Now, that wasn’t to say I didn’t see things. Like other Ranthas who had snuck peeks at the Warp, our eyes were juiced to behold the wonders of the soul and universe, and yeah, we could see just about everything. Succubus full True Seeing kicked in at Eight, after all, and we could look at the normal, psychic, and magical spectra, unhindered by illusions or false interpretations of reality that normal people had.
We saw the world as it was; Heaven up there, Hell down there, the Veil in between guarding us from all the things in existence that wanted to eat us. Souls and spirits and the power of life and light and the living and the dead... yeah, Ranthas saw it all.
Of course, given Mom had given us a Racial Class made from Soulborn, and our mental architecture rapidly went in every and all directions as a result, none of this particularly fazed us. In another being, the sheer ability to see reality as we did would have resulted in some mental warping to accommodate things humans really didn’t know, and didn’t want to... but all our core personalities were based on some dumb, blind, deaf, and stupid human person, used to living without all the secrets of existence hanging out there to be ogled as we pleased.
So, the ability to see all this didn’t get natural, and it didn’t get old. We were fully aware of how awesome and powerful our abilities were, and the nature of being a Null and having a 40-some Wisdom meant it didn’t go to our heads. It was a super-power, we were super-people; enjoy it, indulge, don’t forget where you came from.
So, there was the Warp, and it was trying to look back at me.
A Null’s psyche is as obdurate as the rest of them, and a Rantha’s mind was arranged in methods stacked on from demons, daemons, devas, devils, divs, genies, Fey, and Hags, among other things. All the mental Stat bonuses we got from our Racial Levels? Yeah, that was our minds expanding out to think in all those directions.
Succubi and Hag were the two biggest influences, other than human, upon us. Neither of them was much affected by looking at the Warp, especially Succubi. The Warp, the Abyss... eh. Chaos was Chaos, wherever you went.
So, I sat there and looked out at this morass of agglomerated psychic power out there, and parts of my head no human had in them took it all in with a dash of salt and found its madness mildly entertaining at best.
Yeah, I could see the wild and turgid emotional flows and instincts it was made of. Made of a crushed and mangled afterlife, all the emotions, thoughts, deeds, and beliefs of all that lived were running into one another in waves and whorls, burying one another, mixing and blending into arrhythmic storms and flows that slammed back and forth in utter disharmony, their own conflicts inside driving further conflicts outside. The very energy of the Warp was in turmoil as drives and urges that, outside in Creation, were parceled out or allowed to burn free and recede back into the fabric of Creation, were instead turned back upon themselves, ever in conflict, never in balance or harmony.
The Good was naturally haplessly buried under the emotional quagmire of Chaos, the unbending rigidity of Law, the overwhelming primal power of instincts, and the dark and malevolent survival drives of Evil. The raging emotions, primal instincts, and self at expense of all others had mashed together in unholy and rapacious disharmony, and were steamrolling basically everything else, breaking it up so it couldn’t form any kind of resistance, perpetuating itself as it shattered all the opposition.
Negative emotions vastly outweighed the positive, helped on by survival instincts and the ruthless will to live. It was this power, at the heart of all beings, which had combined here and was dominating everything, leading to the rise of the Warp gods.
There were demons out there, paralleling this ship as waves of thoughts and souls, looking for a weakness in the Throne Field, not finding any, but perfectly happy to sit out there and see if they couldn’t get their hands upon a ripe soul or ten thousand. They were incorporeal, moving through the churning murk of madness, teasing and tempting the eyes out there, trying to draw out a psychic presence for the demons to pounce on and use as a conduit to get into the ship.
I was a Null, and my psychic presence extended four inches past my skin, IF I extended my Vajra out that far. Like to see one of them bastards try to get some psychic hooks into me. It could jump right into my soulclaws and see how it liked it...
Still, definitely not a place to bring a psion up to. They really did put their souls at risk. Normal people had less resistance, but also didn’t have the awareness to make a conduit easily. Oddly enough, it was psi-active cybers who were the most at risk here, having the awareness, but vulnerable because of the machines corrupting mind, soul, and body, and affecting their inner strength and belief in themselves. Not a good place to be...
What I really, really wanted to do is make a vivic blade half a mile long, stick it out from this ship, and cut a real huge freaking swathe through the Warp. Vivic fire would purify all those emotions, from primal savagery to beatific hope, from the Warp entirely, reducing them to background energy that the Warp Gods could do nothing with.
Of course, that would be like drawing a big, bright arrow behind me in the Warp, pointing to this ship for every demon’s attention to do something about. The Throne Field was good, but not that good. The avatar of a Warp God could breach it almost instantly, so I preferred not to draw that level of attention.
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Still, it was a nice dream, and I imagined Mom was doing quite a bit of that in her own way.
She’d been out here more than twenty years in real time, and I doubted the Warp Gods didn’t know someone was out here in the Warp yet. They just wouldn’t be able to see her, only try to follow her trail, and get to where she was actively killing. In a Warp feeding off everything fighting, dying, living, and loving across a galaxy, needle in a haystack trying to sense a blip of a thoughtworld going silent en vivus was not even close to how difficult it was.
Of course, one day an avatar might find her, and possibly even bring in the real thing. Then they could see what they’d made of Mom, and whether facing her was at all a good idea.
Mom was probably looking forwards to it. There’d be a good tussle, and she’d introduce them to some heavy reality the hard way.
I took a long last look at the demon hordes trailing along the path of the ship, the weak ones slowly falling away and back, more converging from out of the roiling murk to see what they could get out of some entertainment.
How much evil, cruelty, primal rage, and will to survive was needed to finally roll together, cling to itself, and condense until it finally formed a lethal package of semi-sentience that could grow into something called a demon?
I rolled the screens back down, not so much to preserve the sanity of the crew of this vessel as to stop any demons from hopping aboard through them.
After all, I wanted this ship. Getting it Possessed by demons was kind of a non-starter with that in mind.
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The ship had enough datafiles that I could immerse myself in them for most of the week-long trip. I cached massive amounts of newsfiles for the past two decades and more for dumping to the Goldilocks... who would get them sifted by the Umbrans and Coronals for material, and then release them into the infosphere for people to wail and gnash their teeth over. We were going to be taking some major options and derivatives out in the financial markets, and making a freaking killing before the market could start gyrating.
The simple idea that there might be an avenue of communication between the two severed halves of the Empire might throw a real spanner into the works, as suddenly all those people entertaining ideas might get cold feet knowing that far Tellus might actually find out about it. Others were going to have to take a good hard look at their loyalty, and wonder... because just because we could talk with one another didn’t mean that armadas could be sent back and forth.
Without the fist of the Empire behind it, what were mere words? It would be like shouting across a canyon and being unable to reach the party on the other side. The galaxy didn’t lack for ambitious sorts, and with no support coming from the Empire, the only thing possible being an exchange of information, plans might hiccup, but they’d still be moving forwards.
Mine sure weren’t going to stop. I was just going to make a lot of money on both sides.
The fact that I did have that connection would get out, simply because the cogitation engines weren’t going to be able to ignore the fact that I was making craploads of money when the news hit. Then the race would be on to control the link I had, somehow, by whatever means was possible.
So, I was going to have to be very circumspect. As the carrier of the news, I was naturally the filter of it, too...
Wading through the news minutiae of over two decades was quite a slog, even with multiple thoughtstreams and digesting things straight in my headspace multiple times faster than anything human could. As something adapted for an effectively infinite lifespan, I also had effectively infinite memory, although I couldn’t digest information as fast as a high-end computer could. Still, normal news was not an issue, and I was digesting, charting, tracking, inferring, and predicting as best I could while I took all this in, getting myself familiar with all the stuff on this side of the galaxy.
The overanalytical girls were going to have a datafest when I dumped all of this on them.
Secretly in command of the ship, I devoured data nonstop, save to cook a meal for Marquis My Pet when he returned to the room. His four maids wanted to throw him to his torturers for days of fun, but he was already a total slave and would simply enjoy it if I told him to. I literally could not abuse him enough, so there was no point in doing so.
Everything of his was going to be mine, and he was my pet. For a paranoid and power-hungry arsehole like him, what better punishment was there?
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Surprisingly enough, Celestia, Keva, and Jensa weren’t the first of my daughters to hit Eleven. Nope, that honor had gone to Brus and Jenyfyr, who had signed up with one of Imperial Regiments and shipped off to the far side of the Khagan Sector, where it turned out the Xenos Swarm had sent a major incursion into the Gamara system to munch on everything organic within.
The Imperial Fleet had been completely unable to deal with the scale of the incursion, surprise surprise, and fled after getting themselves and most of the system fleet munched.
That naturally enough doomed both major populated worlds there. To prevent the harvesting of biomass, the Fleet tried to Omega Sanction the planets frantically before the Xenos got there, charring the surface of the whole first planet to ash, drying up the oceans, and generally burning their meals to charcoal before they could eat them, before racing away as fast as they could.
They didn’t make it to the second before a flanking group of Xenos piloted by cerevores Necrojumped in front of them, and sealed their fate.
Naturally, Brus and Jen were down there on Gamara II with sixteen billion inhabitants, when black carapaced bioships filled the skies. Untold millions of landing pods began to fall, while flying swarms so thick they devoured the clouds dominated the air.
It was a full-scale Xenos invasion, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Gamara II, its production and food-processing facilities, and all its billions constantly sending out soldiers to fight in the wars of the Empire, were going to die.
Oh, they tried to fight back, and the planet had its moments of glory, and valor, and courage... as well as panic, terror, cowardice, and backstabbing. Warp Events went off like clockwork, but were soon so overwhelmed by the raw psychic might of the Xenos fleet that it just didn’t matter.
What had been a routine dispatch to settle a few mega-cities rebelling against the planetary governor had become annihilation, as naturally it was the cerevores behind the rebellions, orchestrating everything and buying time for a real Xenos fleet to arrive.