Bering Briggs was one of the Natural Explorers. He was silly eager to get to Ten, get himself an Alias-class Explorer, and go jetting out into the void, see all the wonders and horrors out there, and arrange for big enough hammers to hit them in the face.

Dora Rantha was a Natural Cartographer, willing and able to map the entire universe, given enough time. Bering wanted to go new places, and she wanted to map them and lead others to follow them.

The Empire being as big as it was meant that ‘new places’ was anywhere one of my kids or I had never been. The Phlos all had to be tracked and recorded, the links between the various stars put in place, and all the many, many connections set up in The Map for people to use as they needed.

For now, what they were doing was following aetheric signals from world to world we hadn’t been to yet, making landfall, then Riftcutting a passage so spatial coordinates could be locked in. Ranthas could then come in to start doing things that would definitely involve a lot of people dying.

Infiltration teams hit the relay points like ghosts in the night, doing what they needed to do while Bering and Dora mapped out whatever system and its Phlos they were in. The two then followed the trail off into the stars, moving from system to system along an ever-growing Map, making their way toward whatever the destination point was.

Sometimes a Rantha had already been there, but of a dozen worlds, it only happened twice, as there were far too many worlds in the Empire. In such cases, they still followed the Phlos, charting new routes and rivers through the deep void, heading in-system long enough to be sent back out to the next destination.

The Tachyon Drives were up well over ten pph now, so even a thousand light years wasn’t too huge a trip anymore. Too, their sensors were TL 15 tech on the Celestial Tribute’s fabbing standards, and there was plenty of information on movements of energies and very, very alien entities in the deep void to come by, usually concerning how to sense them early and stay away from them.

Coming in from outside the heliosphere also gave them exposure to the movements of the true alien species out there, particularly the Mi-Go and other Aberrant-worshipping species who dwelt at the far edges and in the depths of space. Even if it was passive and in the far distance, it was more information than any other organization in Known Space possessed about such beings. No species with good sense went out beyond the heliospheres without good reason, after all.

Tracking, charting, moving, mapping; going from system to system, and opening Rifts to get planetary locks to the base in Gloom so operatives could come in, and it could join the growing array of places they could get to on demand.

Expanding The Map, along with everyone else doing the same thing, in all directions from multiple locations across the entire galaxy.

But most of the kids weren’t driving it towards the center of the Empire of Man and Sector Solus, the heart of the lands held by humanity.

They had to be careful when coming into new systems, manufacturing false Warp Breaches to be picked up by the sensors of the Imperial forces as ‘proof’ they’d Helljumped their way in. It was easy enough to disguise their vessel as a courier, given its speed. Alluding to contracts and deliveries and suchlike was a decent way to get planetside, discretely pop a short-term Rift, and get operatives on hand for infiltrating the local Beacon.

The trail moved on, from Crownworld to Throneworld, and then back out, yet still in, because now they were in Imperial space, and the full might of mankind could fall upon them if they made a mistake.

From the mighty bastion world of Scutum III they went off to the mustering world of Gladius, where endless numbers of men came in to get elite training as Imperial Marines, and were turned around and shipped out in equal numbers for the endless wars, equipped with equipment from a dozen surrounding forgeworlds.

One of those forgeworlds was cold and proud Hurksen V, wrapped in ice and only populated in its heated heart. The trail went from there out into the cold void of lazy stars, and thence to cold and windswept Carag IV, an almost feral world with little of worth save for the extremely tough people who lived tribal lives there, with a single small kiloplex lording it over the whole world.

There was no reason for such a world to have a Beacon, because it was barely even a blip on the Empire’s radar. No traders came here, and its visitors were basically the occasional avid hiker and survivalist, and people who didn’t want to be anywhere the Empire would bother to look for them. The wilds of Carag were one of those places.

A ship coming in to visit this place would be noticed immediately, so the two had to come in under cloak and make planetfall some distance from the kiloplex. The Ranthas who came through a Riftcut to do the infiltration promptly snickered at having to run nigh on five thousand kliks to get to their destination, but simply got to it immediately regardless, Tats driving thrusters as they skimmed toward their target.

The city authorities would doubtless have been quite alarmed by how readily the team infiltrated the city and bypassed its defenses, but Vampire’s Veil was largely proof against non-biotech. They noted that this backward, isolated kiloplex with basically no discernible products or economy had remarkably good security tech... and a remarkably active Beacon processing astropathic notices for a place with little or nothing important about it.

Curiouser and curiouser...

The purpose of the place was going to be fun to dig out, and the two Ranthas promptly made it their pet project to take over the whole damn world, and have fun doing it. Someone had made it less than memorable, so making it even less distinctive shouldn’t be out of the question.

The last leg of the trip wasn’t following an astropathic signal. The messages were broadcast up to an orbiting satellite, which then precision-bounced them to a relay station on an asteroid in the next orbital path, which was regularly visited by a shuttle from a ship that appeared on the edge of the system and just as quietly departed without ever going near the planet itself.

It had no clue that I had waved goodbye to Dora and Bering as I hitched a ride on the shuttle, jumped off outside the ship as the boat came gliding back inside to dock, and set myself up out on the ship’s hull in a convenient spot. My Vajra was standing between me and hard vacuum after the frigate sucked in its atmosphere, running and making it out to a convenient blind spot behind an outer system gas giant before Helljumping away.

Did the idiots think that a courier method was more secret? They were basically pointing an arrow from the Warp right to wherever they were going. The crew of the ship below me couldn’t possibly all be Voids, which meant the Warp could see them.

Still, the Warp had to realize it was important... and jRaztl had to find it all amusing enough to relay to his minions. I doubted that would happen. The last thing the Warp wanted to happen was for free Voids to start working in the galaxy again. The Void Brother habit of removing pivotal and important pieces instead of being distracted by the chaff and drek was really, really off-putting to the cult-forming fanatics trying to hide in the background. That stuff didn’t really work with Voids.

Their other habit of getting humanity back on a proper track, instead of this grimdark techno-hell the Empire had become, wouldn’t make them any friends, either.

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My second trip through the Warp wasn’t as comfortable as the first, but at least nobody was leering at me and leaving me with the urge to Love Potion #9 them and make them into marginally productive subhumans... for a time, at least.

I watched the demons in the Warp beyond the Throne field, probably hurr-hurr-hurring all the way to the bank as they watched these idiots go about their jobs. The masters of the Assassins probably thought they were clever and were hidden even from the Warp, when the Warp was actually helping cover for them.

My never-seen Mother and the first Rantha Hag was out here, too, as whatever she had turned into.

I smiled as Chalice fell into my hand.

Somewhere in the Warp, the original Chalice, an orichalcum sword that had probably eaten some really unique metals, was in the hand of the ultimate monstrosity Mom had been turned into.

And that meant I had in my hand the one thing that could be used to speak with her.

“Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes...”

Our voices couldn’t be heard in the ship, but out in the Warp those words represented an idea, a meme, a thought that reverberated in the Warp, carried silently and invisibly at the speed of imagination.

I watched the demons shuffling along with the ship suddenly decide they had pressing business elsewhere, probably without even knowing why. A nameless dread was building around the ship as the Warp began to hum with dark, morbid undertones, and death began to roil in its wake.

The death of demons in uncounted numbers...

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We were vomited back out into real space, and I promptly Det Loc’d, nailing down where we were.

To my utter lack of surprise, we weren’t actually on a starchart anywhere. No, they wouldn’t retroactively delete a system from the records to conceal a great secret, would they? And this was Sector Solus, long the heart of the Empire... would anyone actually bother to say, “Hey, that star over there isn’t in the charts? Let’s go check it out.”

If it wasn’t in the charts by now, it effectively didn’t exist. Someone would actually have to check every existing star’s physical location against the charts to determine if it was actually there.

Ergo, this system was now dubbed Mountainspace, and it was ceremoniously placed on The Map... which had now created a lot of fun toil for the academic data-crushers. They decided that matching up stars and the Empire’s star charts might just reveal a whole lot of shit the Empire didn’t want us to know... or maybe didn’t know itself.

Some very powerful and very subtle scanners went over the ship as it came into the system along a course that was very pre-determined and artificial, judging by the subtle course changes made for absolutely no good reason.

The star here was old and cool red, the very definition of an ancient system. Of course, that meant it still had millions of years of life, so the chance of it going supernova was literally nothing, as it wasn’t big enough. Two tired old planets rotated the thing, one small and probably still warm given how close to the star it was, the other bigger, still smaller than Tellus, but with a viable atmosphere, maybe?

It certainly wouldn’t be very hospitable.

As the shuttle zipped off, Chalice teleported me atop it, and I crouched down and enjoyed the ride as it moved again on a prescribed course towards its stop.

That destination was an old and long-abandoned space station, floating out in space like it had once been a relay or resupply point for some fallen megacorp or mining organization, and then simply abandoned when it was no longer of use. There were holes in the hull, definite signs of oxidation and brittle decay, and the whole thing radiated an aura of age and decrepitude that would have any serious spacer shaking their head and passing it by.

If they didn’t, they’d probably die quickly, if they weren’t already dead for not following the right course into the system.

Lights ignited on the central shaft and ring structure for a moment at the shuttle’s approach, and it reacted by breaking sharply and waiting as I presumed they did the security handshake and data moved in both directions.

When the frigate had shifted to a holding pattern, I had Riftcut a path to Gloom, and Nadir Rantha had stepped through to relieve me. There was no way we were not going to see exactly where that ship made its rounds, and collapse upon all of them at the appropriate time.

I was dropped off at the space station, the shuttle headed back, and I took a tour of the thing on the outside of its hull, deciding on my next move.