I was watching everything, juggling and fine-tuning the machine that was rising with distinctly superhuman levels of intellectual ability. Briggs was doing the same, with emphasis on different sectors, and really doing more managing than I was since I was also doing some levels of deduction, inference, chaos math, and para-laws as I was Weird Sciencing our way up the tech tree. I was designing, testing, redesigning, testing again, getting results, and Briggs was handling the explosive production cycle behind it all with aplomb and enthusiasm. Briggs’ loved to build.

New ship designs were rolling out of the shipyards we had taken over, and the snarkily named Greater Axiom Modular Technology foundations were now firmly in place. The inability of the Mechanist Guild to properly make such ships, even when supplied with the schematics (and yes, the schematics EXACTLY matched what was being made, thank you) was really making them fret, and those families, clans, and corporations deeply embedded into the whole AMT production tree were frightened, angry, resentful... and they really, really wanted a piece of the pie.

Without the Coronals and Umbrans standing directly behind us and buying everything they reasonably could, Rantha Corp would have been extinguished long ago from every vector imaginable, the technology buried under waves of lawsuits, assassinations, supply chokes, labor shortages, endless inspections, sabotage, asset seizure, ‘random’ Events, terrorist attacks, lack of funding, things falling out of the sky, and anything else they could think of to just bury the tech, us, and keep their monopolies.

Their past and current achievements in battle had given the Rantha and Briggs Clans a formidable reputation that was completely deserved at all levels of combat. While it was plain they were vat-born, and there was plenty of sneering disdain for it, there was also cold and dreadful fear as they broke Seven like nothing, and ascended to Ten over heaps of corpses, crushing resistance under their heels, and moved together as a hivemind could only dream of doing. The mindclaw-armed street punks, the trash Beacon psions, the barely-educated Downspire workforces, and the drafted soldiers who didn’t want to see combat had all evolved into an unbelievably skilled, strong, and united fighting and work force that was proving nigh-impossible to crack open, infiltrate, and subvert.

Well, it wasn’t that it was impossible, it was that it was deadly.

Inigo had completely taken over control of wet works operations. Her past life of being a garbage scrounger and pickpocket preying on the rich had left her with both a keen resentment of those born to incredible wealth, and a fire to step beyond petty street crime to sustain herself. She was born with a talent for crime, she was going to use it, and woe to anyone who crossed her family and tried to treat her as low-born trash!

Her ascension to one of the major crime lords of the city was quietly paved in a lot of blood. War was a fine time to remove the assets of her competitors, and making sure such assets got sent heartily into the line of fire was a wonderful way to do so. She was entirely heartless as she and Anatolia arranged for mafia family after family to be utterly destroyed, territories yielded up, assets seized, and their deaths all laid down in valiant support of the city, thank you.

She put her hand hard on the information strings of the city, she and the Goldilocks crew tracking down all the information brokers systematically, relentless at the task, and either subverting them or eliminating them, there was no room for negotiation, regardless of who their backer was. Umbran striker teams coming in to clear out someone working for aliens and cultists was something none of the Crownspire forces dared cross openly.

Her hand firmly on the black pulse of the underworld, it became exceedingly hard for existing forces to make moves without her knowing it... and by extension, the Umbrans and the Coronals. The Twilight Orders expanded their own information-processing divisions just to keep up with the amount of chaff information coming through, deftly cycling through the removal of violent people best sent off to die in the Empire’s service, and those merely of low morals who could be bent to serve in other ways.

Her tendrils soon reached up into the underbelly of Crownspire, and those families and forces moving in the shadows against the Ranthas began to get sifted aggressively in ways both subtle and overt. The Patriarch of the Endgelgut family, a fine example of old blood, built-in racism and elitism, and a ruthless protector of his family’s interests, slipped and fell on his ornamental poniard, twice. The accidental death was talked about for months.

Ruthless competition was a byword at the highest levels, given the amount of money and influence at work. The Twilight Dukes watched, the planetary governor spectated and tittered, and the high guildmasters and admiralty looked on, but the latters did not move under the eyes of the former. As long as production was maintained, and the war effort moved forwards, the petty schemes and deaths of nobles and corporate executives meant nothing to the Twilight Dukes. If families and corps suddenly deprived of their best blood suddenly had to sell off some vital assets to stay alive and affluent, well, that was business.

Newer businesses and corporations were arising from the Downspire families and clans forming. Some had Briggs Brothers or Ranthas at the helm, but most were simply Sources, trained in the G&G and now in pursuit of their dreams. With their own crews and families behind them, they were building and rising up aggressively... and the Ranthas were perfectly happy to let them do so, as long as their paths could combine. Sources following their Oaths were literally forces of nature, luck and fate bending to their paths, and combining to form a stream with so many branches that it couldn’t be stopped or dammed as it hit the river and surged forth.

The Sources stepped into openings and voids made by the battles and losses so readily it was like they were made to be there, closing gaps in supply and production of key goods, working together like oiled machines as events fell into place. They naturally outnumbered the Ranthas and Briggs by an order of magnitude, and the Umbrans and Coronals were astonished to see that, after literally half the population of the planet had been slaughtered, production was actually going up!

Said effect also meant funds readily flowed to organizations with a Source at the head. That they were involved in the Markspace and were working towards the overarching goals therein only made it even easier.

------

“What are we looking at?” Tiffany asked calmly, ensconced on the Saber’s Throne and preparing to go to combat at any instant.

“Three ships, Captain,” Maurice on Divs called out. “They are cloaked with holovoids, Elvar style, but we can’t tell if they are drow or not. But they are definitely not in an escort formation.”

“The Sunhawk’s personal squadron numbers four to eight ships. Let’s see what happens.” The Bared Saber was not a cargo vessel, but the twenty tons of Void Osmium they had received did not take up much room at all. The psions were even now wiping the multiple psionic signatures left on the metal, repeatedly, and the procedures would be repeated multiple times as it was cut apart. Whether the Elvar were simply keeping them on their toes with the equivalent of teaching a lesson in competency, or were actually trying to sabotage whatever would be made of the oblivichrome was moot; the latent psychic signatures had to be purged utterly for the cargo to be useful.

They had not, of course, done the same in return. They had better things to waste their time on, and the Elvar would still have to go through the cleansing process out of paranoia, anyways. Not finding anything would only bring them consternation and shame in equal measure at the continued stupidity and lack of subtlety of the Coronals in such forthright dealings.

The vessels paralleling them were a couple light-seconds out, beyond effective range of all but the heaviest and most focused armaments... the Elvar had the latter in abundance, but not the former. They usually substituted formation effects with their solar sails for massive weapons, but that required multiple ships close together, and such was not the case here. There were very few forces in the Galaxy that wanted to face down an assembled Sunflower Formation...

The entire crew was now in a meditative state of focus, ready to release Nimbuses, walking a wire of serenity and aggression. It was not a state a normal crew could remain in for long, but everyone on her ship was a Psion, be it normal, Null, or Source, and had the Ranks in Meditation and Concentration for this to happen. The Bared Saber was moving through space under normal Jamming at .35c.

The Elvar ships were rated at .45c. Keeping pace was simple. They were merely waiting for an optimal stop with the greatest amount of time before any reinforcements could come... which should come up in mere moments.

“Ships closing in, Captain!” Maurice called out, more for the crew than for her, as Tiffany was plugged into primary divs and sensors. Like wolves on a calf, the three ships were closing in from the flanks and straight ahead, cutting off flight and harrying the engines to cripple the Saber.

“We Jump at 0.1 seconds out,” she reiterated for the crew, calming them down at mention of the tactic they had used repeatedly. Twenty thousand miles out, a tenth of a light-second, was largely beyond preferred beam range in space combat at velocity, the ideal tactic was to simultaneously breach the gravity field envelope, break the Saber out of Jam, and attack as one.

There were going to be some problems with that...

She watched them come closer to the thousand-mile gravimetric boundary which would break them out of Jam, eager foxes after the hapless hare. Her boundary, of course, was much further back...

“Jump!” and Focuses released, superconductors went beyond perfection, random energy pulses harmonized perfectly, and every atom on the ship stopped vibrating and instead pushed all in one direction.

It took a lot of power to do this, and the systems weren’t available to handle it for protracted periods. But in that one second, they could reach .5c instantly, and in basically any direction, without actually affecting any of their inertia.

The Bared Saber was Jamming forwards at .35c, and was suddenly only a few dozen miles behind the cloaked raider coming in after them. Both of them came out of Jamming speed, but the raider would require at least thirty seconds to reconfigure its solar sails for increased tactical speed.

“Charge!” and the pulse of the tactical Harmonic drive shoved all the atoms on the ship in the same direction. Needle beams played out, narrowed down the location of the cloaked ship. “Lance!” The prow surged with glorious silver light as the Saber came in, tractors licking out and locking on target, preventing it from frantically maneuvering to dodge the incoming ship. “And Thrust!”

There was a flicker of solidifying matter as they breached the cloaks and the Elvar ship tried to bring its shields up, not that they would have made any difference. They were built to take on missiles, not suicidally ramming ships with prows shaped like cutting blades.

The elvar sheared the tractors free, but it wasn’t in time, and the Saber slammed into them at ten degrees off straight, smashing through the living solar sails and into the crystalline hull, peeling it apart and away as they overtook the Elvar ship, slit it open, and the side guns fired off in series, blowing the ship apart from the inside out.

Fireballs and glittering shards of crystal spun away in the void, slowly losing momentum as the Saber continued barreling forwards.

The other two ships were now light-seconds ahead, shocked at both the sudden movement of their prey and the abrupt drop to tactical speed, leaving them far in the distance and unable to render aid to their fellow vessel. Its sudden loss of signal would only make things worse.

Two other things happened to ruin their day.

As the other two raiders dropped into tactical speed and out of Jam to make a turn and swing back on their prey by instinct, there were two other Harmonic Jumps.