Getting into the place was going to be annoying, but it was part of the job. Being the Dark Angel shooting the enemies of the Empire was just going to have to be on hold for a while.

Hey, I was being nice. They were already looking for me, and I was going right to them. They should be thanking me for what I was going to do!

It worked out that going in over the obviously stupid points to do so was actually the better play. Someone with too much time and infiltration experts on hand had rather zealously gone over all the possible ways in, and then put some really, really annoying stuff in the way to catch anyone trying to do so.

Even the drow and Tekrons would have conniptions trying to get into this place, because the whole place was Interdicted. Without being able to use sub-dimensions to bypass defenses, that lot wasn’t actually that sneaky on average, relying too much on hypertech to bypass security precautions. Sure, they were good enough to defeat Joe Sentry #3, but brainboxes on 24/7? Not so easy...

The main thoroughfares were naturally closely monitored, and everyone entering was genescanned up and down, if subtly, and there were all kinds of monitors around.

But Vampire’s Veil was designed to work against all manner of visual inspections, the primary defenses here. Other locations got into all kinds of sidereal senses which were extremely annoying to overcome.

So, taking the main way in... was actually the safest way in. All I had to do was evade the living eyes and bypass the psi-boosted surveillance cameras trying to deal with the normal people there.

In short, this wasn’t about whose tech found the other, a yes/no scenario. This was about comparing Stealth against Perception, with Vampire’s Veil basically offsetting any bonuses for equipment and leaving it a test of pure skill against skill.

Stealth was one of my Primary Skills, and I’d kept it maxed out. With 14 Ranks, I could basically walk through the main door of a crowded room and out the other side, and nobody would actually see me.

Yeah, it was unreal, but any Ranks past Six started getting into unnatural stuff.

As for modifiers... 14 Ranks, +3 Class Skill, +5 Mastery, +6 & 4 Feats, +20 Dex, and a short-term +10 Insight bonus from Soul, +4 Cunning, and +5 for being such a charming ExLite, was a nice +67. Stealth Mastery meant I could Take 10, and remove chance from the equation with pure skill.

A 77 was not something anyone under Ten and lacking major buffs had a hope of overcoming.

Thus, piercing the perimeter of the Crater was a surreal dance of moving into and through a supply caravan delivering goods to the place, flitting from place to place as the angles of observation from every possible source slid past and around me like I wasn’t there. I was behind everybody, nothing more than a shadow of a cloud passing by as I moved by the people, the inspectors, the walls, the cameras, and the inevitably bored sentries who just couldn’t maintain anywhere close to the focus they would need to get lucky enough to see me.

It didn’t hurt that the tech they had was concealed, and so not as effective as it might have been. It was fine, I forgave them, as I avoided air pressure sensors, split sound waves around myself, neutralized magnetic readers, walked above the ground sensors, conducted microwaves and electrical fields right through my Vajra, and the thermal sensors just thought I was the air.

I found myself a mile outside the checkpoint city, moving above their transportation tube, as I certainly wasn’t going inside of it. Yeah, it was two hundred miles on foot to where I needed to go, but there was a reason ol’ Sama has her lightfoot up to the 210’ range. I could walk faster than the best unbuffed human could sprint, sprint in the neighborhood of 150 mph under my own power... and maintain Stealth while moving at full speed.

The power circuits of the buried transport tunnel made it very easy to follow in my Trembling Domain, even as it was buried deeply, humming as they did through the ground. I was matching up a lot of the schematics I’d gotten off Bob with the surveillance networks to the landscapes to either side of me... which I didn’t know if I should care about, although I was sure young Voids in training were in them, doing... whatever they were supposed to be doing. Hunting alien enemies of mankind or something...

Speed and VV-blurring meant I was less than a breeze passing to the occasional camera with me in their area. The landscape was passing by on either side of me, shielded away by force screens (damn, lots of energy being wasted here... well, not much different from a city dome, I supposed...), a strange and foggy broken landscape on my right, and a miserably hot and vine-filled jungle on my left.

It should change in about twenty miles or so...

Smiling to myself, I ran along the border between the two zones, towards the great looming sphere of the arcology at the center of the crater.

The Mountain. My smile grew wider. Little Brothers, big sister Sama is coming, don’t you worry about anything...

------

The zones changed three times before I got to the edge of the Dome proper, and it loomed up above me, a dark sphere blocking any observation from without.

It had to be more than that, if it was a place that could brainwash Voids.

There were a lot of sensors around, but I had the distinct impression that they were more for observing Voids released from the city to have fun, and not infiltrators who should have been exposed way before this. Strange matter sensors, psionic radar, thought detectors, transchronal monitors... there was some seriously weird high-end stuff here and there, and anything relying just on innate abilities and tech trying to get here would have been found out long before they reached this far.

Orbital satellite death ray follow-up would have been prompt in such a case.

I sussed out the monitors, and while every inch of the place was technically under observation, there wasn’t any way they were going to see me touching the dome.

Mmm.

Nihilor laen. This stuff was magically and psychically inert laenwork. Not even magical, either. You were dealing with dark matter alchemy to make this stuff, it was not something anyone did for funsies. The cost of this...

Yeah, if anything could keep out the Breath of the Land from a bunch of Voids, this was the stuff. There was going to be no living anything wafting its way through this. While inside it, they were basically invisible to anything magical or psychic.

You could buy a planet for the cost of this dome. Maybe a system, I wasn’t sure. Making nihilaen was not cheap at all. Nihilor, the negatively charged E-plumbum, was much easier to make, but not nearly as usable, being lead, after all, and having some rather nasty long-term health effects for being around. You could make a storage cell out of it, but don’t expect anything alive to be inside after very long.

Nihilaen didn’t have the problem. Void and negatively charged leaded silicon diamond was no joke.

This was probably the only place in the Empire where something this extravagantly wasteful was located, although I couldn’t speak for anything that was on Tellus. When you’re at the heart of an Empire, extravagant waste was a compliment for judicious personal spending habits.

Of course, now I had to get through something that was impervious to magic and psi, and as hard as diamond.

Except... not even TL 17 tech could spin a whole dome out of nihilaen, there were still binders and struts in place. Maybe the Tekrons could do it, but you’d need a factory the size of a moon. There’s waste, and then there is waste, for something that wouldn’t stand up to a good broadside of railcannon loads.

My Trembling Domain could still read vibrations, spreading my hair out to sense and receive. The nihilaen itself was about a foot thick, functionally black to stop the light, and mounted in great triangles for effect, those frames cored with nihilor to keep coverage as contiguous as possible.

I just needed a space with an inch or a half-inch of room to enter. Given that it was air-tight, that meant I had to create my own instead of looking for flaws, but that was fine. The Umbrans had all sorts of stuff to help with that kind of thing.

I picked my entry point to make sure there was an access hallway or corridor beyond, sitting there for twelve hours reading vibrations moving through the structure to determine where vents, hallways, doors, and other hollow spaces were located. Much of the nihilaen down low was buttressed with plenty of plascrete with nihilor flakes inside it, just layers on layers of raw money being thrown out here, but I was punching a hole through a durasteel strut, which I was going to instantly quickly replace.

Air pressure sensors looking for leaks were classic ways of spotting a break-in, after all. All you need is a tiny bit of pressure differential, and all those tons of air looking to equalize would scream that you had a breach.

The Nail and Plug was a one-two device that sent out a very narrow disintegration beam, used to rapidly inject some sort of surveillance device or drone with a relay or wire attached to it, and then it would re-integrate the disintegrated material, putting back together what it had torn apart. I couldn’t just phase the matter out because of the Interdiction field, but this worked.

As for the load being injected, that was going to be me.

I set it up on the strut I picked out, in the location and at the angle it needed to go off at, very precisely. Veering a millimeter in either direction would clip the nihilor or nihilaen, and the beam would go nowhere, and I couldn’t sense any nihilor flakes in the path of the plascrete beyond.

With aplomb, I set the timer, took out a Vial, and downed the Potion of Gaseous Form.

The Powered who could use magic were few and far between, because they had to be bonded to Forsaken, gifted enough to develop the art, and they could only get the magic by drawing it out of their Forsaken companion, which naturally made practicing with it a bitch. They could only practice in chambers cleaned out by vivic fires that were still actively burning and suppressing the Warp corruption, and they couldn’t have any magic active if they left the place, meaning most forms of buffing and long-term development were off-limits.

Still, being the first Wizards in literally ten thousand years or more was enough to tempt some to do it. They were mostly working out the basics of interaction of psionics and magic, rather eagerly, but from a practical standpoint they made special one-shot toys.

Such things had to be used by Forsaken, because if it got beyond our assorted Nulls, Suns, or Helices, Bad Things Happened rather quickly. However, Potions were one of those things, and if used by a Forsaken, could actually give us a short-term Buff, for an absolute maximum of ten minutes, and usually much less.

So, Gaseous Form it was, baby.

I was converted to a somewhat equal volume of randomly assorted gases, with just enough cohesion to say I was a thing, and I poured myself into the cylinder behind the Nail and Plug. Yeah, I had to compress myself, but the pressure-sensitive thing helped by registering the infusion and as programmed, sucked me inside in literally seconds.

The cylinder loaded, the Nail hummed; a green beam of light lanced out, and disintegrated any non-nihil matter in front of it, forming a three-quarter-inch tube of nothing in front of it.

Lo, and I had a way in!