Prosecuting internal treachery while there is a war going on is fraught with danger. The forces you are purging tend not to like it when they are getting swept away, and are likely to do all sorts of silly, petty things, in response... like blowing up ships and factories, sabotaging repair facilities, snarling production lines, and other minor inconveniences that can cost you a war.

As a corollary to this, Mekkers loathe cyberpaths. Really, they do. Someone that can just reach out with their mind and rewrite programs from afar, wipe away security programs, step around lockouts, and tell encryption to reverse itself... they were among the most loathed of mentalists to the Mekkers, who had come up with many, many systems over time to foil such opportunistic insurrectionists and punish them. This included using the brains of those they caught to oversee system security.

At this point, there were over two hundred cyberpaths working with the Goldilocks crew and Umbran Intelligence. There was an old semi-retired Umbran at a quiet desk in the Dungeon who received private notifications of all the blatantly illegal shit they were pulling off, repeatedly, sighed to himself often, smiled more then a few times at the pure chutzpah of some of it, occasionally directed them to be more roundabout or subtler in approach due to certain geopolitical factors... and then sent on appropriate tidbits to interested parties for sometimes prodigious amounts of money, and watched the reactions.

Duke Rimval was also aware of everything, as was Bluma, and he was making somewhat more lethal moves in other areas.

This was important, as the preserved head of a certain Mechveister whose primary duty for the last four hundred and two Tellurian years had been researching fluid energy compression for high-end energy weapons, to absolutely no real effect, had been the recipient of a data alert on a search function for the Celestial Tribute. He was rated an Eleven, a true elite of the Mechanist Guild, but buried deep in the hierarchy with literally nothing of note to watch over or do.

Elevens are not something any organization throws away, and they should not be buried inside an organization, either. They should be leaders, managers, and wielders of power with influence, hidden or overt... and Duke Rimval had literally never heard of the Mechveister doing anything for the past century. He was on a list of post-Tens in the system, but given absolutely nothing related to him had ever happened, he barely registered the name of Kiang Fo at all... which set off all kinds of alarm bells.

Tracking that errant bit of code as it did its thing wasn’t hard. Nor was using electropathic divination to sense the fact that the data attached to it had been wiped from the underlying hardware, and replaced with something else. Even while the Mechveister had been watching a truly clueless band of soldiers routinely logging their findings and a bored tech do the follow-up, the team had been into half a dozen databases, noted more information substitution, followed that to yet more false data plants, and more Mekker viral alarms attached to them.

Now, the sixty percent computerized brain of the Mechveister was plugged into an isolated computer system, while Duke Rimval worked on the meat side, and three cyberpaths in metaconcert worked on the other.

Their goal was quite clear. Find out who else knew about the Celestial Tribute, and follow the chain of information back. The cyberpaths had already gone in and carefully blocked any removal of the Mechveister’s authority, and the twice-lobotomized skull was now a quick and rapid in to the Mekker systems and where they needed to go to find stuff.

If they just so happened to download all his test results and data to the Rantha Corp in passing, and exploit his clearance to look at a lot of restricted tech files in passing, well, that’s something that data thieves and raiders did, all praise the Emperor.

Duke Rimval went through the organic memory with incisive care and ruthlessness, supported by Bluma and her horrid amount of Reserves. The cyberpaths simply disengaged all the old cyberhead’s hardware and software security systems, one by one, including tissue implants from other cyberpaths and the psionic circuits powered by them, turning the mind and cybermind of the Mechveister into an open book to peruse.

There was a lot of very grim stuff there, including actions taken against the Ranthas to prevent their rise and spread of their technology, as well as hurried efforts to duplicate said tech which had simply not succeeded. There were multiple incidents of sabotage and killing related to keeping information related to the Warp Zone quiet, including the resemblance of the Zone’s energy signature to high-end Throne Fields. The numbers of deaths in multiple professions and stations of life was in the high five digits, and that only since this Mechveister had arrived on station.

Contacts concerning this matter were mixed, as the next link up in the chain was simply a randomized Boolean address that would cease to exist as soon as the other party was informed of the Mechveister’s death.

However, that would have to be done by traditional channels, and the Mekkers were not the only ones that could mess up data exchanges. Slipping some one-off code to eliminate any mention of Fiang Po and his Boolean ID from transmission off-world or through the satellite relays would certainly slow things down, although a direct ground-to-ship info dump would likely be impossible to curtail. Still, it meant at least a few weeks of breathing room... and certainly didn’t stop astropathic communication with Dungeons on other worlds, or swift courier ships from being dispatched.

Bland notification of status and movements to that ever-shifting node could still be followed by the cyberpaths to its destination, its upload to the astropaths as random code, and then its squirted notification to the Maggarheart Forgeworld.

Divinations had calculated four possible destinations. ‘Training teams’ led by Ranthas had already been dispatched to each of those worlds, two being Forge Worlds, and one being the subsector Seat, while the last was Rimcrown, the Sector Throneworld.

As promised, the Marks worked perfectly well across thousands of light years, a communication tool far beyond even the best astropathy. Coronal Guards with a certain pair of surnames were already being dispatched to neighboring systems and beyond to Mark certain Coronal Knights and Umbran Inquisitors recommended to them, and begin the expansion of their information network.

If having an information network faster than astropathy gave Rantha Corp and the Twilight Orders a leg up on the Guilds, Families, and Megacorps, well, the Throne Endures.

------

Thyeva Rantha was on station with her Umbran Agent partner Moltham and his investigative team. The Maggerheart Station was rather annoyed and confused by their presence, especially since they weren’t headed by a true Inquisitor... by choice, as Moltham had certainly secured enough merits and was a full Ten, certainly worthy of wearing the black cloak.

But Inquisitors were Important People, and watched wherever they went by many a nervous eye, who would as soon shoot them out of the sky as keep track of them. Agents, not so much, as most Agents never made Inquisitor, through a combination of bad luck, enemies, a dangerous job, and many sources very interested in making sure there were fewer Inquisitors around.

Umbran Guards were just muscle, a new notion and haughty nod towards giving competent thugs some show of authority. They generally weren’t treated with any more respect than anyone else known to be working for the Umbrans... and they certainly weren’t allowed to display the Dark Moon Seal of the Emperor’s Inquisitorial Authority.

Which was absolutely fine. Thyeva coordinated the two cyberpaths on the team, Moltham was in metaconcert with them, meaning Thyeva could use her Reserves to support them all, and when that astropathic message came in, they were ready and waiting.

It was just lines of electrons, pulses of code, and they didn’t bother to unscramble it, they just watched as it zipped through the systems, diverted here and there, triggering other tiny bits of code that sent it this way and that, and they calmly piggy-backed it through six different security barriers by conspicuous consumption of PP they wouldn’t have been able to afford on their own.

It hit a node and paused, triggering an alert that shuffled off on a dedicated path to a dedicated address, which triggered another alert to a different place.

It was a matter of minutes before the target of the alert tapped in, shuffled through the system, grabbed the report, decoded it, read it, and then everything was wiped as the reader pulled away.

---------

The team pulled out, gasping as they did so. They had burned through a massive amount of PP to stand off the security barriers and hold an exit point as they followed the message. No single one of them could possibly have afforded the cost, and without the Marks allowing a metaconcert resonance so tight, the sheer size of the effort required to do so would have given them away.

Thyeva was down 200 PP off her default, which was going to take several days of nosebleeds to get back, and she had a splitting headache from continually popping Reserves to hold their cyberlink tight and compressed like that, letting the three psions do the intricate part of the job while she handled the pressure.

Moltham clapped her on the shoulder, the brawny Umbran looking nothing like the suave, debonair Umbrans of the holovids. His simple expression, beard, curly hair, and stout build made him look like a genial, jovial laborer, not a slyly humorous on demand and mercilessly efficient on requirement Umbran not-an-Inquisitor.

His own Reserves were in the toilet, too, and they all needed meditation and sleep to regain their strength. “Find that signature,” he told Shella and Trims, and the two cyberpaths, ignoring the bloody tears coming off their eyes, headed to the datafiles of the Umbrans.

Divination matching. They duplicated the electro-psychic signature of the person who had made contact without ever actually reading the code, and simply matched it to the database of communications the Umbral retained of all past communications carried via the Boole. Since all Mekkers were cybered, there was no chance they wouldn’t have a psignature, especially if the recipient was either important or powerful. Even the most routine communication was enough for a psychic match.

The answer was pulled up in seconds: Archveister Gunthad Mao, who oversaw Shipwright Operations and Hull Manufacture in the Guild’s many factories on Maggerheart.

A Thirteen. His refinements in the logistics and operations of hull manufacturing were used across the galaxy, and were matched by his attainments in alloy mixing and refinements in strength, flexibility, and ease of manufacture.

Moltham scrolled down to his earlier histories, having to go through over eight hundred years to get to where he wanted.

“Archproctor Riggivari,” he said softly.

“The Mechanist Chair on Rimthrone,” Theyva nodded understanding.

“Who...” Moltham’s fingers danced on the screen, flitting back and forth, and settled on a name.

“... was apprenticed to High Proctor Adulai on Venus itself, one of the Seven High Proctors,” she continued with a nod. “No, no, this won’t go high at all. Even if they can’t duplicate what’s inside there, just being able to remove the systems and fabbers will keep the Mekkers solidly in power for another five thousand years, barring disaster.”

“Staving off oblivion while guaranteeing it,” sniffed the Umbran. The Umbrans of Janus were thoroughly brainwashed by Duke Rimval’s attitude of throwing back the dark, not just delaying it.

And if the Mekkers tried to duplicate the Throne Field Energizing the elements of a planet, they could doom the galaxy!

Moltham glanced up. “The techs are due in in six hours. Would you like to go to the Duke and see if he wants to set up a Rantha production facility here?”

“The Coronals have already arranged for a cruiser to be nearby when they hit the system. The Umbrans might want to arrange for a different one...” she agreed. She’d already been blipped by Bluma on some of the things the Mekkers had done.

Two shipments of Vakker tech bound for warzones had been lost ‘due to pirates’... and the Umbrans had found said pirates and administered them Final Mercy. That the Mekkers had supplied them the routes and cargo came as no big surprise...