There were several things going on which rather confused the Umbrans and Coronals.
First, there were actually a dozen Silent Sisters on the Silent Ship, carrying their cryo-frozen cargo off to Tellus to be strapped into brain boxes and help power the Celestial Beacon, the preferred fate of rebellious psions in the Empire. Doing it at the local level and freeing up Beacon Psions was a no-no, of course. Had to keep those low-born psions busy somehow, right?
At least until the capapsitors started coming online, and Rantha Corp could start hiring them away...
Two, the Silent Sisters didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave, even as silently wailing condemned psion after psion was frozen and stuffed into storage for their return voyage.
Three, they basically dropped off the grid, save for terse communiques back and forth when needed, and the Orders didn’t know what they were doing.
I, however, did.
Now, it was completely and totally beneath the Silent Sisters to take part in anything as base and pointless as gang warfare for territorial expansion. Even city-wide drug wars didn’t mean a damn thing to them.
However, rooting out Warp Cults, xenos infiltrators, and that whole business? Oh, that was totally up their alley. Using Green and Gold gangers as cover for their operations was totally possible, all they had to do was take off their armor and they were basically just more women waving around mindclaws enthusiastically... or bladebelles, with the Sword Foci they were all quickly sporting.
Finding people involved in the Warp wasn’t difficult for Ranthas when we went searching for them. The girls were already getting involved in the shady side of life, and their information networks were only getting better by the day. Leading the Silent Sisters to such folk so they could accumulate a bunch of easy, light experience with their new mindclaws, while learning their new psionic abilities in the company of Nulls and Sources who were incredibly relaxing to be around, was pretty much a no-brainer.
I told them to just think of it as light training duty, the equivalent of running through simulations, while actually doing what they were born to do. Everything they were doing was basically lost in the general tumult and violence endemic to the gangs of Down and Underspire. If they stumbled onto something like, oh, psychotropic drugs that opened one up for Possession, which had a trail that led back Upspire to an up and coming pharma corp with some hot profit margins, well, I promised I’d help out if they wanted to suit up...
As for their inspection of the local Mentat guild while ostensibly the entire Guild was gathered in a grey room... well, that went rather badly for the seventy or so Mentats involved in Warp dabbling, and there was a pell-mell inspection of all their associates as the ones who survived were put into cold storage. As for the three dozen or so members who didn’t show up for that assembly, half were found dead, and the other half went quickly missing, with Sisters who could sniff a psi-trail out hot on their paths, Striker Squads in tow.
Jonah, Elijah, and Noah quickly became indispensable to the Sisters, but the Sisters were also quick to glom onto the more experienced Null Mindshields, blithely and openly recruiting them, both men and women. There was standing by the cozy fire, and there was blessed silence...
Our information network was all about keeping them busy, and with the sensitivity of their Vortices to the Warp, just getting them in the general vicinity of a cult or practitioner was enough to confirm the information was good, and not waste their time. We were very definitely not wasting their time, and if the Sisters were crashing cult operations high and low with terribly accurate raids, and really upsetting some folk in high places, well, that is what the Sisters did.
---------
-It’s probably time for you to leave, Eloise.-
The senior Sister /sighed in Markspace. The Sisters had totally glommed onto the tellepathic communication of the Marks, and their coordination in combat was now literally silent and eerily fast. That the Nulls and Sources could share in it... and also share privately... was just a very nice perk.
-Why do you say that?- the Sister /asked, her sharpness mollified by true respect for me. I had delivered unto the Sisters the biggest boost of their lives, and they were all able to tell how effective it was. As their psi power grew, it pushed outside their soul, and the contamination from their Vortex was kept at bay, the stress upon their sanity was relieved, and their effective lifespan was growing by the day.
How that would upset their bosses when they didn’t have a limited shelf life any longer was a problem they were going to have to address...
-The first reason is that our information sources are running dry on things for you to do in Kolosti Prime here. That’s not saying that there isn’t more Warp stuff in the city, but unless you want to start pounding the pavement and feeling for it actively, it’s not going to happen. You could go to another mega-city and grab some low-hanging fruit, probably starting with their Mentat Guilds, if they haven’t panicked yet, but otherwise, you’re going to be taking up time doing nothing.-
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
-We shall begin our purge of the Mentats,- she /agreed, which I’m sure all of the Mentat Guilds on the planet would have been so happy to hear. -What else?-
-The real way to improve is to go to places with true conflict. You want to max out your Mindblade and complete your Bulwark? Go find a combat zone with the Warp, and commence large-scale butchery.-
She hummed mentally. -I have noted my progress has slowed as my skills have improved,- she /agreed.
The Sisters had made broad foundational improvements and revisions across the board, layering skills, grabbing new Class Levels to build a better foundation, establishing a Vajra after taking Monk Levels, gaining access to ki... and taking a Soulshaper Level, getting Opened to Soul Essence, and urgently establishing a Diamond Vajra.
From there, they could establish a Vortex Matrix of purified mana. The Mark IV Diamond Vajra quadrupled their defensive Bulwark’s power, and they wanted nothing more than to get that thing so solid they could be sucking on Amourae Herself and risk nothing.
-There’s one last thing for you and your Sisters to do here in Prime. Meet me at these coordinates...-
-------------
A tac nuke had been used to wipe the Dead Walking Event in this waste zone, and the ruins of a blok were scattered around the area, the twisted remnants of the great durasteel bar at the heart of its foundation bent, twisted, and fallen over the rubble around it.
Nothing lived in this area. There were no weeds, no rats, no bugs. Traffic Control had zoned it all away, holo signs warned people not to trespass, and nobody who went in after nightfall made it out alive if they advanced more than a hundred yards past the signs.
The Sisters were all understandably nervous. They could clearly feel the hundreds of thousands of damned souls about us, and even if they were barely visible to such things, when the light faded and they could manifest, vivus on their Sword Foci or no, they were going to die.
Deep in the heart of the zone, right in the middle of the ground floor of that blok where some Warp Sorcerers had done the whole pslaver thing again in glee, a single burning brazier of unwhite flame was burning.
Occasionally, it would woosh up, and if someone was present, they just might see the shadowy image of a person, their tortured face relaxing in release as the vivus crawled up and released them from their torment.
The damned souls around this point were clustered so thickly they were almost tangible. The Sisters were getting increasingly nervous, until I pulled out Chalice, and she began to Dirge.
The pressure of the spirits evaporated like mist in the morning. The Sisters all watched the wispy, ghostly aura trailing from her Blade, and they realized something.
Their eyes got very thoughtful...
I waved them around the brazier, and let go of Chalice, who rose into the air, gold and black soulblade humming a sad song of finality, of sorrow... and underscored with a grim and terrible resolve.
“I bring twelve Ghost Knights to the dead,” my voice rang out. “They are huntresses, driven to seek and slay those who wrought doom upon us. What good folk shall accompany them on their hunt? Step forth, and claim your knight!”
The air churned while nothing moved. The vivus fell, and seemed to simmer, intense and low, under the anticipation and breathless stares of the unseen dead.
Shadows spun up out of the vivus, hints of unwhite gathering from the shadows of the skeleton of the blok laying dead about us. Faces were drawn out of those faint lights, faces grim and eyeless in skulls that could be seen right through, bodies trailing off into nothing below the chest... but each of them was deeply individual, especially to a Vortex.
Men and women from different walks of life, slain by the evil that men do and the Warp encourages.
Twelve of them, facing twelve huntresses.
“Place your soulswords in the brazier, and offer them to your ghosts,” I instructed them calmly.
The Silent Sisters looked at the dead, the victims of those they had not been able to stop, and their faces hardened.
Sapphire-silver blades, starting to lean towards the latter, hummed into being, still with the translucent wispiness characteristic of Voids and Vortices. Most of them were about two feet long now, slowly growing as their wielder’s Reserves did.
They were offered to the dead, their tips placed upon the brazier of vivic flame, as the women in black and grey knelt together.
Vivic fires simmered on the transpsionic blades, up onto the waiting souls, and drew them down into the swords.
Breaths hissed out all around, as souls merged with Foci, linked through their blades, and the Silent Sisters Named their Swords.
Before, they had kicked ass in the name of the Emperor.
From now on, they would be doing so in the name of the dead.
------
I watched their ship head out-system a month later. There were some extremely relieved and extremely upset Mentat Guilds left behind them, and two noble houses had been purged from the planet directly. They had shaken up the higher echelon of society in ways such people didn’t like to think about, revealing friends and peers as corrupt traitors and blasphemers, and thoroughly destroying their views of themselves.
I particularly liked the way they had carved their way through one entire sect of the Cult of Man, revealing that the priests of the church were Warp adherents of jRaztl, and many of their most fervent servants were in fact pslaved to them.
It was funny how the dead were even more sensitive to that level of corruption than they were...
I hadn’t Soul Tatted any of them. While they had Diamond Vajras and could technically manifest Soul Magic, getting Tatted and revealing such strange and unusual powers that the Sisters were not supposed to have would instantly alert their masters to something Not Right going on.
In the end, it was fine. Soul Feats alone were making them tougher and harder than they’d ever been in the past, and could help their killing power out invisibly, too. Just having some self-healing capability was something they were celebrating.
Of course, they weren’t really gone, they were just leaving. Marks extended across systems.
Jonah was capable of making Marks, too... and I was pretty damn sure the Sisters would be sending requests for more Null Shieldbearers soon...