The rock-boring machine was using the mishmash of psitech and weird science unanimously dubbed Beacon Tech in honor of the mentalists who did most of the work. Instead of Shaping away the rock in front, it liquified it, and pumped it out back into molds while any useful elements or ores were filtered out of it by other Beacon Tech. The base rock was continually hauled back along the multiple lines being constructed, to be used to make roads and basic walls for fortifications and transport lines snaking through the Warp Zone as we conquered and cleared it. Investing plascrete and durasteel for a spatial rift that was going to undergo radical geographical change at some point just wasn’t a wise idea unless we Ripped more Corridors through the place.

We did have duracrete bracing for both this tunnel and the Main Line. The Main Line would be getting disassembled at some point, and we fully expected it to collapse when the Warp Zone was finally cleared. We were naturally going to drill a third pair of lines and re-use the raw materials of the Main Line, said process going to start as soon as the Ripped Line reached the Tribute.

My Queen and the Two Princes (which titles heartily embarrassed the two young men, despite themselves) didn’t need the path laid out in front of them, able to feel the reality distortion of the Warp Zone as clearly as a sun shining ahead of them. Each of them had their own bonded Rantha, of course; Serena with My Queen, still carrying Lepido around, and Grill and Mika with the Princes.

The latter two had the Devoted Follower Talent, and had been Sevens when they glommed onto the two Ones. Now they were Nines and the lads were Tens, but neither much cared, everyone was happy, and leaning on a Rantha mentally and physically as you faced the fact that the rest of your life you were going to be a weapon of the Land against all the unnatural shit in existence... yep, take a Rantha. Nulls were made to endure and to lean on, and the right Hag could make it more than tolerable, too...

Chelsea and Davo, and Shiera and Piotr were with Briggs and I, all of us following the lead of a Void Brother, making our Ripped Corridor nice and wide for future use and abuse. The four kids got the honors as the leaders of the first groups to reach the Warp Zone initially, so this was finishing their symbolic trek of making a true path to the heart of it all. Glory Award extra freebies are not to be passed up.

The ground was still abused and stripped of life, although the primary three dimensions shifted and altered around slowly us as we trotted across the landscape, overlays of knotted realities dispersed by Helices, burned back and away by Source Fields, and then sealed off and stamped with Nulls. As typical of their kind, the beloved of the Land, the Princes had Leveled with incredible speed, helped by having no end of things to slaughter for Karma, and had little trouble keeping up with us.

They also didn’t have to pay six times the cost for all these Rantha Levels, just three or four cheap Human Levels, so they were missing a bunch of huge Karmic sinks, relatively speaking. None of the Ranthas minded, of course, just happy to have Void Brothers driving up in Levels even faster than other normal humans...

---

The three Voids came skating up on the Tribute, and from a couple miles back, slowed down to take a look at the thing.

The biggest difference was that there was a city around the ship, built up to house workers and all the machinery needed to make the stuff for the ship. The biggest of these were the specialized foundries needed to forge the immense hull plates for the ship, a process usually done by space-born factories, which naturally we couldn’t access here.

Some of the holes were covered over, others were gaping open as the ship was cut open and new modular segments were being put in place. A gash a quarter mile wide and almost the full length of the hull was cut into one area, and flows of men and materials were moving out of it as they accessed the central area of the ship.

The sleeper pods all had to be repaired or removed, and we had no need for a hundred million sleepers at this time. The layered warehouses for all the sleeper modules occupied a lot of underground room, even Compressed, and the modules themselves were being slowly repaired by devoted factories as they were removed.

Removal of the tubes naturally opened up the entire center of the ship, and meant it could be crewed and actively used. The devoted power systems for sleeper modules had been layered but separated, and now new ones were being brought in, as internal reconfigurations and reinforcements and repairs to the ship’s skeleton were taking place.

Oh, the Tribute was now under null grav, a devoted suspension field formed underneath it and keeping it levitated a hundred feet off the ground. After all, the hull plates down there were badly mangled, too, and had to be swapped out.

Every member of the workforce here was at least a Six Null, moving from a combat status to a worker status where they were needed. They were also anticipating becoming crew members in the future, if they desired it, and they all knew without a doubt that working on this ship was probably the grandest thing they were ever going to do in their lives. If the numbers of kids being born had exploded in reaction, well, these things happen.

There were layers of scaffolding, webbing, dangling lines, machine tracks, lifters and hoverwagons, tractor cranes, and cargo containers, all in motion, all constantly moving here and there. Thousands of arc welders were visible like tiny fireflies all over inside and outside the hull, while drones shuffled around on endless errands moving things to and fro.

If Janus III had the most skilled workforce ever working on its ships and rebuilding, the elite of those were working here, on the Tribute.

It was an open secret now that massive amounts of men and material were going into the Warp Zone, and the stories leaking out, and the quality of the troops that it generated, meant the naysayers literally had no ground to stand on. That Mechanists who demanded to go in went barmy within days, sometimes hours, without the protection of an active Crown effect, making it just one more reason to deride them. Psions without a bonded Null or Source rapidly fled screaming as well without the same level of protection, and suddenly being a Beacon psion became almost an enviable thing to the elites of psociety...

The inverted Throne pulse in the air was powerful, and basically just ignored now, like the background ticking of a clock. Everyone knew there was a powerful demon down in Engineering, nobody went there, and if the Throne Field went down, a system-wide catastrophe might start. They were perfectly happy to be utterly safe in the heart of the Warp Zone so they could get this ship finished.

Tribute City was now the domain of Jillo Briggs and Liza Rantha, whose Talents were Organizer and Administrator, respectively. One handled the people, the other handled the logistics.

The demon was now being handled by Constanz Rantha, whose natural Talent was Clarity, and the first Rantha that Duke Parablum would have promoted directly to the station of Inquisitor, were Coronal Guards allowed it, and if he thought it was even possible.

She was also the only other Rantha who could now replicate Love Potion #9, and she spent a considerable amount of time brow-beating the enslaved Spell Weaver, plumbing it for data and theory, sifting true from false, corrupt from damning, her Talent keeping her mind cold and clear of corruption and infiltration by the Warp, regardless of its subtlety. She was responsible for keeping everyone on the straight and level and free of any Warp influence, and watching for any signs of failure in the Throne field.

Admittedly, the influence of the Warp here, in the Inner Field, was less than in the Outer Zone where the secondary field didn’t exist, but everyone was still greatly reassured that she was watching over them in their own devoted Markspace.

She also freed me up to do other things. Naturally this tied her down, but as long as she got to off the Spell Weaver when it was time to do so, she was cool with it. In the meantime, she played a lot of strategy games against it, clashed against its will, and stayed very ready to kill it.

It knew it was going to become a very nice Baneskull for her at some point, but oh well, as long as it got its fix, it just didn’t care. Love Potion #9 was not something to mess around with, especially with a dozen Brands on you. Or rather, it was everything to mess around with, excluding anything else.

---

“What are you all thinking, My Queen, My Princes?” I inquired calmly, and the Princes sighed as My Queen totally ignored it.

“It doesn’t belong here,” My Queen said firmly, his now-dark Rantha eyes studying the thing. The two Princes both nodded in agreement. “Nor the Throne field, that is a given. Its destiny lies elsewhere.”

All three looked up and turned their heads. I took note of the angle, made some calculations. No, not Tellus. Spinwards... definitely on the other side of the Rift. Aquila Sector, where the Corunsun Duchy lay...

“Nothing for you to do here?” I asked calmly.

“The Throne Field needs to go, but it is under control,” My Queen stated, narrowing his eyes, his dark pupils moving and looking at things no Rantha could see as his Helices danced subtly. “When it goes, there’s going to be things happening, Sama.”

A Void Brother saying that was pretty much a curse. But... it still had to go.

“Understood. I do have a question for you three.” They all looked at me, curious, as did everyone else. “Plans aren’t finalized. Star Carrier, or Dreadnought?”

All heads turned back to the massive ship on cue, that huge central shaft, the amount of area inside.

Fill that with generators and you had a warship of incredible firepower, possibly unrivaled in the galaxy, especially with TL 15+ tech, psionic additions, and GAMT synergies.

“The answer is destruction or creation,” Prince Firesword spoke up. “A Star Carrier of such size is also a drydock, and the ship is a node of creation. It could potentially build an entire fleet by itself, if it but has the raw materials. Otherwise that creativity is simply designed to replace and modify its own combat systems, and it becomes an engine of destruction.”

“Star Carrier it is.” I could make ships with guns with the Tribute, it didn’t need to have the biggest guns itself. Superb shields would do most of the work... and a few really nice ones wouldn’t be a bad thing, of course.

I glanced at Briggs, he nodded, and Option Beta went off to the planners and designers. It actually made things easier, as Energized materials for really high-end armaments got attention we didn’t want. Defensive stuff, not so much. Now, we wanted stuff that could help make other stuff. The Empire’s reactionary people-shooters were always happy about more production.

If some modular attachments happened to be Really Big Guns, well, there were a lot of people who wanted to shoot such things.

Of course, (and I grinned with all eight canines) that meant we had to build a fleet to go with it...

--------------

It was a quiet moment that was going to change the galaxy forever when Smith Briggs and Jones Rantha found the first Phlogiston River, as it was promptly and inaccurately dubbed. A lot of astrophysicists screamed in outrage, and were promptly outvoted by Rule of Cool. Exohelial quantum gravitospatial tethers didn’t even crack the top hundred potential names.

The soup of the heliopause was a weird place to go looking through for unknown stuff, and perhaps to nobody’s surprise, the Phlos weren’t found right at the solar ecliptic, as doing a whole circuit of it (to the surprise and violent disapproval of several scattered forces operating in that area) found out. As we had no true basis for calculating where the damn things were, that largely meant a lot of repetitious circuits up and down the heliosphere... which was basically a huge globe/teardrop twice as far across as the entire star system!

It meant a lot of area to cover. It was literally an entire light-day across, traipsing about there beyond the heliosphere where Dark Matter creatures and Elder Gods puttered around, trying to find the needle in the system-sized haystack.

It took a lot of patience, a lot of time, a lot of correlated data, and ever-tightening criteria. A typical ship or drone was limited to ten light-seconds or less of sensor range, since we didn’t know what we were looking for. We did know that straight lines to the nearest stars didn’t work, as that was the first thing we checked.

Drones blew up. Void dwellers and elder races got excited and violent. Ships fought, the Fleet enjoyed the new activity, and a BR duo making out under the stars found the first one.