So, the Goldilocks crews had managed to track down this place on Kragamaore as a major hub of where the information on Voids was sent. It had involved infiltrating and directly cracking open the public welfare systems of the fifty largest worlds in this subsector, looking for anything tracking the discovery of Voids and Vortices, and then following the trail of messages being sent to and from hub to hub.

Some of the job could be done by cyberpathy, but suborning the hardware required a hands-on touch.

Two hundred of my girls with Intellects and Talents regarding computer tech, Runecrafting, computer engineering, programming, and hacking the crap out of amoral fuckheads pulling off this disastrous shit were working with me as I took a break between shooting Warped rebels on Baldur IV and my upcoming trip to the suborned Forgeworld of Hekkonaides to do a little personal insertion.

My Intellect was higher than theirs, my Exemplar Lite bonus made me very good at everything, so they were basically running their awareness of the situation and Talents through my backbrain like a convenient co-processor as they disassembled this building-sized contraption in my Trembling Domain. My hair was splayed out in every direction like a living thing, magnifying the sensitivity of my Vajra to all the impressions I was getting from around me, and if my awareness wasn’t at the molecular level down to the end, it at least stayed at the cellular, and I could send my hair shooting this way and that to get better readings.

Damn stuff was over twenty feet long now. So lucky I could Compress it short at will. I was my own walking Trembling radar dish.

We had discovered that the maker of this system was pretty cocksure, and the safeguards against the information being monitored, altered, or adjusted were pretty skimpy. There were acknowledgement protocols, and simple follow-ups and confirmations, but the complexity of the coding and the fact you actually had to be looking for what was going on meant that they felt pretty damn safe about the flow of it.

Heck, because this was hardware-based, without cyberpathy being able to track individual electron streams from afar, even the Tekrons wouldn’t be able to discern what was going on here. They would only see the occasional diffused programs operating through the system as inefficiencies, or loose code, not some greater pattern connected by the hardware it was being channeled through.

The sheer breadth and scope of the effort made it plain just how importantly this project was viewed by the Emperor. I could only assume that at some point it had become plain that the Emperor was setting himself on a course that would lead to ruination, the Void Brothers had moved to stop him... and they had lost that fight somehow.

By putting this system into place, he had basically rendered them extinct, with all new Void Brothers being subsumed by the Empire, and the old ones killed or dying off in the course of their duties. Maybe by trying to kill him, who knew?

It was our job to bring this system crashing down.

I slid through the information feeder system, analyzing and adjusting, and noting the structure of everything around me. This was a hardware detection thing, not a software. It meant there were gaps that cyberpathy could not jump across, with triggers being pulled by mechanical and psionic means, instead of just programs activating.

Without knowing what to look for, I wouldn’t have been able to find anything in this molecular-level crystal lattice fabbing. Learning what to look for had cost a lot of man-hours of some impossibly smart and Talented Ranthas, who just wouldn’t admit they couldn’t do the job. It had taken ten thousand of my kids, and a link to the Celestial Tribute’s main computer core, to dissect the Janus Prime astropath station and finally decipher what was going on and how it was happening.

The principles involved were still beyond them, but they’d cracked through the -30 Level penalty with the TL 14 basis I made possible, and figured out what was being done.

This monster of an Astropath sender was even more complex, but now we knew what to look for, and had the basic outline of the Formation Array constructed through combinations of coding and crystal. Once I found several key points, we mapped them out to the inferred formation, looked for more, and then because of scale, went looking at high probability areas for newer and upgraded Formations. It actually wasn’t all that hard.

For two hundred Intellects at close to 40 and devoted Talents, that is, while I sat there for an hour in the heart of the machine, my hair moving this way and that to get better readings and fill in a lot of blanks in their schematics of this thing.

Once that was done, there was only to insert the TL 15 recorders and receivers the Celestial Tribute had thoughtfully printed off for us in appropriate locations. Some were hardware, some were code; all of them were psychically-enhanced to get past the TL gap.

All this, just so we could figure out where the code was being sent to.

The amount of ship traffic going to and from the Mountain was going to be minimal at best, and was going to ghost in and ghost out, never being recorded on any systems, just inserted into calculations by Traffic Control and then erased... we knew, we’d found the code for it. Thus, finding an Assassin ship was going to be difficult without finding an Assassin, and one that knew the way to the Mountain would be even harder. The Assassins basically had no knowledge of where the Mountain was in the galaxy, and because their Helices were so suppressed, had no planetary attunement that would have allowed them to pick it out from across the galaxy.

It was like someone knew their capabilities, or something.

The things I was putting into place were no bigger than fingernails, meshing right into the structure of the Relay, and wouldn’t be found without a scan specifically looking for them and knowing what did not belong. They didn’t disrupt anything here, they didn’t drain any power, and they didn’t actually record and transmit anything.

The ‘transmitter’ was a sympathetic resonator, which altered when one of these sensors was tripped. The ‘receiver’ just changed with it, shifting to match its twin in form through the quantum field, no energy projection or retention involved. It was like having a light that went on when the matching one in the bedroom of the Emperor went on, nothing more.

Of course, any spy will tell you that reading the changes in an object, such as the vibrations off a window, is a perfectly fine way to get lots of important data, so that is exactly how this worked.

Could they be detected? Yes. So, one of the things that had to be done was altering the basic schematics of the scanning devices so that the things I was putting in place were ‘supposed’ to be there. That involved some psi-rune downloads, like scanning a bar code, that made alterations right to the scanning machine on a subtle level, telling it there had been upgrades and automatically giving the modifications permission to be there, using the scanner’s own coding against it. It wouldn’t even retain the fact that its schematics had been upgraded, they’d simply make the alterations and be done.

Yeah, the girls really loved going three and four levels deep on this. They were already commandeering all the Mechanist facilities on Janus, going through their data, and shooting more Mekkers after finding all sorts of stuff that fleshy people supposedly weren’t qualified to learn about, then suborning their systems. Having fun rewriting Mekker programs and schematics and updating them to other Mechanist systems for proliferation virus-style was a thing, and since they actually involved true upgrades to some key tech, were enthusiastically passed on.

Of course, those programs assembled themselves into other programs and started doing shady stuff in the systems, which the cyberpaths were helping themselves to with grim glee...

Ah, don’t mess with the Goldilocks, everyone knew that now...

We had no data on natural birth rates of Voids and Vortices. We did know that it wasn’t ‘hereditary’, by anything we could tell. The only way the ability was passed on was if a new child was actually a gene-clone adjusted away from the original, and even that was iffy and a Vatter, limited in potential and capability.

Only natural-borns were able to unleash the full potential of Voids and Vortices. Their rarity made it plain the Will of the Land was being hampered by a combination of both Imperial meddling and the Warp not wanting them to manifest. The girls were into the millions of newbies Marked, Opened, and Awakened, and yet we had only discovered two. My Queen was a total outlier that had to hit Seven to realize what he was. Any Void that hit Two would need to do the same, or he would be a schlock Primos for the rest of his life.

That didn’t mean there weren’t more out there, but they were dying regularly. Given large numbers, there were teams in place on all the more populated worlds to deal with such births, as it would be too inefficient to just fly around and back so frequently.

We knew, because so far we’d wiped ten of those teams back in the Khagan Sector, and were urgently tracking down the rest. Even adding a world a day into The Map, and the girls getting Gloom Access to them, there were thousands of worlds to deal with. It was something that was going to take time, Hagbloods at Ten, and Riftcutting Weapons.

It took only a few questions of Brother Firesword Frank to confirm how grueling and lethal the selection process was for training Assassins, and it was plain after further detailing that the process was skewed in favor of Fireswords and Mindrings, with the others being progressively less and less useful in their instinctive motivations, until they were eliminated entirely. Bonescythes, for instance, were far too sensitive to the dead telling them things their masters didn’t want them to know... including how they were murdering unwanted Void kids. Once they were identified, they were quietly eliminated straight off.

Fucking bastards. No one was better equipped to mess with the Warped in the total crapyard of an afterlife they’d made up than the Bonescythes.

And naturally the Lightscepters would have ripped apart the Cult of Man as the sham it was, since NOBODY was using Faith Magic, except the Warp. Can’t have the masses not brainwashed into mindless service of the Emperor and all. The Wavespears would have slaughtered every megacorp polluting the oceans and rivers. Razing a planet and turning it into a Forgeworld? The Windarrows would have killed everyone responsible...

Ugh. I could see why the Emperor wanted to get rid of them all. He simply wouldn’t have been able to build and take command of the Empire he wanted with them on the loose. With the Land guiding them to the weakest points to strike again and again, the Brothers could effectively paralyze countless numbers of people simply by removing those in power driving the process. The powerful naturally wouldn’t like the idea of someone out there holding them responsible for stupid choices in life, and would be fully in support of the Emperor putting a leash on them and turning them into His pet dogs...

Who would still do the same job, only now at the behest of the Empire.

How long had it been since there had been free Void Brothers? Had the Emperor put the systems into place even before humanity left for the stars? Could He have possibly taken control of the empire if Void Brothers had been scattered across countless worlds and stars?

There had to be countless Void Brothers out there on lost worlds who had never been Awakened, and so had no idea of who and what they were. Where the first one came from, I had no idea, but everything I knew suggested that they didn’t Awaken naturally, something had to key them. The hyn had probably been Awakened by the drow accidentally, as all their legends of escaping from the dark elves revolved around their Voids leading the way, and the Shadowknives Awakened one another as soon as they sensed a fellow Void.

The only way to find them was to keep Awakening people, crossing our fingers, and working the large numbers.

If we found more lost worlds, we should find more of them. That was a comforting thought.

I’d already suborned the Emperor’s detection tech for genecodes on Amistad, the world I’d liberated from Marquis de Krov, and the whole population was being put through a census and a scanner, looking for their Talents, their Powered, and potential Voids. The planet had never been under the Imperial Dole, so none of the health systems were in place.

I hoped to find a bunch of them very soon...