All our Swords got busy registering the spatial coordinates on the other side, while we also got busy plying said Swords against the startled drow guards lazing about there, and their cyber-slaved mechtoys, and murderhounds and reapercats and random Corsair reinforcements and merc guards and...

Well, let’s just say that nobody who saw us on the way out got to live, and their cameras were going to have trouble recording more than blurs, anyways.

The girls would have no problem whatsoever getting back into the city, and were going to do just that. Their jobs were to find as many such Portals as they could and get the coordinates for them. Mine was to get shit started on this side of the Rift, despite how much resistance I was likely to get.

My duel with Madam Liloth was going to have to wait a while. That said, all three of the girls hit Melee/11 with me after living through that grand celebration of the drow, and killing things bigger and older than we were.

I was going to hit Rantha Thirteen as soon as I delivered this message, maybe higher. After all, I had me some ambitions.

We were in a pirate port, a place where the dark sides of the galaxy came together to deal and get dealt with, aliens and the scum of existence side-by-side in a Don’t Knife Me, I Won’t Knife You (right now) kind of standoff suitable for dealing with the kind of unspeakable stuff you just didn’t find with your normal merchantman.

We could all see the heavy cruiser in orbit, with its attendant modified transport trailing after it. Data matched the lines of the ship of our target, his fleet was probably back in safer space, not wanting to make quite the trip this was, and probably covering for their boss.

While doing something coy like Airwalking up there was a possibility, or even jetting, that would be visible, and I wanted to be subtle-like... plus it was a long damn way and my fly speed was in miles/hour, not miles/second. I would be taking the local transportation.

The transport that Marquis de Krov had brought his cyborg slaves down on was gone, but his personal pinnace was still here. Getting out of here was going to be as simple as going invisible, holding onto the damn hull of the ship, and letting my Vajra deal with air resistance as it flew up into the void and delivered me into the heart of his ship.

And then, well, I had plans for the bastard.

-------

The girls vanished back into the starport, zipping through Riftcuts back into another part of Gloomheart, there to continue their explorations and additions to The Map. I blended into the top of the Marquis de Krov’s private ride and waited for him to come out.

It didn’t actually take all that long, if you were the patient sort. Nobody was clambering over the top of this thing to check it out, that’s what cameras and monitors that couldn’t see me anyways were for (amihitaba, Vampire’s Veil), and of course the guards were stationed at the entry points, not the roof.

About twelve hours after I sat down, him and his cohort of n’er-do-wells and paid throatslitters swept up, complete with a few house guards of his drow sponsors to make sure none of the watching pirates got any ideas. Once he left orbit, anything went, of course, and I assumed that whatever was being traded had already been sent up and out by other means.

The drow didn’t actually send some ships up to escort him, there being a very strict limit to how nice they could possibly be to a human, even one that would work with them so unscrupulously. He and his crew boarded, made sure that nothing had been strapped to, seeded on, or otherwise affixed to his ship, and then it was blasting off with rockets and anti-grav. There I was, still clinging to the top of the pinnace.

The air was hissing past me hard enough to cut steel as it rapidly picked up speed, but Vajra, frictionless; it zipped right on past me even more smoothly then it would the pinnace, so there were no handling problems, it was probably even a little bit smoother than normal. It didn’t take long to break out into space, but the ship was big enough to have its own small gravity field, and a residual atmosphere clinging to it.

I watched his ship growing before me.

For all the eye-peeping I’d done and continued to do, I had not personally been up in space before, nor seen a ship like this up close. Oh, I recognized all of them from having watched through the eyes of the kids and Marked a zillion times, but there’s always the first time for yourself, y’know?

Axiomatic Modal Tech demanded some freaking stupid, yet impressive architectural styles. It was meant to be blocky, domineering, tyrannical, intimidating, conveying a massively powerful physicality and implacability to the enemies and members of humanity alike.

I mean, seriously, you don’t need to put cathedral towers on a starship, statues of worship, mediation chambers, and that incredibly blocky style of construction, rune-patterns of assembly forming a greater purpose of Law that helped ward off the presence of the Warp, especially when the Throne field went up.

I imagined that statue of the Emperor wasn’t really intact at this point, but who knew? I wasn’t going to go over and inspect it.

Just a rake of the ol’ Rantha-peepers was enough to see that this ship had been in a lot of fights. Miniscule differences in alloys made the replacement plating stand out, and there was a lot of it. Carbon-scoring; not quite perfectly matched and patched replacements; breaks in the AMT pattern that might be dangerous in the Warp, might not. Likely, this sot didn’t believe or didn’t care about the profound nature of the stuff involved, and just had it dealt with as needed.

Well, it wasn’t something I could do anything about, so, eh.

Of course, the bloody thing was big, a couple kilometers long, with main gun barrels a hundred meters long facing forwards, massive side-mounted batteries of missile launchers, mushroom-like clusters of point-defense turrets, and the beehive stacks of the ship’s shields. The religious iconography was everywhere, but not maintained all that well, and lacked the continuity that would make it truly useful.

Well, bad luck had caught up to them today, so there was that.

The hangar deck of the heavy cruiser was yawning open, and we entered the ship’s atmosphere smoothly, the pilot deftly bringing us into the yawning chamber.

Two hangar entrances, one on each side of the ship, with another one in the stern for pure cargo, I surmised, seeing the squadrons of starfighters lined up on the floor and racks all about. At least two hundred at a glance, and the iconography and paint jobs were anything but reassuring, given the irregularity of markings and spreading of individualized styles. There were several smaller cargo transports and utility flitters here, and there was an adjacent hangar that seemed to be tightly packed with troop transports in storage.

Yeah, de Krov’s flagship was not a big cargo transport, that was certain.

It was fairly well maintained for a non-Fleet craft, but I could already see signs of slacking off everywhere, particularly in cleanliness. Fuel and power cables were snaking about in ways they shouldn’t, clearly just put down where it was convenient instead of on dedicated paths. Laziness and lack of discipline... but that’s what happened when you were pirates and crooks, and employed murderers and convicts...

The flyer glided into position on grav control and set down on its own dedicated spot... having clear access to either exit point, but giving plenty of space for the fighters to be launched and do their things. After all, if he wanted to leave in a hurry, he needed to have a quick shot out of here.

I wondered if he had a gunboat or yacht around that was Jump-capable, which would be a nice investment for running away. A racer or courier-ship was not out of the question when it came to preserving your own hide...

In the end, it didn’t matter for now. I quaffed a Potion of Invisibility, slightly more reliable than my hair, and jumped down from the flyer before it set down.

It was forty feet to the deck; I hit with a thump not heard above the soft rumble of maneuvering jets and whining grav-transoms, and the sound of many tons of ship hitting the ground not ten feet away from me.

I had naturally memorized the standard layouts of all these AMT model ships, including about fifty variations of them. All that data was standardized stuff, and when I was making parts for installation, I naturally had to know what went where and how.

Briggs handled the engineering hands-on stuff, but I was the one who had to take the first swings at the design and fitting all the stuff together, modifying the AMT to GAMT if possible.

The prominent bridge tower amidships wasn’t where the actual bridge was located... that was more a ceremonial gathering point and where most of the crew quarters were located, and entertainment and eating areas, etc.

The bridge was located further forwards, with more layers of shielding between it and the raging matter-destroying fire of the ship’s main reactor. If the reactor blew, the bridge could actually survive the shock, blowing away from the rest of the ship into a tumble... and the secondary reactors powering the forward guns could be rerouted into the maneuvering rockets on the forward canards, enabling the survivors of the front part of the ship to drag the rest of it back to port... or get there independently.

I’d seen several examples of it during the ‘Vore Invasion, as thousands of crew stranded in the ships didn’t want to just wait for a tow with the void full of biovore vessels, many still teeming with hungry things inside. It was slow and it looked pitiful, but it got them away from the living starships and back to port regardless.

So, I wanted to go forwards, to the area between the transom cannons and the broadside array just beyond the hangars here. It was a bit of a walk, but that was what moving floors, transom rides, and elevators were for, as well as personal lifts through the pedestrian zones.

Still, much too big and roomy place, probably because they had to haul ISBM’s through it. I avoided most of the traffic by dint of walking up on the ceiling, which clearly hadn’t been nano-scrubbed nearly enough, trotting ahead of the Marquis’ party as he took the opportunity to walk to his chambers and enjoy the feeling of having made a lot of something and getting what he wanted.

---

The ship was getting underway within ten minutes of him landing, plainly just waiting for him to arrive. I registered the sudden shift in grav, even if I couldn’t hear the deep thrum of the engines starting up. Basic inertial compensators dealt with the acceleration as the ship pulled out of orbit quickly, heading out for a location past the unstable gravity wells of this system, where they could start a Helldive into the Warp and get back to human space.

The transport ship for all them cyborgs was likely paralleling this ship and coming right along with us, too. I couldn’t see it taking a separate course until they were back in a safe system, after all.

With total aplomb, I headed for the captain’s quarters. Given the man’s ego, they would only be bigger than normal, and there was a limited number of floor plans which could satisfy that. Now, breaking into such a place would normally be pretty difficult, but I didn’t really have to do that... I just had to get inside with him.

While ships like this traditionally had Interdiction fields included into the ship’s shields, all part of the Throne defenses, such defenses inside the ship were usually part of the walls.

So, for instance, if I saw an open door, Chalice could ‘port right on through it, especially after I verified the layout of it in my Trembling Domain from the hallway.

The captain’s cabin would be a convenient place for me to spend the voyage, too. Of course, if he had some entertainment in there, I could avail myself of it... and I couldn’t even picture someone like de Krov’s temperament not having a couple pleasure slaves in his quarters, catering to his every whim. Whether I could trust them or not, that was a separate matter.

I was certainly looking forward to serving him more than a little bit of his own style of business. Hostile takeovers were just the funnest and most profitable things, after all.