The Sargasso became a convergence point for some of the higher-Level kids clearing out Warp stuff, and an ersatz testing ground for new technology and tactics. The fact that we’d occasionally run across weird aliens, almost always devolved, evolved, mutated, or Possessed, meant there was always new stuff to learn, and these little nuggets of tech that could be investigated and added to our own store of knowledge were of course the best prizes we could get.

By now the kids had realized that the best road to Eleven was saving a planet, taking over a planet or kilo-city (population dependent), putting together a fleet, establishing a megacorp (branch of G&G usually), and otherwise making a name for themselves, adding another stone to the fortress we had to build against both the Empire and the Warp Gods.

Finding awesome weird shit out there in the galaxy could trip an Expert Level past Ten, as Maggie and Amer found a gathering point for Dark Matter life forms while zipping by in the Void, and realized that those erratic gravity waves were probably non-baryonic life forms making out. Cortez and Amelia popped Eleven when they drifted in near a system that happened to be in the throes of a battle between the Zygom and the Cellulocusts, engaged in mindless eating of one another and all the biomatter in the system. There were signs humans had once lived on three of the worlds, and a fair amount of wreckage overgrown by clumps of spore-born and seedlings eating one another mindlessly...

Still, there was only so much awesome shit they could find, and the threat level could spike VERY quickly doing it. That said, there was a lot of the galaxy left, and we were mapping more and more of it.

Marcon Briggs discovered the keynote dimensional vibes for a standard Gloom Portal, fed it up the Ranks of TL, and suddenly our highest-end specialized sensor suites could detect Elvar Portals within a system. Very quickly our ability to plot the comings and goings of the Elvar increased significantly.

There were a lot of forces that definitely didn’t want us investigating everything we were, mapping out their territories, and otherwise dissecting their holdings and plotting their movements. That they had a pretty good idea of the human empire’s power in return was not something they were going to willingly lose, of course, and they definitely didn’t want equality in intelligence-gathering.

That only redoubled the explorers’ resolution on their Grand Quest to Map It All. There was going to be a lot of Karma involved along the way, because Briggs boys were swearing Oaths and taking this REALLY seriously. Alias-class ships were riding some of the advance waves of our tech curves for this very reason, and their updates to The Map, going on all the time, were basically levels of information you simply could not buy.

They could only be done because of our ability to travel in real space, and that speed was starting to hit the top.

Ronnie couldn’t make Eternal with Expert Levels, so she was spiking her Rantha Levels now, and going Deep with Vizard and similar Levels, bringing them up to Ten. She was already a Twenty, so she was basically just broadening her knowledge scope at this point, and only had so much time in the day to work on stuff. Just the dribbling fallout of Can you look into this for me Thx! coming off her research would have melted the minds of the Mechanist Overmeisters on Tellus and Venus.

If she occasionally popped into the Sargasso to engage in a little action science, hey, nobody minded. We all considered explosive violence on the deserving immensely relaxing. It didn’t stop her from researching, anyways, that’s what the dozen extra thoughtstreams were all about. There was no way she was going to make Eternal as a Melee, unless she invented the ultimate Mecha or something-

-Dammit, Mom!-

-and she didn’t have time to pilot it anyways.

-PLEASE INVENT ULTIMATE MECHA THANK YOU!!!- the Natural Pilot kids all cheerfully /called out to her.

-Dammit, Mom!-

Snark, snark, snark; grumble, grumble, grumble... hee hee!

I sent out a /tell to the new Contessa Rantha, who was just putting a Baneshot into the skull of the Patriarch of a House Minor who had the audacity not to remove themselves from their ancestral lands on a world owned by the Corunsuns since before the Empire, and who thought vowing to the Stone was completely unnecessary.

-How’s your grasp of the House’s trading?- I /asked Priscilla, as she watched Prince Henry flip over a hovertank and put a few plasma charges into its underside. The release blossomed a couple hundred feet into the air, and he came down out of it onto a frantically firing Knight Walker, shattering the joint of one leg. The highly sociable and erudite young Briggsboy drew Repartee back as the knight inside gawked at him...

The Contessa applauded off to the side, but her growl on the /tell was heard very clearly indeed.

-We have more stuff going on than I can track, the holdings are just too big,- Priscilla /admitted. -We’re fanning out and taking control of stuff piecemeal, but minimum numbers are twenty-seven thousand worlds at least affected by stuff, and it could be six figures without any difficulty. The Foundation doesn’t even know it all... they just collected the money and didn’t care as long as it came in.-

That was par for the course. The Foundation had their claws firmly into the top ten thousand or so revenue sources, and as for what was below them, eh, minor players. Their family members went out there, made fortunes of their own, kept control, and never came back, for the most part. If they did, it was for power struggles that usually killed them.

It was a total freaking bonanza for Hagsbloods looking to build up followings.

-Alien trade agreements?- I /inquired. The Foundation didn’t have any of those down ‘on paper’, because it might have imperiled their status in the eyes of the Empire. If some of those irrelevant quaternary holdings did stuff on the side and got caught, well, they’d be appropriately punished for being clumsy, er, betraying the Emperor, and life would go on.

-Several dozen behind the back, the others have found.- She put two Banebolts into the face of a cyborg, sliced off three limbs from another’s warframe and then chewed a path into its power-core with Bitchin at just the right angle to blow its braincase to goo. -Nothing that would be high treason, although I did just send out Fred and Vilma to Investigate something on Ovious III which might involve the drow...-

-How about the Kappa?-

She sent some thoughts flinging out, they came back. -No holdings that far spinward, we come up about five hundred light years short. You want us to open a back channel? It’s within the remit of a Marquis, as long as we gather sufficient intelligence with the trading.- A desperate young noble carrying a fusion device was grabbed by the TK of her Ring, went careening into a charging Knight Walker, and she detonated the device, swallowing a hundred-meter circle in some nuclear fire and almost mussing her hair.

-Please. It’s time to start some post-Imperial planning.-

-----------

“Go.”

Nemvis Glortil was a low-born nobody from Johorg IV, coming off a farm raising cattloids for butchering. He got a Mark, went from a farmhand to a technician overnight, joined the militia, fought in two planetary wars, and mustered out to the G&G corps.

He came from nowhere, and now he was a Ten Expert, Six Melee, one of the most adept at his trade in the galaxy, and he had drawn the straw.

He smoothly fit the custom cable array into place on the last of the secondary power cores of the Ruk Citadel ship.

Antisilicon was injected, the silicon particles already zipping about inside started lighting off. Matter became energy, fields energized, cables and banks of equipment lit up, lights turned on, and the whole room began to hum.

“We’ve got a subetheric gravity wave going out!” called out Halise, a former hairdresser from Tingia Station II, now one of the sensor techs manning high-end Angeltech. Her palm flared repeatedly as she Focused and Released her Nimbus. “Definitely a signal! At least a KB of modulation in the first pulse!”

Everyone waited expectantly as her brow furrowed, looking over a dozen readouts around her. The seconds crept by patiently, and there was just the tiniest fluctuation above and beyond the roiling surge of energies within the power core. “Six-part beep! We’ve got a locator signal!”

Everyone looked at one another in a mixture of relief and worry, and eyed the surrounding equipment a tad suspiciously.

I’d been able to break down the language and functionality of just about everything fairly easily, but only the simplest and most obvious features of the equipment were usable, as intricate knowledge of the hard-coding was required to actually start manipulating stuff.

The Ruk would naturally have known that, so they’d set it up to maintain power and set off the pulse. It would travel on the gravitational waves that bound the galaxy together like plucking the edge of a spider’s web, there and gone, blipblip, and unless you were actually watching for something with TL20 tech or some really high-end psi, you’d have no idea you were sitting on a time bomb.

“Fifth and final check. The Array in the Dark Matter Core ready to go?”

-87% done and all positives, Sama!- was the /callback.

I nodded to everybody in particular. “Roll it all back and out. When that scan is done, I want all of us out of here five minutes later.”

A wave of affirmations came pouring back, and the people around me burst into motion, heaving some very high-end equipment and instrumentation onto Disks, and guys in power armor started pushing them towards the lifts at firm trots. Several thousand people pulled up and out of the Mount’s interior, and the transports and shuttles carried them away quickly.

The team from the Core was the last to step out, other than myself. I didn’t go down there to check on their work, and they knew it was because I was fully confident that they did the job right.

The Disks set down, and the shuttle lifted off for the Dojo nearby.

The Dojo was my new ship. I hadn’t exactly ordered it, but the designers and planners had deftly gone behind my back and designed the first capital ship with integrated TL 20 tech for my personal use.

It wasn’t a warship, as there would have been a lot more guns if it was. It was like the Precipice’s bigger and nastier younger sister, made for multiple roles... but the tech was good enough that it could perform a general role better than a TL 16 specialist ship, without any problems whatsoever. If it geared for a specialist role, well...

It had our third White Hole reactor core, the third Gate system, and an organic computer system and interactive intelligence that Hulkamania had grown personally.

The speed with which the modular attachments could be removed from the superstructure and framework and swapped out for pure aggressive military stuff would probably have the Mekkers dying in pure envy....