“Oh, no, no.” I waved my hand. “Forsaken aren’t Psions. They are just like the rest of you and I, can’t send out psionic power at all. You know most Forsaken are Nulls, just like me. They have all the psychic presence of a rock.”

They looked at one another behind me.

“Your Null,” she barely hesitated with the word, “is very strong. I cannot feel your presence at all.”

“Wind over stone,” I waved airily, completely ignoring the fact they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. “Vortices draw in energy continuously. Voids filter and pass through. Nulls sit there like rocks, and Sources radiate.”

I also ignored them tensing behind me. Obviously, they had never heard any of this before.

“I confess to never having a met a Source, or even a Null before today,” the eldest of them filled in smoothly.

“Hah! You’ve probably met millions. The average person is a Null if Awakened. The average exceptional Forsaken is a Source. So, if you’ve met any person, you’ve met a potential Null who wasn’t Awakened. We’re as common as dirt.”

I could tell that the fact alarmed them. “I... was not told this...” the elder admitted, almost despite herself.

“Well, who would tell you? Psions loathe all the Forsaken, and Nulls are, generally speaking, the most useless of all of them to a psion. All we do is sit there and Not Take It when psions get their knickers in a kadoodle. We are extremely annoying. At least Sources are big, strong, and easy to get along with.” I leaned closer to her conspiratorially. “You sure you’ve never met a Source before?”

“Quite,” she answered softly.

“Well, then you Vortices are in for a real treat.” We walked out of the building, everyone giving us a wide berth. “That armor rated for high drops?”

“It is,” she informed me.

“Perfect! We’re going to take a dive into Downspire about twenty klicks away.” The jets on my greaves extended out from Compression with a click as I strolled right toward the edge of the walkway and landing area. “I’ve already got clearance from Traffic Control,” I said, hopping weightlessly up on the eight-foot railing as they looked up at me. “You ladies ready for a short jaunt?”

--------

Their maneuvering wings were golden memory gossamer-metal, unfolding from the plates on their backs as their jets kicked in. Given I looked like I was flying on flaming wings, I couldn’t fault them for their glittery golden pinions in return, and they obviously had flying experience with how easily they shadowed me as we literally headed downtown.

Traffic Control had us marked, so there was no problem with the airborne traffic or switching lanes as we descended... and the Sisters very much had priority over other traffic.

The twenty kliks went by in a matter of minutes at our speed, altitude gradually lowering as we drew closer to the multi-level factory that was both a production center and a G&G training area. The nearest three bloks had already been cleared and claimed, and a few thousand zwilniks had died in the doing. The kids were aggressively claiming more territory, the current holders of those territories were aggressively fighting back, and there was a fun time Downspire in old Kolosti.

We zipped over one of the firefights going on, as G&G people led by Trish Rantha and Tobias Briggs were making a push into the Razor Eaters’ territory, complete with flashes of lasers, some autofire, and a few explosions. I saw her, she waved up at us as she shot a ‘borg between the eyes and chopped the arm off another one, and some sniper had the ill-wit to shoot at us. I whipped out Paten and put ten las-shots into him in strobing disapproval of his life choices, and nobody tried another one.

“Free entertainment!” I called back to the Sisters, who remained scrupulously quiet, and probably mindful of the fact I’d just picked off a man shooting from a window from a hundred yards off while flying at 200 mph or something.

I was daring to use a Humanbane Weapon, too. No mistaking that bloody red flame, nosirree.

It was only a couple miles further to the gates. I phoned ahead and told them we were coming, and so nobody shot us as we swooped on in towards the landing deck on the roof of the administration building. We still hadn’t totally fixed the hole in the roof next door where a tanker load of flammable toxic waste had come down and fallen on the factory... and strangely not combusted, since we’d seen it coming, and our psions had suppressed the flames around it and controlled the chemicals straight into the flushes, only losing a couple people who happened to be reporting constantly to external forces...

A few people in Traffic Control, a shipping clerk, and three Mekkers who thought they were clever had all died within a day. It helped when the local mastermind was dumping his activities to your hackers and you knew all their dirty schemes ahead of time...

I pulled up, drifted down two inches smoothly, and skated ahead, turning to watch them come in with control, if not quite so much grace as I had. Power armor was more about soaking the impact than being smooth, after all.

“Come and follow me, Sisters.” I led the way to the stairs, waved the doors there open, and they followed only a little warily down into a bright wide corridor, leading to a waiting room below.

Jonah and his brothers Elias and Noah were there waiting. The Sisters walked into the room, right into their Source Auras, and their heads whipped around in tandem, and then tilted back to look up at the lads waiting there.

“Hey, Sama!” Jonah spoke up cheerfully, biceps as big as my waist folded across his chest, and his deep voice almost making the floor vibrate. He very carefully didn’t call me Mom, although he was dying to, just to see how the Sisters would react. “Are these the girls you were talking about?”

He took a long, looming step forward, extending out a very big hand to them as they gawked up at seven feet of Ancient towering over them, his Source Aura massive, overwhelming... and completely shutting out any other feeling but of him. Warm, fuzzy, shiny him.

Despite themselves and all their arrogance and training, they swallowed at his big beaming smile, radiating so much cheerful manliness that they found it difficult to respond, despite themselves.

“Hi, I’m Jonah, and these are my bros, Elias and Noah,” he said formally, shaking their armored hands by dint of swallowing them inside his own, and his beaming, hairy brothers did quite the same. “A pleasure to meet you! Who are we giving the tour to?”

“I-I am Sister Eloise,” the oldest of them managed to say, almost managing to hide the breathy sigh in her voice. “This is Sister Elanis, and Sister Emerta.”

“Sisters Eloise, Elanis, and Emerta, welcome to the Green and the Gold training center for Rantha Corp!” he boomed, the ceiling tiles hopped, and the three Sisters almost swooned. “Let me personally take you on a tour of the place. Mo-arquise Sama, you can just follow along.”

I lifted an eyebrow at the save, as the ultimate in sophisticated psi-killing noble ancient order imperial minion women had their hands taken by brutally ugly, hairy, massively muscular, magnificently voiced, and overwhelmingly dominating primitives. “Oh, by your leave, Jonah,” I replied evenly, and he just grinned even wider as he led the Sisters out, and promptly began to expound on things like an experienced personal tour guide, more about asking questions, measuring, and getting responses than anything else.

I smiled. Source Charisma wasn’t something to mess with. These women had to put up with stray thoughts, emotions, and energies flowing through them every minute of their lives... but right now, the only thing that they could sense was the big strapping fellows ambling along with effortless power beside them.

They did glance back at me; I just rolled my eyes and shrugged for them, and the tour went on.

--------

They had doffed their helms finally, so they didn’t radiate so much ominousness-ness, Jonah had politely shooed them forwards down the main production floor working on the GMAT, where everyone was politely ignoring them in the brightly lit, cheerful workspace, focused on their jobs and all those micro-miniaturized vacuum tubes in all their different arrays, and what we were making with them.

“Vortices, huh?” Jonah asked, looking after them as they walked through the factory floor, occasionally reaching out to touch a machine, look at a flower in a pot actually growing there, and blinking at the clean and sometimes even smiling workforce giving them friendly nods and smiles as they walked past, clearly unafraid of them (doubtless blissfully uninformed) and happy to be working here.

“Turned into psi-killers and harvesters of psi,” I said. “I don’t know if they kill them when they get older or just put them into someplace isolated until they go nuts and off themselves.”

“And they are stealing the Voids as they are born?” Jonah shifted, grimacing. “Is... that even possible? Wouldn’t they go barmy too?”

“Yes.” He swallowed at my reply. “Void Brothers are made to serve the Land. Trying to hijack that directive is going to lead to Void Deviation, energy retention, and obliteration. Every one of them they train is going to have a shelf life. They probably figured out a way to stylize a skin-sheathe that only allows optimized psi-traces through so they can’t feel the will of the Land much, only the overarching Akasha of humanity, and are trying to breed the compulsion out of them.”

“Aren’t Vortices sterile, too?” Jonah asked softly.

“Yes. While they are probably world-raiding for recruits, they are probably being artificially made as well. Most of them have probably only ever known mothers. Maybe Voids are being bred in as fathers, I don’t know.” I could only sound flat and pissed. Yay, me.

“The Empire gets some superb psi-killers, but doesn’t have to worry about them going rogue, because they’ve all got built-in time limits.” Jonah’s nose flared. “Damn, Sama. The Empire really is ruthless, isn’t it?”

“You think?” I smiled hard. “Did you see their faces when the kids manifested all those mindclaws, and they didn’t feel it coming?”

“They almost jumped through the ceiling,” he agreed. “Can...Can they manifest a claw?” he had to ask.

“Yes. It probably won’t show their aura but faintly, based on who they are.”

“You going to show them?”

I sighed hard. “If they want me to, yes.”

“That is a dangerous gamble you are making, Sama,” he said softly. If the Sisters ruled against us, that meant everyone here was fodder for the psi-vats and brains in a box... not that either was going to do crap with Forsaken.

“Yeah, but their souls are already shaken. I don’t have to open Markspace to them, but they deserve to know.” My eyes narrowed. “And they are highly trained, intelligent, disciplined women who have been lied to. Such women couldn’t possibly have a mean streak in them, could they?”

“Hell hath no fury...” he mused aloud, and Elias and Noah nodded agreement. “I doubt they’ll fight back, but keeping secrets from their overseers? I don’t see that as a problem at all.”

“They are the smart and precise ones. They are born to be killers. What’s the compulsion of a Vortex?” Jonah asked quietly.

“I’m not sure, but judging that they don’t feel the Land, my guess is that they are born to hunt corruption, given their jobs.”

All three Briggs boys rumbled deep in their chests, sounding like engines revving.

“They’re probably going to want to take us with them, aren’t they?” Jonah asked fatalistically.

“I didn’t pick three of you who didn’t have a Rantha for no reason...”