I broke Fifteen in Rantha Hag, much to my bemusement.

Once again, I was left with nothing to do except what I created for myself. Only this time, it was even stronger.

Ronnie was already at Fifteen and was taking charge on the tech tree. While I could and did provide a very useful sounding board and reviewer, and could go off into areas of tech she couldn’t explore due to time constraints, the fact was I was not needed to drive the tech advance anymore.

More of the Ronnie Curseline were urgently Leveling up to provide assistance and help drive the tech upgrades further and faster. The Fantastic Ranthas were all giddy technos with soul swords, ready to take humanity to the new limit... and only needing the people and resources to get it done.

Planetary domination and resources were thus a prime focus of the Strategos Circle.

As for the non-tech brainpower, like Psicrafting and stuff... Grandmother was there, and she was at least a Twenty.

Touching someone with a 60+ in Mental Stats is a mild exercise in holyfuckwowness. That is totally Divine Levels of mental ability, a mind unconstrained by the flesh, flowing through the Akasha.

The problem was that Grandmom had no true exposure to high tech, and didn’t have the akashic links to take anything that wasn’t magic-linked past six Ranks. Oh, her Alchemy, Spellcraft, and Psicraft were unbelievable, and the revolutions going on on that side of things were very, very impressive, but she couldn’t help with the pure tech.

That was fine, as she could help with pretty much everything else, and she had enough thoughtstreams to pay attention to everything.

That said, her advice was extremely limited, mostly related to factual data and information. Advising on courses of action or guidance, she basically told us to do it ourselves.

She was in the Warp, and her Null was simply immense. She had no effect on reality from there, and was actively expelled by it. Any influence she had would likewise weigh down on anything we wanted to happen, and might even start thwarting Source influence and hampering what we were trying to accomplish.

She was a Null. She was not supposed to lead. That was the job of Sources. It didn’t matter that she was a Twenty or higher, or what her Stats and Skills were at. Nulls could only support. She had no agenda to give us, beyond what our overarching goal was... take down the Warp Gods!

Her job was to provide emergency support, special aid, and maybe hasten some of our goals with pure data management. Sources led, Nulls supported, Voids guided.

She did think Ronnie’s line of techpriestesses coming up was an absolutely hilarious idea, however, and gave me a mental thumbs-up for coming up with it.

Regardless of anything else, I was still the First True Rantha Hag, the Exemplar Lite of us, and so I was Mom and always would be. That was very assuring, as I looked around the galaxy and wondered what the hell I should be doing next...

Contessa Rantha and her growing fleet had been taken over by my girls. All branches of G&G and Ranthacorp were being run by my kids. De Krov’s planets were being run by kids. New planets were being settled and developed with great speed, the tech of the future capable of growth like nobody’s business as long as the resources were available.

The Map was reaching across the galaxy, the Phlogiston Rivers forming highways between the stars. The Dark Angel was dancing across battlefields across the galaxy, and was getting famous among aliens and humans alike. The Voids were free and going to start being re-established across the galaxy.

Ranthas and Briggs were leading Crusades, crushing pirate groups, gutting criminal syndicates, building businesses, rising in the military and mercenary circles, training up legions of Nulls and Sources, and generally engaged in hyperambitious projects everywhere and anywhere.

So, where did that leave me to go next?

GAMT tech and Angeltech was piling on the success of vivus and slowly ramping up, to the great consternation and unremitting hostility of the Mekkers. Unfortunately, their calls for terminating this technology and its impossible effectiveness was falling on deaf ears for now, as they simply couldn’t back up their claims. The technology was open source, anyone could look at it and try to replicate, and still the RanthaCorp stuff could not be equaled in performance.

It drove them into a tizzy, along with our many competitors. The accompanying violence was another major source of Karma for the kids as both sides expressed their displeasure at the situation.

-------

Christopher Briggs and Nina Rantha slid into the system aboard the Santa Maria, a nowhere place with only a numeric designation on the star charts, with grim expressions. The chatter and radiation coming out of the place was a very good indicator that something bad was here.

It was all in Mekker Boolecant. It was very difficult for a normal person to have any chance of understanding machine code straight off, let alone the encoded variants, but those people weren’t Tens with all the required Skill Ranks to do just that, and active gold-links to their Bands to help in real time, as required.

There were a lot of Mekker ships in this system, notable only for a white dwarf and the ancient remains of some pulverized planet or asteroid field.

They were in full stealth mode, drifting at a significant fraction of light speed as they approached. They could easily brake without throwing off stealth, so their approach was mainly to get into eavesdropping position.

There were over a hundred Mekker ships here, and not ones for simply research or hauling cargo. The vast majority were heavily armed and meant for escort duty, or going into dangerous places, or transporting the armies and forces of the Mechanist Guilds.

And more were arriving.

“Strategos, those rumors you collated all seem to be pointing here,” Christopher said, looking over the gathered fleet as they swung in atop a shattered hunk of asteroid drifting silently through the void. “We’ve got a mass arming and supplying taking place here. This is an expeditionary force!”

-Chris, you need to confirm where they intend to go,- Anatolia personally /replied coldly. Her tone said she knew, but they had to be sure.

“We haven’t got the stealth chops to do that, Ana,” Nina replied promptly. “This is the Mekkers, they place a premium on intelligence-gathering. The sensor suites are the most advanced in the Empire. We can’t get the Santa Maria any closer, and we don’t have the Skill to evade their systems personally.”

-Acknowledged. Stand by, and keep dumping that signals data.-

---

-Mom, feeling like wiping out a Mekker Fleet?-

Well, that sounded like an interesting change of pace. -Happy to help. What do you need?- I knew that the last thing they needed was me captaining or Warlording at this point. My job was to crack open new things for the kids to do, not to sit around and do things any of them could do.

Oh, and build these Rantha Levels with their crazy Karmic demands.

-They are assembling in an isolated system, preparing to move out to their target.-

She was being mysterious, or just reluctant. -Janus?- I /guessed, and felt her mental /nod. -What’s the play?-

-They’ve a TL 15 scanner network. We’ve got nobody else but you who can evade the network. On the other hand, we’ve been assembling a rather large number of antimatter mines you can put in some rather sensitive areas of their ships.-

I considered the implications of toting around several hundred pounds of planet-cracking antimatter as I stumbled around the finest arrays of sensors the Empire could field. My Stupidity Stat sang loudly, trumping all the others. -Sounds like fun! Heading to Spidey Base now.-

--------

“Hey, Mom!” Wayland Briggs greeted me as I stepped out of one of the Riftstages reserved for personal use instead of the rapidly evolving motorized transport relays.

Wayland was a Weapontechno, with an unreal talent for high-end weapon tech that was the envy of his brothers. It meant he worked on things like planet busters, Macross Missile Massacres, force field breachers, Sunrays, and similar modest material, while also tinkering with upgrades for all his brothers’ power armor suits. He’d had a hand in or okayed pretty much every basic upgrade to the Briggs’ suits, and was pretty much the front man for any Angeltech weapon upgrades.

“Hey, shorty,” I told the merely seven-foot brute, bopping fists with him, and he swayed back on his feet, a flicker of consternation crossing his honest and crude features. “What pulled you away from the cyclation tests? Negative energy cannon feeds don’t build themselves, you know.”

“I know, I know.” He picked up a big Masspack next to him, fully five feet long. “Your payload!”

I looked at it suspiciously. “Are you expecting me to put a mine on every one of those ships?”

He kind of blinked at me with his big dark eyes. “Uh, you weren’t?” he answered, sounding more than a little confused.

“Gawddammit,” I rolled my eyes theatrically, and snatched the thing out of his hand, slinging it over my back.

It was a very high grade Masspack; it had a weight let-off of about ten tons, so the thing only weighed three thousand pounds.

He noticed my feet still weren’t touching the floor after I slung it on. “Aren’t we supposed to be the strong ones?” he protested affably, as my hair adjusted it.

I grinned up at him. “Do you want to see how far I can throw it?”

“Yes. No. Nina’s going to open a Rift right over there.” He pointed to an adjoining platform, and I jumped sixty feet over to it.

I knew he was figuring out the numbers behind me being able to do that, and just how strong I had to be, and sighing that he could be out there tossing tanks around.

Of course, he could slap on a suit of power armor and have no problems spiking his Might into the 60’s or higher, so there was that.

I think he was inspired or something, mumbling something about mylomar cables or something as alternate muscle supplements.

“Hey, Wayland, confirmation: What’s the TL of the blacklight guns?”

“Sixteen, hard. Antiphotonic negative energy, transmaterial phasing to strike directly at the connections of spirit to body. We’ve got most of the math worked out,” he told me, skipping over to join me... but he wasn’t carrying a ton and a half of planet-crackers.

“And you’re setting up negative energy collectors all the over place which can be used for something other than Sequestering a planet from the Warp.”

“Crazy coincidence, right?” he beamed with a broad wink. “The first gen capacitors are going to suck. TL 17, we’ll have limited-shot hand weapons, and cannon rounds. Gonna have to harness a lot of death to use them, of course.”

“Like, using the deaths of a biovore fleet to kill off another one?” I prodded.

He beamed with a big grin. “That sounds like someone who wants to help with the design of a death-collecting frigate!”