-Where did you get the number from?- he /asked me, interested.

-It is the number of girls missing from Wendlerton Academy in the incident where I came here.-

I /felt him purse his lips. -You know what happened to them?- he had to /ask.

-They are waiting to be reborn and go off on the Warp Gods.-

He was thoughtfully silent for a short time. -How will this be financed?- he /asked calmly.

I fed him my visuals, and raked my eyes along the tables filled with great triangular patterns of sand wurm teeth.

His breath /hissed out. Not for the money implications, the amount of money he could throw around was practically unlimited with his authority... but seeing a collection of sand wurm teeth like that was a first time even for him.

-You’ve got complete sets...- Psicrafters would go apeshit for a complete set. -How did you kill them?-

I fed him the kill method, and he kind of did a double-take. -Woman, you are insane!- he /breathed, but not without some amusement.

-I’ll prep one for you and Dorval.- I /informed him. He didn’t miss the implications of that. They’d be getting an extraordinary object to include in a Blade Focus.

-I’m not a Mindblade,- he /reminded me, not a little wistfully.

-Please. Hold out your hand like I am.- I /broadcast what I was doing, and he hesitantly mimicked my precise position. -Do THIS.-

His mind jerked as he complied automatically in synch, his thoughts wrenching in an unfamiliar manner, and he found himself staring at the crystalline turquoise long knife in his hand, wrought of solidified force, threads of gold and silver winding delicately through it.

-You’re going to take the Force of Will Mastery all the way to the end, and devote all the PP to stabilizing and growing your Mind Blade,- I /told him in no uncertain terms. -That will keep your other psi-powers absolutely stable and independent of the PP’s you have to devote to your mindblade, and leave you with a backup weapon nobody needs to know you have.-

He stared at the sword of his soul for a long minute, /nodding to me silently. -I can authorize the purchase and use of the vats, and if you have the funds, that would be even better. I have a contact or two among the Mentats who would be very happy indeed to arrange the auction of whatever teeth you are willing to sell. You should have no difficulty raising the requisite funds.-

-Excellent. Let me know where to deliver them.-

---

His Markdoor closed silently. Philius sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling, thinking furiously.

He had spent the last three years watching Sama Rantha slowly build up herself and her organization, giving only quiet and subtle help, watching her reputation, ability, and followers rise as she did. He had sent her Strikers, to receive her Marks and be Opened to Null Psionics, and they were now among his most prized strike teams, proven in repeated conflicts to be almost mind-numbingly resistant to both the Warp and enemy psionics.

Then he had quietly agreed to take a Mark himself, and finally understood what his men (and women) were talking about.

He had never been in contact with a mind that was so terrifyingly intelligent. He had tested Mechanist minds that had been logic-enhanced, and in specific areas might be able to rival her speed and clarity of thought... but not overall.

And of course, they had none of the depth, terrifying clarity, brimming emotional power, and massive force of presence and will radiating off her, all overlaid with a serenity and harmony that was both sublime and utterly terrifying.

If he didn’t know better, he might have thought she was manipulating his mind, but she did not and could not spend psionic energy. The influence she had on him was because she was just that damn awesome.

If she had been willing to spread her Marks among people of influence, she would already be one of the most powerful people in the city, and only getting stronger. As it stood, she did not even control a million people, a mere drop in a mega-city that housed a billion-plus.

But she was growing, and it was from the ground up.

He frowned slightly. Vat-grown had widely known high-end limitations. The unstable minds wrought from vat-indoctrination couldn’t support spiritual growth above Six. Vat-born who exceeded that Level were all mad, quickly falling to the Warp.

He couldn’t see Sama making such a basic mistake, even if somehow she could recycle souls!... She couldn’t possibly restrict her followers to Six, her doctrine of performance was designed to get people to break Six and step into Seven in unprecedented numbers. The slow and inexorable rise of her Green and Gold, and the Ghost Knights especially, bore witness to how effective her methods were.

Really, with someone like her shining on the other side of your Markdoor, telling you that you could do everything she could do, who would not be inspired to a ridiculous degree?

Vat-born... what was she going to do with vat-born?

He put it from his mind. There were rumors of a demented band of Klaw adherents coming from the Wastes to investigate...

==========

An indeterminate amount of time not long ago...

My benchmark for doing the regression was a 30 Charisma and Wisdom, and being a Ten. I figured at that time I would have experienced enough to solidify my own personality in the event I was tapping into something really big or bad or something.

After all, my spirit came out of the Warp. Dunno how Mom gathered it, but there were odds I was going to be looking at something weird.

Peeling back the walls of reincarnation was about force of personality and will, forcing away the Styxian/Lethean wipe to look at who I’d used to be, and see what I’d been. Regardless if it was good or bad, it meant I had a history above and beyond being another Sama Rantha in this life, and even if I knew I wasn’t my mom-me, this would solidify that belief into concrete reality.

The incarnate wall swiftly receded under my will, the stream of post-birth life that started out as such a blur before the Sama Rantha template was stamped upon me flowed to that point of light where everything began, and under my focus, was opened wide.

To reveal almost nothing.

I looked out onto great emptiness, except for one thing. It floated there, a single instance of time, like a spot of frozen memory that had happened and stopped, occupying all the time that had actually passed back here.

Nothing here, cold serenity, extending nowhere. There was only a frozen image of a golden-haired, blue-eyed young woman with blue-black scars on her face and black nails, who I recognized instantly.

That was the auto-visual of Sama Rantha that came with my template. But there was no life or sense of time about it, it was just a frozen moment of thought... right before I was born...

I quirked a smile despite myself, looked around at the blankness.

I was either a totally new soul, or I’d been made from the purified energy of the Warp, which amounted to the same thing. Which was cool; it meant I was the first incarnation for my soul, and setting a big ol’ standard for those who came after me. I was the Exemplar Lite, so I was the standard...

Yeah, it meant some choice had been removed from who I could have been... but I was an Exemplar Lite of basically a custom Hag race, and giving me the Sama template had made me an instant ass-kicker without having to go through the whole growing-up process. Or, to put it another way, I was in my growing-up process now, without having to deal with having a child’s 6 Wisdom, or something.

Sama Rantha II, for sure.

So, why had mom done this? I zipped up to the image, which was basically a blot of frozen memory.

Well, damn. She had stored a memory inside my non-existent pre-incarnation, keeping it out of the akasha, until I was strong enough to find and deal with it. Toooo sneaky...

Okay, let’s see what she had to say...

============

I tapped the vat in front of me as I walked by.

The Sweiss installers had done their jobs well, but... they were the Sweiss.

I had removed the memory feeds and the subtle programs they had added to them, taken out the data loggers they’d installed to be transmitted to them, and removed all the transmission and retention readers and feeders that were in place on every single one of the tubes and the monitors and computers attached to them.

Vakker-tech had sublimated the crucial programming dealing with nutrition and growth, and there was no indoctrination going to be taking place here... because I didn’t need there to be.

Two hundred and fifty-six vats were growing little people inside.

All girls.

All with the brands of the Curse on them, which had also formed nine Marks around their waists, and under their skin, the same Tats I had on mine.

Everything provided by the Curse, because Mom was a total bitch and had sublimated the Hag Curse in the other direction.

The original purpose of the Hag Curse was to punish evil souls for their deeds. It had been warped into a perversion of sacrificing innocents to create more Hags and spread more evil.

Mom was now twisting it in the other direction, using both circumstances. She was applying the Curse right at birth, and to souls both evil, because they had died that way, and innocent, because they had been psi-washed that way, and reincarnated.

All the girls of Wendlerton Academy... she had sucked their souls away, Cursed them with her own Hag Rantha Curse, and basically waited for me to get old enough to bring them back.

I was an Exemplar Lite. Following the inheritance rules, my children would be Advanced... +4 to all Stats, but losing all the other ExLite goodies. It was still a massive bump on the starting road. They’d have the exact same starting Stats I did... my children were basically clones as much as children, not surprising for a Curse, which all had Lawful origins somewhere.

The only difference would be their souls were true reincarnations, and they’d look like their Other Mothers... their old selves. But High-G nymphals...

Annis reproduction was actually as much about the spirit as the genetics. These girls were literally their own mothers at this point, their genecodes had been waiting on fully primed eggs in my ovaries to be brought out. Given my control over my reproduction cycles, I had stopped anything resembling a period before it could start, and hadn’t really looked at my ovaries to consider the fact I could get pregnant all by my lonesome...

Which would be a real time-waster, even if I had multiple kids, and they matured with, ah, demonic speed...