I wanted to do a great many things. So much exciting stuff! At this time, I was still unfortunately on a tether, as I had to get back and give my addicted greater demon its fix or it would go off its rocker, and nobody really wanted to see what it could do to the Warp Zone if it was beyond barmy.

Alas, alas. It was a good thing I had so many ambitious kids out there, I guess.

Recruitment was ongoing and so key to the combination of rebuilding and reorganizing this stratified and feckless society of addicts and idiots. Senior Hagbloods were quite happy to give directions and ‘issue quests’ to their juniors about all these happy opportunities to exploit. People had different Talents, sometimes very conflicting, but knowing what your Talent was, catering to it, and bending it to benefit people was an art form we all loved to do, since we all started from the same place. That we could run undermafias, rob wealthy people blind, form upstanding companies churning out consumer products and wargoods, and hunt down lawbreakers as a family all at the same time was just more fun when it came right down to it.

Still, going down to chat with a Tekron was interesting enough to be worth my time. It wasn’t like I had to worry about Karmic accrual at this point. The Kids were passing up mountains of Allegiance Karma, and since I was sending it all back to them to build them up further, it was driving my Racial Levels up with the need to satisfy their demands for More Stuff to Do.

Now, Rantha Racial Levels were extremely expensive with all the bells and whistles, but my Allegiance, such as it was, was expanding monstrously, and with the continuous give-backs to help everyone out, the Duty and Loyalty ratings going through the roof meant all that did is make the pass-up ever higher. By investing in my people repeatedly, the virtuous cycle was repeating and growing massively.

I would be hitting Twelve very soon, upgrades to tech would be streaming online, everybody would go into a delirious tizzy of upgrades and reassessments and new ideas and possibilities and mini and major quest goals...

But now I had to talk with an emotionless robot from a line of sentient AI’s with a profound irritation for biological life forms. I wondered if they were converted former biologicals themselves, or just ran on negative energy as an alternate fuel source? If so, the death of living creatures created more fuel, but no living creatures around basically cut off their own fuel sources.

The idea of letting the galaxy swarm with life and then reaping it all had occurred to us, but unfortunately millions-year deep archeology was one of those sciences of very low priority in an alien-infested universe, and asking the creatures who usually wanted to kill us tended not to get results. It was non-productive, in the end. Culling just deprived them of a fuel stream in return for a short-term glut. Went against logic. It was entirely possible that this Tekron was being sustained just by the natural deaths of the people in Janus Prime, and had simply harvested the dead of war for a reserve against tougher times ahead.

He should be somewhat protective of an agreeable fuel source, and as long as he wasn’t actually eating souls, we didn’t actually care. The Tekron race, on the other hand, would simply have the attitude that we were endlessly replaceable and simply not care if we were all extinguished...

We’d have to see what its priorities were.

---

Underspire was a complete mess after the fighting, and the repairs would be ongoing for at least the next century. That was fine, gave people work to do. Whole sections of the city were uninhabitable... well, by normal people. Tons of folk plenty happy to live in those zones, and really, if you just got water and sewage there, local power generation could take care of itself, and just doing tiered farms instead of stuffing people in habs and feeding them drugs kept them sated.

So naturally enough, that’s what a lot of the kids were doing; transforming Janus Prime slowly with lots more green. After all, at some point the Warp Zone was going away, and the planet would be very different when it did. Bonus points, people were eating better. Upspire people naturally wanted to eat fresher produce, and didn’t want to work to do so... but had monstrously hard times recruiting workers except at unviable pay scales, and couldn’t really enter the business. Oh, too bad, so sad...

More deaths to sustain the Tekron, I suppose.

---

I wasn’t tracked by any cameras or observed by any electronics, and the people certainly didn’t register who I was. Underspire was still a place of odd attire and personal motifs, to say the least, and if you didn’t look remarkable, you were basically invisible. Inverting my Charisma to have people ignore me was a trick of the Stealth skill, Faceless in a Crowd, and so my heading into the newly credited area belonging to the Hole was untracked and untraced... and more eyes than mine were making sure.

Rantha True Seeing eyes were in a lot of places these days, as oh so many dops, Possessing demons, cerevores hiding in skulls, bodyjumper Warp sorcerers, and rogue psions were finding out... and the more mundane zwilniks were finding it ever harder to prosper in a career where sudden disappearances were the normal endings to their lives and futures. That so many of the addicts ended up pslaved by contaminated drugs was something that turned the majority of society against them. For those who just didn’t give a frak, if they vanished, and drugs were involved, it was quietly spread that the zwilniks and their clientele got what was coming to them.

Those who tried to make use of this to off their rivals untraceably found that the people doing zwilnik removal were also very happy to get rid of opportunistic murderers, too. Zwilnik removal was all cleared and substantiated ahead of time, it just wasn’t as loud and showy as some of the Juris wanted... although they got to hit all the distributors they wanted to, which often they didn’t. Distributors had connections, and there were some connections going Upspire that were getting a bit worked up as their business model was failing and their guaranteed revenue stream, which should have been booming with PTSD’d civilians and soldiers, was instead drying up. Their employees, once enjoying an inexhaustible track of opportunity for ambitious sots from Under and Downspire, were going away, and new ones were getting clearly reluctant to end their lives within a short period.

I knew a lot of cold eyes were watching this death spiral of zwilniks unhappily. As their addicts were either cured or eliminated, surviving addicts became like sources of gold, prized possessions to be warred over, especially when the number of incoming addicts they were trying to make was nowhere near expectations. The prices of many drugs plummeted as desperate dealers tried to offload them, which only got the dealers removed all the faster, and things were shaking Upspire among many entrenched families and pharma corps who suddenly couldn’t recoup their costs, suppliers who weren’t getting paid, money wasn’t moving, and people started exchanging bullets and bombs instead of bribes and blood money.

The Incursion had stopped, the fallout and the killing went on. Welcome to the future!

---

I simply tap-tap announced my presence, just in case the Tekron didn’t know I was there, although the faint Band signal on my arm would be more than enough to register me. Communicating on the Band was still a stupid thing for it to do, so in an age of ever-dizzying high tech; face-to-face in a dead zone was still the safest way.

I stood there in a side corridor with a route that led right into the Hole through a complex mix of service passageways and tunnels nobody should know about. Inigo had slid through this area, in and out, not going too deep once she saw the levels of necrotech spike to unwholesome levels. While the Tekron had doubtless reorganized some of the spaces, there was no doubt that we had a pretty good idea of the layout within. That it was probably using a private sustained pocket dimension was not out of the question, but beyond our remit at this point. None of us wanted to go test the defenses that had chopped up a Xenos army and sent them back out without a good reason.

It didn’t take too awful long for a cyberzombie to come traipsing out to meet me. Actually, it was in pretty good shape. Looked to be a pslave, its brainfried status adjusted with negative energy to undeath, realigned with nanotech to serve its new master, and some unhealthy enhancements added to its dead flesh to make it more dangerous.

Didn’t come with the extras. Probably figured the show of force wouldn’t work, which was true, and it wasn’t necessary, either.

The cyberized undead stopped in front of me, staring at me with black obsidian eyes.

“Salutations!” I greeted it amiably, in flawless Necrus. “Long time no see! It is good to see that you have been keeping yourself productive. This model is much better than the last. Do corpses with their sense of identity previously destroyed make better undead?”

It blinked slowly at me. “Yes, Sama Rantha.” No reason to hide it, I guess. “Why are you here?”

“Drow have taken a sporting interest in us. Given their methods of operation and their being drawn to depravity, they will be coming to Underspire just to see the sights and sneer at the pitifully dull human standards of excess even while they indulge in them. Their nature is to seek out challenges and attempt to kill them. Their biotech, necrotech, psitech, and weird science are all at levels that can discern your true nature. We do not want that to happen, for the same reason that we don’t want your own kind to find you.

“Our primary goal is to find ways to get rid of them in such a manner that they think the Warp is acting against them, causing them to be intensely unlucky while they are killed in fairly random manners that should be outright impossible, needlessly showy, rather dramatic, and a combination of showy and subtle that will give them the creeps.

“We are wondering if you had any suggestions you might be willing to offer?”

The painted, withered face of the cyberzombie regarded me for long minutes. I waited calmly to hear its reply, even if it was only going to send me off.

I was actually a bit impressed when it replied, “There are several scenarios that can be adapted to aid in foiling the deluded elvar.”

“Excellent!” I held up a thumb drive. “Lay them out in simple format, and we will execute them to the best of our ability. I assume you will render aid unseen at the side.”

He reached out to touch the thumb drive, there was a dark spark, and I took it back, sensing it brimming full of data.

“Thank you. I doubt you need anything, given the resources you’ve snaffled up during the recent disturbances, but is there something you require that we could supply you with that will not betray your presence?”

“Information,” was the instant reply.

I had to raise an eyebrow. “Clarify?” I asked reasonably.

“Knowledge on the metaphysical structure of the universe,” it explained.

I frowned slightly. “Remand the conversation to Human. Necrus is a transmagical language at its core, and I don’t want to talk in machine code, it doesn’t handle metaphysics well.” I shifted my language. “What part of the metaphysical structure are you curious about?”

“Immortality,” was the prompt reply in stiff, flat Human.

Well, that was no surprise. I rocked back, considering that a necroic AI asking about that was indeed not a huge surprise. An AI powered by death could logically persist long after the last living thing died, if it had enough reserves... but eventually, those reserves would indeed run out, the universe would collapse, and it would start over. Even undead would wear out and down, as even if negative energy was born from decay, there would be positive energy degradation in return over the eons.

“I will ask for clarification. Eternity, or Immortality? They are different levels of existence.”

“Query: What is the difference?” It didn’t have emotions, and the voice was flat and mechanical, but the swiftness of response indicated eagerness.