The nearest Seat system with a proper spacedock for refitting was Kolosti Minor. The crew was a bit surprised to hear that the whole fleet would be going in for a refit, and the harvesting of slaves was going to have a slight delay. It was easy enough for the astropaths serving the ships to get the messages off, all nice and proper coming from the captains and the Marquis.
Four days in the Warp later, we were disgorged into the Kolosti Minor system, with the great spacedocks that ringed the planet and serviced hundreds of major ships and thousands of lesser ones at any one time.
Some of the girls had made it to Crown and Throneworlds by now, of course, so seeing space stations that ringed an entire planet wasn’t exactly new, but it was the first time I was seeing it with my own eyes. Did it compare to an ecumenopolis at the heart of Gloom, covering the inside of a sphere larger than Tellus, with its own dying sun bound up in the middle and floating docks with thousands of butterfly-hulled drow ships orbiting around it?
Well, I suppose in its own way it did. After all, every Seat world had a major orbital presence like this. A Throne world would supplement it with several moon-sized fortresses and orbital arcologies, at the very least. The Elvar races had style and chic down cold, but they simply didn’t have the presence, resources, or population to do this sort of thing anymore. Likely the only megastructures they had remaining were their Starhome shipworlds...
So, yay humanity?
--------
Negotiations to dock were fairly smooth, and if the operators of the station were shocked that all of de Krov’s ships were coming in, as long as he paid, they didn’t care. They were given fairly remote docking positions near one another, as requested.
I gave some final orders, and Chalice popped from one ship to the next to execute a few temporary Rift withdrawals, before I headed down to the planet below.
---
Teleportation outside atmospheres has a lot more range than inside them, less mass in the way mucking things up. I could reach all the way from high orbit to low orbit with a Linejump variant, putting me right at the edge of atmosphere, and then from the atmosphere to the ground, zeroing in on my destination.
The city had an Interdiction field up to stop incoming teleporters and dimensional rifts, of course, but that just meant I had to fall a couple miles to get where I wanted to go. It was a friendly world environment-wise, so the city didn’t have a default Dome, and I could plunge right into the city without too much problem, using my hair to remain mostly invisible and Vampire’s Veil to flummox any sensors that might pick me up.
Naturally I had downloaded the layout of the city of Kolosti Prime from the station’s Boole. The Castle and the Dungeon were, as ever, located former atop the latter, Coronals and Umbrals bound together, light and dark.
They weren’t my destination just yet, but I did mark the location. No, I was going to someplace close by... namely, the Beacon, and all the astropaths working there.
-----
There were a few curious heads that turned as I swooped down from out of the sky, but there were minor psions all over the place here, and anti-grav was a thing, so turned heads was all the attention I got for a moment.
“Hi there!” I smiled cheerfully. “Standard Beacon build, astropaths off to the right?” I asked one of the gawkers. I had all the right dominant body language and accent, and he folded haplessly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied quickly. Just the one sentence indicated I had been in a lot of astropath buildings, meaning a traveler, meaning money, and that I was here to spend it. Not someone to get in the way of.
“Thank you!” I waved over my head, he got to look at my ass as I strolled away, and I smiled at what was to come.
-----
“You... this...”
The manager of the Astropath Guild was at a loss for words. They ran the service of interstellar message-sending off residual energy from the Beacon, guided by Mentats who were paid very well for the service... and Geased into discretion, too. Remembering and reading other people’s mail could be very dangerous, after all.
But I had just placed a REALLY big order, and caught him completely off-guard.
“We... we don’t have the capacity to fill an order of this size right now,” he admitted, beads of sweat starting to drop off his head.
I put something on the desk, touched it. Lights danced and spun together, forming a pair of symbols that, while often associated, were rarely often seen back to back like this.
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“You need to correct what you are saying,” I replied shortly, as his eyes bulged. “What you mean to say is... ‘I have no choice but to send all this out as fast as possible, and I will do whatever it takes to do so... regardless of the cost.’”
He looked at me as I leaned forwards, and suddenly his eyes were rather frantic. “Three day’s pay for anyone and everyone who participates in sending this out. If you can get it all done in under two hours, double that.”
His eyes kind of went wild. “Let-let me make an emergency summons!” he sort of squeaked, the combination of a week’s pay and the Twilight Seal lighting some fusion fire under him. He took the message and fairly sprinted away.
---
Not five minutes later a whole bunch of Beacon psions, polygon symbols on their foreheads, started pouring into the Beacon. I sat down on a comfy chair in the corner as the static tension in the air began to increase remarkably, and I knew that messages were going off nonstop as fast as they possibly could, all over the galaxy.
The destinations of those messages included every single Castle and Dungeon in the Empire, as well as every Mentat Guild tower, and every psion inside them; every Imperial Legionnaire HQ of any size, every Imperial Fleet Station, every megacorp office, and every primary planetary or larger governmental entity.
Dumping it into the local Boole was something I did myself, and I was sure interested parties elsewhere would start it proliferating.
That was... a lot of mail going out. Those Beacon psions behind me were Focusing and releasing as fast as they could to get the bonus and the mail out as fast as possible, while I busied myself sending it to all the local powers casually.
The mail I was sending was naturally the Care Package for Vivic runework. Unless the Warp Gods could conjure up a galaxy-wide Warpstorm once again, this was going to get out to those parties that could use it and would be interested in employing it.
It was also going out under Twilight Order Seal. I smirked to myself at the cost of this level of mail going out. The Orders probably weren’t going to like it when they got the bill, which they would be alerted to at any time now. Someone using Twilight Seal authorization without primary clearance from the local Castle and Dungeon was definitely going to be a Person of Interest.
I laughed despite myself when the manager came back, his face an interesting shade of red, sweating, but his eyes very big and feverish.
After all, I had just set a one-day record for the number of astropathic messages going out, especially in peace time. His quarterly earnings report was going to look just wonderful!
“We should be finished up with the messages in approximately forty-three minutes, my Lady!” he reported to me, most obsequiously.
“Wonderful!” I pointed to the workers. “I’ll be asking them if they got their six day bonus a week from now. If they haven’t, I’m going to come back here and remove your head from your shoulders, okay?”
He swallowed despite himself at how casually I said that... and he realized I was absolutely going to do just that.
“I will make sure they are fairly recompensed for their time!” he said righteously, and his dreams of siphoning off thousands of extra credits for his own use were politely put away in favor of surviving an extra day.
“Excellent! Take care of yourself now!”
---------
“Don’t move!”
They came out of holo-cloaks to surround me while I was taking a drink on the veranda while I futzed with the Boole. After all, I had some accounts to set up. The waitress coming with the drinks was badly startled, and I just waved her in, despite the guys in hardsuits with firepower all aimed at me.
“One drink for all six of them,” I pointed out airily to her, and the Coronal, Umbran, and four lads on their Striker team suddenly looked kind of wrong-footed as the greatly daring (and big tip coming) waitress glided in, gave each of them a tall cocktail with a couple wild fruits hanging on it and ornamental straw, and quickly glided away as if she’d seen it all before.
I waved at the lady knight and male op, gesturing them to seats across from me. They looked at one another, wondered what they’d done wrong, while their spec ops boys carefully lowered their guns and wondered what to do with the drinks in their hands.
“Who,” the woman asked directly, her eyes as sharp as a duelist, “are you? A nymphal who dares bill the Orders for a mass astropathic sending on that scale...”
I held up two fingers, reached into my vest pocket slooowly, and pulled out a black square very obviously. I set it on the glass table, and holos spun and psychoactive lights reached up and formed the back-to-back symbols of the Knights Coronal and the Order of the Fallen Moon.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked archly, and before they could respond I went on, “Do you know what happens if someone who is not authorized to handle one, does so? If you don’t, please feel free to confiscate it.” I smiled and sat back, and watched their expressions move around as they stared at the symbols.
The man responded first. “A Twilight Seal authorization is only issued by an Umbral Duke and a Coronal Duke in tandem. That is a very high level of trust.”
“Oh, you got that right,” I agreed, as said Dukes laughed in the back of my head. “Although I would add in ‘a very high level of pay’, too.”
The knight’s face sank. “Are you aware of just how much a mass astropathic message of that scale cost?” she demanded.
I looked up, calculated visibly, carried the one... “Yes,” I stated calmly. “After preliminary calculations of known Castles and Dungeons, Mentat towers, Legion HQ’s, Fleet Bases, planetary governments, and certain businesses of interest, along with the fact Astropath rates are pretty bloody identical throughout the whole damn galaxy, I daresay I knew the cost within a million credits.”
That shut them both up. A million was the rounding error, after all.
“And... the sending of this message was part of your Twilight Seal?” the Umbran went on, his eyes sharp.
I clapped my hands. “Very good! Naturally, the second part involves the local Dukes Twilight. How quickly can you get me in to see them?” Which really meant, Escort me to see them now, you twats. I’m under Seal, and am not going to tell you anything about the hundreds of billions of your credits I just spent.
Some other Dukes had sent me here. Obviously, I came with their trust. The dame and the op looked at one another, sighed despite themselves, and looked at me. “Come with us, then.”
“After they finish their drinks.” I waved at the shooters. “Getting your Strikers all hot and bothered for nothing, they at least earned a drink out of this.”
Both of them just glared at me, and I smiled back. The guys in the hardsuits cautiously put up their visors and grabbed for the fruity drinks sitting close by...