“Four, if you count the goblins politely bugging out.”

“You’re aware we don’t actually qualify as a major power yet, right?”

I glanced into the Markspace, and the thousands of new Marked basically getting added every second now. There were a lot of kids, in a lot of places, adding over a million Good people a day to the Markspace.

A lot of years had passed. There were billions in the Markspace, literally, a huge web of people connected across the Galaxy, and united by weird common ambitions, like hope, progress, faith, fairness, and so on.

The law of the jungle was meant for the jungle. We needed something higher.

“That’s true. But in terms of influence, we’re past the trillions of lives stage, and growing. We’re just... sort of tied up in all those different areas. Unifying our power would make it plain we have some strength...”

“Then we should definitely be concentrating on a core area we can defend, and then develop the shit out of it.” Anatolia frowned. “You know just how much of what we are doing is dependent on the Rift sticking around. If the Warp Gods decide to close it... we’ll be facing down the eyes of the entire Empire. Things will get VERY sticky if that happens.”

“Yes. Grassrooting across the galaxy just makes us a huge cult to be wiped out by superior numbers. Janus makes a nice open base, but I saw how you were swinging development out and away from official Imperial worlds to our own on the technology side of things. I don’t want our tech falling into the Empire’s hands, either.”

Anatolia lifted her nose. “Please. None of the idiots could understand how it all works. They would instantly be holy relics of the Mechanists or corrupt xenotech to be destroyed. In either event, they wouldn’t be able to make more. The people are more important than the machines, and the people are all not in the Empire.”

It was true. We were growing post-Tens like custom squash, and generally speaking, we moved them out of imperial space when we did so, putting them on their own ships, in research centers with bunches of other post-Tens, and the like. The exceptions were the Thunder Bulls, and everyone working with the Coronals and the Umbrans... but the Umbrans and Coronals, in the eyes of the Empire, would be considered totally compromised and illegitimate without the authority of Tellus behind them.

Captain Dornal of the Thunder Bulls was a post-Ten, hitting Eleven in Melee and leading the way for psi-active Legionnaires. There were no full Legions on this side of the Rift, but the Battalions that had been caught here were basically looking up to him as the model of what a Legionnaire could be out here, and he was growing into a role that a Silver Coronal would approve of.

His only restriction was that he couldn’t expand his personal forces and soldiers beyond Battalion size, but that wasn’t limiting him. His influence was growing with every Thunder Battalion, with every Support Company of Imperial Marines attached to them, and with the closer ties of Coronals, Umbrans, and even Reformed Mechanists in prosecuting the fight against the enemies of Humanity.

Being Marked made a lot of things possible. If we were shifting their loyalty away from undead dad subtly to Humanity in general, that was completely on our end. The idea that the Emperor was destined to save the souls from the Warp Gods was already being sent out there, planted in the minds of the Cult of Man. It would spread, reverberate in the Warp... and come to the attention of the Emperor.

Let’s see what He did with it...

In the meantime, we were going to pick apart this Xenos Fleet before it ever reached its destination, and the plants were going to get quite big as they digested their burning meals...

---------

Months pass...

My MF-Class Gunboat was called Mom’s Flitter, of course. I wasn’t Azure and didn’t get an adrenal rush every time I strapped in, but poking away at Secondary Class Levels to keep certain Skills up was definitely something I did. Levels in Pilot all went into Piloting and Navigation until they were maxed, and given the differences between everything from gliders to capital ships, that consumed a lot of Ranks, even with Feats to allow some to be exchanged for one another.

That was fine; that’s why I took those Classes. For all that I’d never taken out a mech in anything but simulations, I could drive pretty much any model that existed if I had to, too.

More to the point, I knew right where to hit them to blow the shit out of them, because I had all the engineering Ranks to make the things, too. Still thought mechs were dumb as shit when the same level of tech and material could make tanks twice as tough, but whatever... the Mechanists wanted to walk the worlds like gods.

They were NOT going to like it if they ever had to go up against the Corunsun ground forces, which didn’t have mechs bigger then Walkers, but had some brutally powerful tanks, which were being tested in certain battlefields away from the Empire against the Cyberdemons of the Warp’s artificers and everything they could come up with. Working quite well, too...

I disengaged from the Dojo, plugging into the Flitter with my hair, the whole Gunboat like an extension of my body. I wasn’t going out to shoot anything, so I wasn’t bringing any Natural Gunners along, all of whom would have half-died for the chance to be shooting for me.

Nah, I was going to be Nice, which was something quite different from normal.

I waved them off, turned the Flitter, and shot off to my rendezvous on the other side of the system.

The Elvar had chosen this out-of-the-way system for a rendezvous, just in case of treachery on our part, word of a Coronal or no. I didn’t much care. They would not believe how hard it would be to take out the Flitter, as it was made with the most current TL20 tech we could manage. Even the Ruk admired the ships after they saw them in action. It was a lot of engine, a lot of endurance, and spending that much money for a small gunboat just for quality purposes really struck all the craftsmen in them.

Most of the MF’s were working their way up to TL 18, as pound for pound they hit the hardest of any of the ships we could field. A squadron of them could totally take on a capital ship, and had proven it more than once. Totally demolishing one was not easy, of course, but precision crippling of engines and guns was their specialty, and they were very good at it.

They had a certain reputation among the Elvar corsairs and drow pirates. Nobody who wasn’t a Natural Pilot got to fly a MF (unless you were a Rantha), and to fly the better ones you had to be a Seven running for Ten. MF Pilots were our very best, and the Elvar Sunwasps had learned many painful lessons about skirmishing with one.

I knew for a fact that Azure’s blue color scheme for whatever ship she plugged Yonder into had been broadcast through the raiding population of the corsairs, and they were constantly trying to drag her and the other members of the Flying Rainbow into traps and ambushes. Her ability to sniff them out and surprise the crap out of those trying to pull that stuff only pushed her higher up on the bounty list, and the number of assassins who had tried to take her out was nearing three digits, she’d told me proudly.

My Gear was plugged into custom ports all around me, which is why Grim, my psicrystal, wasn’t the name of the ship.

Paten and Host were my Gunners, plugging directly into the rotary cannons that could spring out on top and bottom, their magic singing out to the guns there. Those guns were already some nasty pieces of coherent matter-stripping pieces of work, and adding on all those bonuses turned them into true terrors to their enemies. Basically, they didn’t miss, had twice normal range, double the firing rate, twice the armor-punch, and even glancing hits could fry systems. They could also shoot pure force bolts that ignored ship armor...

Faith ran the shields, of course, maximizing the overlay against those targeting the ship, and taking monstrous amounts of energy and kinetic damage through the ablative superconductors against his own Indestructible self. Among other things, he made the ship completely immune to temporal or spatial shearing once he was hooked into it. Take that, dimension-benders!

Chalice was on Scans, and had expanded her Special Purpose Healing to include Repair spells. She helped coordinate fire, and transferred injuries from the ship to me, or if it was drastic, simply mended it outright here or there. So, yeah, I could totally repair the totality of this ship, even if the Flitter was shot all to hell.

She could also Riftcut ahead of the ship as a six-second Reduce cut the ship down to half-size so it would fit through the forty-foot width of the Gate.

There was a reason these ships were so damn tough!

Grim’s job was to help with strategic Sun Shots, storing them during any break in the action, and bolstering the others, helping synergize everything. He could also take over control of the ship directly without me, naturally enough, so if I had to go exo, the ship still had a Pilot.

The telekinetic power of my Ring was being used for frictionless system operations. The quasi-psionic passives of the Air Elemental Command of my other Ring were being used for mass offset and maneuverability... and additional integral Lightning Resistance for the system.

Yeah, this was my Flitter. I could so tour the galaxy in this ship.

The most advanced White Hole Core in the fleet was my power generator. It could run a destroyer without any problem. Power I had no problems with.

------

I threaded a path around the heliosphere at a few hundred times light speed, not in a hurry as the tachyon drive hummed and made a bubble of accelerated causality for me. I was basically taking spot readings; this system was out of the way enough that none of the Scouts had been through it and put it into the Map, so I was doing flybys of calculated Phlo points and adding them to the logs. No reason not to do double-duty since I was early, right?

I turned in-system once I found three Phlos, and gravity readings could pinpoint the others. Where they led to was another question, but that was something for a Scout ship to come in and find out... which, now that the Elvar were known to operate here, one was certainly on the way to do just that.

Coming in at a steady .85c, I arrived at the coordinates and cut to tactical speed... and found exactly nothing.

I wanted to roll my eyes. I did roll my eyes. My Weapons all snickered.

“Give me a tachyon ping, full power,” I instructed Chalice, who shunted tachyon generation from the drive to the two forward mounts, and blew them out in an eruption of FTL particles... which would decelerate just a fraction when they reached the gravity fields of any objects within an AU.

Yeah, it announced my presence to everyone and sundry, but I hadn’t come in under cloak... and I totally could have, too. Standard Invisibility was a power of my Elemental Command Ring, even, and I had the embedded psi-capacitors to use it.

“Mass shadows, three of them, closing in,” Chalice sang out smugly. The calculation of the mass fields, spreads, and the ships that naturally had to be in the middle of them, were in my head, and my autobows went bwip-bwip-bwip with underpowered and frightfully accurate guns, spearing across ten thousand miles of void, to splash onto the laenwork hulls of the incoming ships precisely.

“Open channel.” Grim complied placidly. “Well, now that you know I know where you are, if you could stop playing games and reveal yourselves, we can get introductions in order, or we can start shooting.” I absently chose the course that would keep me equidistant from the three ships, confident there wasn’t a fourth there... or was I?

I re-adjusted course towards the smallest of the cloaked ships smoothly. “Warm up all guns. I think our hosts have been delayed. Are the trackers in place?”

“Confirmed impacts on all three cloaked ships. Photonic tracing is active.” Real-time positions of all three ships were in place. It was the real reason they’d been shot. Unless someone walked out there and cleaned the quantum-adhesive polycrystal with half a photon on it off their hull, I was going to know exactly where they were, even before I got inside their tactical field.

Their formation showed they hadn’t expected me to alter course so abruptly. I painted a marker onto nothing into the tactical sphere and began to adjust it, based on how the three ships were maneuvering.

“Moth Dancing up. Shields powering. Turrets deployed. Cycling up the rail guns, primary cannons are go,” my Weapons sang back to me.

The Dojo was only on the other side of the system. It could be here in literally a minute or two. Of course, I could be out of here in seconds, so that was nothing. I wasn’t in any real danger. No malfunctioning hyperdrive motivator here...