya, Crim, and the others, who were all glad to be relieved of relay duty, and moving on to the next step of the process.

There was a planet-wide war going on, after all, and in the last couple of days, the local scenery inside the Warp Zone had basically stopped changing. That also meant that, under the impetus of Karma-hungry Rantha-led combat squads, anything dangerous in the local multi-mile radius was no longer alive.

The fighting between various Warp forces going at one another was starting to die down already. Although the numbers of people we had here wasn’t high, it basically included the youngest and newest troops, and kiddies who needed Karma and experience. The outer reaches occasionally had demons, but without the massive threat level of modern weapons, were actually the best place to make Five, and that was where all the new kids were going.

We definitely didn’t climb down. Winging it down was totally easy when you can actually grow wings. Briggs was wearing rockets, so he didn’t care.

Four loaded Disks and a full hoverwagon followed us down as everybody descended. The worksite below was already heaped up with stone being processed into crete and readied for processing into plascrete for the track that was going to be shot across a thousand-miles of bio-stripped plain to the Celestial Tribute.

Briggs and I flung ourselves across the Thronefield’s edge and out into space. My Markspace, after a remarkably short yet world-turning absence, lit up again.

A whole lot of eyes turned to look at Briggs and I as our presences, so core to the Markspace, came online.

What I noticed was a shitload more Seven to Tens, and some extremely fast improvements in other areas, Karma just waiting to be digested and allocated. I also noticed a lot of absent Doors, with the lingering echo of death behind them, and thousands upon thousands more new ones, recruited by my girls, finally hooked into the greater Markspace, and more coming online all the time.

I could feel the absent echoes of over ten thousand dead. I grit my teeth. I couldn’t be there for everybody, and not even all my kids could, either. People were going to die, that was the cruel truth of it, and the only thing you could do was Level up and make it harder to kill you, and easier to kill the other guy who offed your pal.

There had been a lot of that going on.

I had tons of general data relayed by Crim and T’Chaya, so I knew the broad strokes of what had been going on. Now, Briggs and I were basically deluged with all sorts of waiting reports, including death notices from howling-mad, pissed-off kids with an unrelenting mad on for Xenos and cerevores now, which definitely did not bode well for either species’ dreams of galactic conquest and consumption.

“They got Delors?” I swore to nobody. Ophilia had got there too late; she had been pslaver-virused, was losing her mind, and had blown her own brains out rather than be turned into a puppet.

Ophilia had Delors’ soul, too, and there were a lot of Ranthas waiting for the current generation of brothers and sisters to get born so they could allocate some souls.

I thought about the Tribute, and how it would technically be the perfect place security-wise to Vat in a lot of kids... except the Warp waves thrumming through the place. Maybe once we were done there...

I doubted I’d need to get much clearance for more Vats to grow kids. The battle reports flying through indicated just how much rampant massacre and slaughter... er, doughty fighting the kids had inflicted upon the enemy, and the Dukes Twilight knowing where the souls that drove them came from meant there’d be precious little resistance to more of them coming online to fight.

Wasn’t any different than Imperial Legionnaires, really, without the Mekkers needing to be involved... or the Empire.

From a loyalty to the Empire standpoint, strictly speaking, it was probably a bad decision to let Hag-blood Ranthas and Briggs’ keep accumulating, as it was going to lead to trouble with Imperial authority at some point.

On the other hand, what we were doing was awesome and lighting a whole new road for the human race.

Humanity, or the Empire? Many people thought they were one and the same, but there were others who knew otherwise. The problem was, both the Warp and the Empire were energetic in stomping out any other alternatives. The Empire was united at all costs, and the Warp wanted extremism. When the Empire crushed you and the people you were trying to help, where did you go, in the end? The Warp smiled and took you in, and turned you into your own and the Empire’s worst nightmare.

---

The kids, however, saw something else, and loud “Oooooooo’s” reverberated in Markspace as they saw the pair of us.

We were on a refined level now. The only two post-Tens with Marks were the Dukes Twilight, and they didn’t have our Statlines, and usually stayed quiet behind their Doors. Strictly speaking, they weren’t as Broad and Deep as we were, and a lot of their Karma came through basically Allegiance management, manipulating others into doing what needed to be done, inspiring, and leading, not personal combat... although personal combat had likely gotten them past Ten in the past.

But Briggs and I were now solidly at Eleven!

We’d punched a fixed reality interdiction tunnel through the Warpzone.

We’d located a monstrous ship of the ancient times hidden for thousands of years on Janus III.

We’d warned of a biovore infestation in time to actually be prepared when some of the kids actually stumbled onto them, and all hell broke loose.

We had purified and united the disparate AI’s of the Celestial Tribute, assuming control over the ship.

We had defeated the Warp Infestation of the Ship’s Throne, and taken control of it and the Weaver commanding it. We now could grind down and eliminate the Warpzone’s denizens completely, with time, and then collapse and seal it.

We had laid claim to some TL 17 tech, some crucial parts thereof which were accompanying us back, along with knowledge that was once sealed and dumped deep into the vaults of the Mekkers, never for fleshbags to see.

And we’d seized the title of a Duke, although what it would amount to was anybody’s guess.

Epic Quests are Epic Karma. Breaking that wall to Eleven was totally a thing. Rantha Hag and Hagspawn Levels, +1.

In real terms, not game-breaking. More minor advancements possible in Stats, Skills, buy more Feats, Attack bonus (YAY, ATTACK BONUS!) and so forth and so on.

Eleven Ranks in a Skill possible.

Oh, DUH, that’s how you make a Tachyon Drive and a Harmonic Drive! It would only be the simplest and crudest, there was a lot more profound math and materials to arrange to rank the damn thing up towards actually moving with great speed on the road to true inertialess and free-loving, but I had figured out how to make one, and I knew what direction we had to prepare to improve things and get ready to make those improvements.

The Tribute had all kinds of educational software, records, schematics, designs, plans, and prints for technology all the way up to TL17 almost across the board, 18 to 20 in (very) narrow areas. Better yet, they had TL17 fabrication technology, which was basically the equivalent of a holy relic.

The Mekkers would reduce this star system and anyone inside it to ash rather than let it fall into anyone else’s hands.

Just a cursory glance and I could see the comparisons within tech ranges between the old stuff and newer Mekker stuff. There had been some improvements, mostly in materials management. It seemed the ancients had easier access to crazily-Energized materials than we did today, and so hadn’t bothered to control costs and find alternate means of making them. There were design improvements everywhere in the TL10 and below areas, where numerous people could contribute little bits of insight and design changes over the millennia, but just the bits of TL11 tech I’d seen didn’t show much change beyond superficials and a distinct bias towards use by cybered people... and production methods that virtually ignored use of psionics.

Hardly unexpected, after all. The Mekkers had been the ones doing the improvements.

I could now start upgrading everything, without being at the beck and call of Mekkers and restricted in design functions and parts-making. Indeed, being able to integrate Holy Patterns into default Axiomatic stuff was going to be extremely useful, although it did mean the stuff I made was not ‘perfectly modular’, which was the main point of AMT. Modular among themselves, sure, but not older AMT designs.

I didn’t care. Briggs and I were already exploding with design work we didn’t have to beg from the Mekkers or get made elsewhere; we could simply make it ourselves now!

------

Janus Prime had lost hundreds of millions of citizens, and yet was still basically an endless resource of bodies as we began to recruit again. In the chaos it was very easy for thousands of citizens to vanish every day from the overview of the Mekkers, and given the scale of the labor force we needed, that was exactly what we did.

Briggs and I had relayed our labor needs before we hit the ground in the Warpzone. Among other things, this was a battlefield Full of Shit. All that stuff could be fed into fabbers once it was repurposed, and used to Make Stuff.

The Celestial Tribute needed to be fixed. It needed the raw material, so feeding it that material and adding Vakker-tech and Holy AMT buttressing to its design and builds was a thing. As it needed human labor of the proper persuasion for that, that meant people needed to be brought into the center of the Warp Zone, turned into engineers and skilled workers, and put to work alongside the countless drones now fixed on changing and upgrading.

Yeah, the Celestial Tribute wasn’t going to be a fallen colony ship by the time we were done with it... and Briggs was salivating just thinking about it. I had to admit I had equally great expectations.

-----

The trip back involved a lot of planning, allocation of responsibilities, and new actions to undertake, all in the middle of a war going on that hadn’t even cleared Janus III yet, let alone all the other cities. The TL 17 industrial fabber coming back with us, and all its datafiles of things it could make, would need someplace to sit up and be fed. Oddly enough, there were going to be lots of areas to be cleared away and salvaged, and more to the point, there was a lot, Lot, LOT of mining that was going to get done.

We just needed to scare up some new funds, that’s all...