To put the closure on the whole ordeal, when the fleet left the system, the remnants of the space station were completely gone. The kids were experienced at Looting Their Stuff, and had arranged a Solar Furnace to come in stealthily, suck in all the floating parts, process them, and exit the system while the assassin fleet was tooling about on the Mountain’s world.

The assassins weren’t too happy to find out someone could pull that kind of stuff off under their noses, as they could find absolutely no trace of the station and its debris on the way out of the system... but a whole lot of news was waiting for them when they hit Imperial Space again, and found the destruction of the station set to music and all over the Boole.

Well, given the Vizier had died before they even left the system, there was some political shuffling going on over in the government. There was a lot of missing money, there were some very important files from very secure places that should not have been breachable being sent off to some very powerful and important people, and loyal servants of the Empire were beginning to shoot one another in the halls of power rather wildly.

Well, people had to pay. Blame was assigned, refused, counter-assigned, discussions were had, and whoever lived had the last word. Thousands of proud Tellurian bureaucrats, nobles, guildmasters, merchant lords, Mekkers, military officers, and the like all got in on the discussions, having forceful opinions about what was going on and how it all should be resolved; were met with counter-arguments; there was a lot of repartee, often flashy, sometimes pointed, and usually career-ending.

It was a rare time of great opportunity for ambitious young bureaucrats, and the turnover and promotion rate in the many halls of Tellurian power hit a three-hundred year high, as did the number of loyal Tellurian servants of the Empire who didn’t live to collect their pensions.

Families rose, others fell, and there weren’t enough qualified bodies to fill all the positions with pure nepotism quite fast enough. There was a remarkable and impressive crackdown on trying to stuff lower-tier and unqualified personnel into positions simply to keep influence over them; more senior positions opened up; and the ambitious trying to measure all the ways the wind was blowing continued on with their jobs far more exciting than they used to be.

Mata got a lot of her more adept minions into a lot more places than before. Harley got a lot of people out of a lot of important positions as strategic file after file leaked from the Assassin archives were released, and kept the shuffling of seniority and promotion climbing in effect, generally over the fresh body of the incumbent. Her obituaries were first rate, her explanations drop-dead perfect, and she was a go-to person for lightly explaining away even the most outrageous circumstances with a perfectly straight face and absolutely no regrets whatsoever.

------

Still, the removal of the psi-killing Assassins, one of the Emperor’s greatest tools for millennia, definitely sent some chills down the spines of those in the halls of power, mostly because no one could figure out where they had all gone to, and not getting any information for at least two decades had to be suspect at best.

After a suitable number of impromptu knifings and career-ending personal discussions, the head of the Ops department, which specialized in sniping and explosive removal of key political figures with ideas they shouldn’t have, finally inherited his predecessor’s position. The leaking of files miraculously dried up, and he didn’t even bother to claim he hadn’t been behind it, since nobody would believe him, anyways.

He did get Summoned to see the Emperor, a rare honor that had him pale in the face despite his esteemed profession. He came out of it with an odd light in his eyes and a mission: find out what had happened to the newborn Voids!

He was plugged into the network of gene reports, and ordered to find out where those kids had gone, and how, and who was behind all this.

He got right on that job, mobilizing the Covert branch, which specialized in infiltration, and the Technos, who relied on tech and mad hacking skillz to do the job for them, in addition to his own Operators.

It took him over two years to realize that the generation of the results for the new gene-positives was being delayed by nearly twelve hours, by which time the family and child would be long gone before they could be found by his people, taken away by agents who didn’t pop up on any kind of surveillance.

The girls, on the other hand, vanished with their families, only to be presented inextricably to various Silent Sister ships going about the course of their duties. Their reaction to his interference in the recruitment of their little sisters got unnecessarily violent, especially after one shipload of the children was blown apart when it resisted being boarded. The enraged Sisters decided that the entire investigatory team had blown apart with it; too bad, so sad.

Given some of the losses the Sisterhood had been suffering recently, the Assassins decided to take the better part of discretion and not interfere with the shipment of young babes to them and their temple on Titan. As far as they could determine, the delivery vessels were automated shuttles of mass make and could be found literally anywhere, outfitted with the requisite cribs rapidly, and shipped out when a Silent Ship was in the system.

The Sisters had taken over the shipping of the children to their subsidiary Temples, and if that took a couple years, well, their ships were big for a reason.

Trying to find the teams that had once been gathering the children was nigh-impossible. The files were physically gone, and had not been copied. The Technos did their best, and actually managed to trace the identities of several of them, but all such teams had gone missing or were discovered dead by the various unhealthy means that were so common in the megacities of the Empire.

The Technos went around and around with the coding problem, but could not work out how the alert system had suddenly been subverted so thoroughly. The only place in the Empire where alerts were going out on time was Tellus itself... and the planet had long since ceased generating Voids, only the occasional Vortex, as if to spite the Emperor. As a matter of percentages, Voids were far more often found on barbaric or regressed worlds, but too often were too old to be recruited before they were actually found, set in their ways and their gifts never activated.

--------

The Assassins had no idea how many eyes were on them and their teams, and how we were mapping out their networks and contacts as they moved from world to world in ever-increasing scope, trying to find the Vampire Veiled teams doing the job.

As for the delay... well, their technos were good, but nobody but the Emperor himself could have broken the TL20 Code that had subverted those incoming alerts without knowing what Profound Coding actually was, no matter how good their tech was... and they didn’t have the good tech. The Great DM made sure that code didn’t get copied and sent off to Tellus for analysis, too.

We also had a good time exposing the presence of the Assassins to various parties who would panic at that kind of news, and if Operators and hit teams offed one another in the shadows, well, it was what it was.

The key part of all this was simply that the Emperor Had Noticed. Now everyone involved in that operation had to be a Source or Null, to evade his Psight ranging across the galaxy and following threads of fate.

I watched the threads of multiple sudden investigations into G&G and Ranthacorp cycle across the stars, as if someone was giving the order to harass them. The production of Angeltech dropped off sharply whenever the workforce was harassed, however, and they still hadn’t found the secret to making the stuff. Pressure from various quarters kept mounting until the investigators from the Ministries and Mechanists had to pull back, often missing a few people to sudden accidents as those various parties made their displeasure known.

A monopoly on a vital asset is a wonderful thing to have, in the end.

The Umbrans were instructed to investigate Ranthacorp and G&G multiple times, of course, to the extent that most of the branches set up an office for them to use whenever they stopped in, and a place to rest, stocked their favorite beverages, had showers and beds in their own apartments, and open doors everywhere, do anything.

They went over the bios of our employees so many times I think they recorded the number of hair follicles our employees had. They went over our financials, and if they were a little shocked at how profitable and how well our employees were paid, well, the tech we were turning in justified it all. They were one of our biggest clients, so they knew plenty well how good psi-enhanced Beacon vakkertech was, and as people with money putting their lives on the line, they naturally wanted only the best.

We delivered, unless outside forces came in and messed with our people or supply lines. After several delays where our disgruntled customers didn’t get all their stuff in a timely manner, and we pointed to some very obvious supply line problems, we were given carte blanche to secure those supply lines using any judicious methods suitable.

They loved reading our reports of exactly what started to occur thereafter. We started investing money in our supply chain after several agencies responsible for said disruptions got bad cases of Dead, soothing our upstream. If they wanted to come down and look at the factory and the people at any time, they were more than welcome to, of course...

------

All this really meant that Ranthacorp was basically popping up anywhere there was a Castle and Dungeon that wanted to buy our wares... and where the Mekkers didn’t mind kicking out the Beacon Psis for Capapsitors, and we could pay them better and treat them with more respect. With us always came G&G, arranging better places to live for our employees through shooting zwilniks, cultists, loonies, and various urban predatory types who helped pad Traffic Control’s Darwin numbers.

----------------

“They noticed there’s no Ranthacorp branch on Tellus.”

Trump Briggs was a Natural Salesman, cheerful, smarmy, diplomatic, roguish, trustworthy, observant, humorous, and just full enough of himself to put just about anyone at ease. He headed up the branch on Imhotep II, the Seat of Rajah sub-sector, just outside Tellus’ Solar Sector. Big, bluff, hale, and hearty, with most of the features of an Ancient subdued, he and Chanel Rantha had built up the branch there with affable manners, dry wit, and some astonishingly brutal negotiations with the powers-that-be. He didn’t hold it against them, and even the Mechanists murmured that they loved the taste of the maintenance fluids he served.

He was looking at a very Proper notice that had been delivered directly to him in his guise as Trump Gunstag, a true luxury in the information age, and something not to be ignored.

I watched with a bunch of others as he scanned through it, the very polite wording in gilt script, definitely hand-written by a trained scribe. He could sense the imperfections in the ink on the paper in his hands.

There were finely crushed diamonds in the ink. The thing was QL 32, suitable for framing and hanging on a wall just about anywhere. It had a psionic Seal that notified the person who laid it that it had been opened by the person intended, too. Trump had to rein in his Sun to make sure it worked when he opened it.

“They noticed there’s a G&G branch there, but no Ranthacorp.” It was a direct invitation to visit with several personages on Tellus interested in seeing a Ranthacorp factory get up and going there.

-There’s at least three layers between them, but those people are all bound to noble houses directly in the service of the Emperor. They’ve all got kin in the Palace Guards,- Mata /reported. -That came right out of the Palace.-

Trump winced. “They aren’t going to send me up in front of those old bones, are they? I’m a Ten, but that’s not going to be enough for Him, right?”