The pressor beam shoved me through the tube, skirting just between nihilor cores and nihilaen plates. The tube opened on the far side, auto-opened as the Fill promptly undid the disintegration effect, and removed all visible signs of anything having happened.

My gaseous form boiled up out of the cannister, expanding back to proper dimensions, and I brought my Null up to immediately sweep the magic away instead of waiting for the inevitable erosion of it, internal or otherwise.

I materialized back to normal form, picked up the canister and stashed it in my Masspack.

I was inside the Mountain. Now I was going to do a bunch of exploring while I ‘waited’... for that ship to make all its stops. Nadir was a very patient hunter, and if it meant sitting around in soft vacuum on the frigate for most of a year, she was very prepared to do just that, bringing through girls into each system to add them to the mix, and tracking just where and what these bastards were doing.

We had the central point; now we were working backwards along the organization, compromising it step by step.

It meant neither she nor I could take direct action yet. Taking out the Mountain would just alert the entire organization and whoever was behind all this. So, we were going to get people into place in a lot of locations. When they moved, a whole lot of baby-stealers were suddenly going to cease to exist, and that hardwired data exchange the Empire had in place was going to have some new masters. I was willing to bet they didn’t even know how it truly worked.

I smiled mirthlessly as I set out on my task. The sheer variety of things that needed to be done here demanded that I be the one to do them, as none of my girls were quite as deep in so many disciplines as I was. It sucked a bit for them, but they all had key Skills they were boosting up in their chosen specialties, so there was no real loss.

In the meantime, Nadir would finetune the preliminary taps I had put into the frigate’s comm systems, crack the encryption, and we would have a direct feed from the active component of the Void Retrieval Teams.

My first thing to do was a survey and layout of this place. Then I’d go after the computer systems. I’d have to compromise the security system, and then eliminate all the failsafe connections. Thereupon would follow all sorts of special surprises installed to really annoy everyone of importance, and my big surprise.

If I could, I would try to save the farmers, but that might be a bit difficult. I was likely going to have to arrange for all the fighting environments to be glassed, or the beings within them would be unleashed upon farmers not at all ready for them, in terms of training or of weaponry.

I firmly believed there was a planetary self-destruct in place, so I’d have to worm out the location, means, and triggering method of that, and either move it somewhere more interesting, or simply shut it down.

There was a plethora of interesting areas to dump it into at this time... it all depended what type they were going to use and how big it was. A mantle-cracker would be sufficient, but they might just use a solar cannon to bake the planet and set the atmosphere on fire. A virus bomb wouldn’t be very reliable if they knew anything about Voids...

I was fully aware that by doing this I was setting myself at absolute cross-purposes to the Imperial Assassins, one of the most feared and lethal arms of the Empire... and I really didn’t care. I didn’t know what measures the Empire as a whole had to act against Voids outside the control of the Assassins, but I assumed I was going to find out quickly.

That was fine. There were a lot of Voids going to be evacuated to the far side of the Rift, and quickly, to Level up, feed their Helices, and feel the Will of the Land.

Also, while the Voids were definitely their preferred elites, it didn’t mean the Assassins didn’t have other things to fall back on. Bioengineered killers, cyberized killbots, even elite mercs or operatives recruited from elsewhere... the Assassins had been forced to rely on those on the other side of the Rift, so there was no reason they wouldn’t be using them as reserves and auxiliaries here. After all, Voids weren’t specialists at mass slaughter... that they knew of.

Like a nice rat/14, I set off to investigate all the interesting little holes in the walls here, and see just how badly I could mess these guys up...

-------

Naturally, the rest of the Galaxy wasn’t remaining still just because I was.

Jensa, Celestia, and Keva took turns being the Dark Angel all across the galaxy, spreading the name and the legend, and incidentally irritating the heck out of the drow trying to pigeonhole and track them down. Differences in our Swords were chalked up to observer error, if noticed at all, and they even used multiple configurations just to sell more posters.

Some of the later girls coming through wanted to get in on the fun, as well, and given that there were at least a hundred conflict zones going on at any one time, well, spreading out the love, Karma, and growing the legend yet more wasn’t all that bad an idea.

If they couldn’t Riftcut and were thus able to flee, they weren’t allowed to do it.

Our infiltration of elements of the Empire on this side continued apace. Actually, non-nymphals were much better at that aspect of things, so Nulls and Sources from G&G ended up taking point on pretty much all of those operations, getting themselves hired or drafted into various Planetary Guards or Imperial Marines, and their skill and expertise shoved them rapidly up the ranks.

Other girls and boys drifted into the service of the Marquise Rantha and her fleet of independent vessels, rapidly expanding as various piratical, unscrupulous, rebellious, and predatory sorts found themselves relieved of their lives and ships with about as much mercy as they’d showed so many of their victims. The Roman Sector, at least, suddenly began to clean itself up somehow.

Five more Letters of Marque fell into the hands of the Marquise by some odd coincidence as their previous owners went abruptly missing and their ships showed up for refits, sans their crews. Fealty arrangements were set up, the Orders Twilight were most bemused, and suddenly the Marquise was a Countessa.

I watched Ophelia accept the new Title on my behalf with much amusement, her smile as magnificent as her hair, and her thoughts totally predatory as the established powers aimed to crush this upstart... while also wining and dining her, since she was a wonderful dancer that all their younger folks wanted to chase after.

-------

While one of my Natural Actresses added her own delightful spin to the social scene, expansions continued on both sides of the Rift.

The Warp Zone was emptying out. The influx of a lot of people shooting for Six and higher had a disastrous effect on the native fighting population, killing them ever faster and more plentifully.

I was notified that maybe two months of things remained to be cleared off, if that, given the numbers and skills of the Warped left behind.

No, I wasn’t going to let them turn the thing back on. When they were done, and I hit Fifteen, we’d do the penultimate mods to the Tribute, crash the Warp Zone, and bring the ship out of there.

I was pretty sure I’d break Fifteen when I broke the Mountain and its network, but there were a lot of moving parts to get into place for that to happen. However, when said parts are Tens with inhuman mental abilities, that’s not as hard as it seems.

Ronnie had already moved in and was driving further revisions of our technology. She was deciphering the secrets of the Tekron base under Janus Prime with an ease and thoroughness that would have frankly alarmed any of us if we didn’t know it was actually her own base, and she was just refamiliarizing herself with it.

Installing negative-energy collectors to really clamp down on the Dead Walking Events on multiple worlds suddenly became a potential thing when she came out with the first plans for said devices, using a necrotao approach that was completely unlike the Tekron technology while being based on the same foundational laws, just given a completely human spin on them.

She broke Eleven in Expert with blinding speed for coming up with that, and was spearheading revisions of our own technology like a steamroller of brainpower.

I wasn’t sure quite what she would come up with next, but I was pretty sure she’d be Fifteen inside five years, without even engaging in mass slaughter.

She was leading an enormous push for resources, since the Alias-class ships were uncovering system after system that could be plumbed for Stuff, and our modular mining platforms were getting put into place here, there, and everywhere. Lost worlds populated by species human and otherwise were being added to The Map, and we were finding out just how interspersed ‘humanspace’ was with soooo many other races. If the Empire knew, they were keeping stupidly silent about it.

Krisma took the first Letter of Marque in Khagan Sector, and promptly started getting REALLY aggressive, in counterpoint to the other girls and guys shivving such folk and staying out of the limelight. She revealed half a dozen goblin-occupied systems being used as bases by the raiders of that race, and called for a fleet and the manpower to take them on.

In no time at all, she was a bona fide Warlord leading a whole bunch of ships we hadn’t made into bloody conflict with the goblins, who were not at all happy to see them coming.

They were even less happy when her brothers and sisters came in to help, and the stars were alive with war enough for a whole bunch of Ranthas to prosecute and add to the incredibly violent reputation we already had.

The news of two ships commanded and officered by Ancients sent the blinkered sots in the Khagan government into conniption fits. It got worse when a Coronal Knight took up position on each ship, and the Umbrans categorized them as ‘motile relay and relief posts’, while they dove in to help Krisma’s aggressive push.

When two nearby worlds rose in rebellion, they coincidentally happened to be right on station to address the matter and form the command ships for the evacuated Coronal and Umbran forces who managed to get off the planet.

To the utter astonishment of many, the Ancients didn’t rampage over the planet and eat people. They were brutal yet surgical, wearing some remarkably nasty power armor, and while not at all merciful to those shooting at them, they stayed away from civilians and non-military businesses.

They did rather gleefully rampage through many of the wealthy areas backing the rebellion, leading elite drop troops happy to shoot those who thought they would be the first to seize power and go independent now that the Empire couldn’t reach them.

It wasn’t that we wanted to enforce the laws of the Empire, but as soon as someone struck against the Coronals, it was a sign that the forces behind them were more than just rabble-rousers and idiot patriots.

Unearthing jRaztl involvement among the ringleaders of the independence movement, and shoving the faces of the firebrands driving the whole movement into it, put a remarkable damper on the basic support of the masses for the independence drive.

Jin Briggs adeptly positioned their own involvement as being because of the striking against the Coronals and not the Empire itself, further dispiriting them. They had been used by fanatics of the Warp, as had so many billions before them, despite all the warnings.

It only cost about a hundred million people dead before it was all said and done. As planetary rebellions went, it was relatively clean and cheap.

Everybody was also now abuzz about the fact that the Coronal Knights had a force of highly-trained, very powerful, and skilled Ancients in power armor running around for them. With ships. And the Umbrans knew about it... or at least some Umbrans did, because others were scrambling for more information, and found the Dukes of Janus were much, much farther ahead and deeper thinkers than they had thought...

While there would be changes and rebellions in the future, for now, unity was still by far the most important thing.