“So what have we got here?”

“Data files are corrupted, standard Warp bending. If we try to read them, it’ll get right into our heads,” the tech scanning the hardware shook his head meaningfully. “I’m sending them all to recycling.”

I just nodded. The techs doing this shit were all VERY well-trained, and resisting the temptation to think they could overcome the Warp was a primary part of that training. Ranthas didn’t try to overcome the shit, why should they?

It was unfortunate, but not unexpected. If a tech said dump it, it got dumped.

I strolled through the ship as reports of nope, nope, no, uh-uh, ain’t no way, doooon’t think so, and not a damn chance all sang out without any fear of disappointment or being overridden. When it came to the Warp, if there was a no, it was a sigh of relief that it had been caught, not “Damn, we missed out on something.”

I imagined jRaztl was crying in his tea of bitter tears that we weren’t taking all the fine bait. It just wasn’t worth it.

On the flip side, the hardware was a little easier to do something with. We didn’t have to use it, just scan it in depth, and that was one of the reasons I was strolling out with my hair down like a big crimson cape.

I was painting the ship and its design into Markspace, where teams of eager shipwrights of all specialties were examining it in depth. I could do spot analysis as good as any of them, telling them where to focus their attentions, taking care of basic material analysis, and letting the scanning crews know where to put their rigs and get some really detailed readings.

I wandered back into Engineering on my route, taking a slow stroll through the heart of the ship and looking at the power systems and Jamming drive.

Antimatter fusion, working with gravitics. The field harmonic settings were original, and off they went, and that array of equipment there, paired with the structures I’d found... they were tapping on zero-point energy, using it to form an artificial spatial channel...

I burst out laughing at the crazy ingenuity, which was probably just a logical extension of their thought processes, given how they loved their rail gun tech.

They had a Jamming drive prototype that acted like a rail gun! It formed rings of gravitic acceleration that could, in remarkably little time, get a ship much closer to c than standard Jamming tech could. It was a huge leap forwards in their subspace speed, although its combat effectiveness was nominal given the time required to actually get up there.

It thus wasn’t as good as the Harmonic Drive, but it was supplementary to it! And point-singularity tech would probably be even more efficient at pulling the trick off.

As hee-he-hee’s promulgated through the distant geeks careening down a new avenue of research, engineering, and engine-erring, I focused my attention on yet another device that was definitely out of place relative to the other tech.

Like the Raildrive tech, it was clearly customized, not mass-produced and standardized. I eyed the connections to the power core, the gravitic assemblers of the Raildrive, and noted how they were using the subspace tech to accentuate some other tech, aiming for an improvement on their FTL systems.

I wandered over to the FTL systems, and scanned them in thoroughly, accentuating what the crews were already doing. They had more detail in some areas, less than others, and our findings overlaid one other.

They didn’t use Helljumping, which matched part of the lore we had on them. This was... a gravitic sundiving technology, similar to the psionically-driven methods the Cellulocusts used.

They created an artificial Phlo along a given gravitic stream, and the ship dove towards the distant sun, using gravity to bend space and skirt around the Warp. It was definitely slower than Helldiving, especially for long distances, and explained why the Kappa hadn’t gotten far outside their local cluster. Taking a day or a week just to move between local stars was slooow, and if they ventured further afield, they were looking at communication and logistic problems, especially since we hadn’t seen any viable FTL communication tech here, what with them lacking psionics.

They had tried to mate it to the Railship tech, and so accelerate the bending of the curve...

-Holy Shit!- Ronnie /blurted out from her time-sharing thoughtstream with me, and popped Twenty, just like that.

Some profound math went singing through the Markspace, and levels of Tekron tech that had been indecipherable to her unwound majestically. Hulkamania’s computer forests almost overheated spontaneously, and had to hurriedly shut down to stop the joyous flood of math going through them aching to be resolved.

I stepped into Seventeen, and things about time and space any normal human would consider contrived sophistry at best and absolute madness at worst were pounding through my head. I hit the nominal cap to the Rantha Hag racial advancement paradigm, based off a lilitu as it was, and the actualized perfection of a Lesser Exemplar Rantha Hag echoed through the Markspace as the last of the physical and mental Stat increases thundered through my System. Racially, I was Complete.

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To advance to Twenty Racially, I would have to use the blanket road of just straight, unadorned racial Levels... or refine my Exemplar Lite status Up.

Technically, I was already there. The power humming through me informed me that I had just stepped through a barrier mortals had not broken in this universe for a very long time.

An Exemplar Lite Seventeen qualified as Eternal.

I looked at the Kappa technology there, flipping multiple mental levers at the same time, because I could, yo. I wasn’t a Twenty, and I still couldn’t grab more Ranks than my Level, but I could break some limitations that mortals couldn’t now, and flipping all the levers I could at one time was one of them.

They’d had an awesome idea, but they’d messed up the math. They’d bent space too much, and breached the Veil, dumping themselves right into the Warp. The results were as expected.

Phlo Rifling. We could accelerate along the length of a Phlo, using the gravitic tether as both a guideline and enhancer, and the further we had to go, the faster we’d go. If the Kappa had known about the existence of Phlos, they wouldn’t have ended up in the Warp...

The Parsecs per Hour potential was incredible. Combined with a viable Phlo map or Phlo mega-rivers, our time to cross the galaxy was just reduced to a tenth or less... as soon as we got the math, and the engineering followed.

TL20 revisions to the Harmonic and Tachyon drives were spinning out now, upgrades to going Inertialess, and Hulkamania was frantically growing more trees, kelp jungles, coral reefs, and laying out crystal veins in its mantle to process it all. There were plans for crystallorganic logic engines the size of mountains to be grown in place, laid out in profound mountain ranges across the entire world to enhance their ability, like a transcendental neural net for the planet that would access and create its own Akasha... because the planet needed the unlimited data storage space.

We knew how to move a planet around, in both real space and Gating it around. The power requirements were Up There, but we knew how to do it. We had to get the math down, but Hulkamania was working on it, as that would be its trump card and greatest defense.

All because a bunch of turtle-men wanted to shoot themselves like bullets so fast space bent around them.

The techies and engineers were trying veeeeery hard not to stare at me as I digested all this, and I tried to rein my Eternal aura in. It was a good thing I was a Null, or the Warp Gods would all be looking my way with rather unsightly expressions and itchy trigger fingers.

I could take Eternal-class Feats I qualified for... which I basically didn’t because I didn’t have the underlying fundamentals. I had to laugh at myself.

Now it was simply choosing whether to take four more generic Racial Levels, up my Class Levels, or try to advance my Exemplar status to full Exemplar.

I had no feeling at all I could do the latter. I was pretty sure I needed to be a post-Twenty to bend reality enough for my own benefit to try.

Basically, it was what was going to help me get to Twenty-One the fastest. Stripped Racial Levels would still be expensive because Rantha levels incorporated so much Matrix advancement. Even without extra Stats they were expensive.

Expert Levels couldn’t breach the Eternal Barrier. That left me with Melee Levels.

Melee Levels required combat. If I pursued that path, it meant I was going to war. It was hard to make Melee Levels improve without combat. I could Warlord like nobody’s business, tho... and I had Eternal lack of limits to that, hmm...

So, if I conceptualized all this as building up my War Machine for Mah Fuzzy, perfectly fine advancing my Melee Levels, and I’d actually get there faster than taking four more Rantha Levels.

Damn I had expensive Racials!...

So, Ronnie was at Twenty. Our Tech Tree was solidifying basically by the minute, and what a beautiful ginormous overwhelming Tree it was and was going to be.

The engine of war now had to be built, and everything start turning in that direction.

I took a deep breath as I adjusted and conceptualized all this, how witheringly complex the road ahead was going to be, and just what kind of resolve and ruthlessness was going to be required to get us there.

Resolve and ruthlessness were basically what Nulls were made for. Sources led and dreamed. Voids removed the key obstacles. Nulls kept marching forward, one step after another, behind the guy who formed the road, and the guy who cleared the trail.

I could do this because I was made to do this. It was a terrifyingly brutal intellectual exercise in resource management and social engineering, and the center of it was being run through the back of my head.

At the end of the road was bringing down the Warp gods.

The Phlo Rifle was the start of the death of Helljumping. The next stage would be removing planets from the auspices of the Warp.

To defeat an enemy, you deny them resources. The Warp was eternally fueled by the uncontrolled impulses of life. Cut off that stream of power, and it would start to strangle.

Especially since the gods of Creation were already sucking away its power. It just wasn’t happening faster than the new power coming in.

The idea now was to tip the scales.

It was now going to be war on multiple levels and scales, from recruiting each and every new person to work for us, introducing them to the Markspace, activating their Forsaken or Powered statuses, building those Statuses, gaining Levels, changing the way they looked at things, uniting them into a common belief system, empowering them with a shared destiny...

Perhaps it was time to start adding viable aliens to the mix, and seeing if there truly was A Better Way.

I contemplated that as I resumed my walk around the Kappa ship, looking around.

The Elvar? Too full of themselves for now... and their racial xenophobia was well-established.

The Kappa? That was entirely possible, but the very design of their ‘inclusive’ philosophy with themselves at the center showed they weren’t entirely benevolent.

The Ruk? The elder statesmen of the galaxy. They had run it for so long, and despite many races feeling stifled under them, the fact was there had not been war in the stars while they were around.

I was thinking as I continued my Trembling scan, and multiple thoughtstreams started making plans in many different directions.