Nobody bothered to go out past the heliosphere except sleeper ships, as there was literally no reason to, ever. Pointless travel time, spots of superheated plasma, magnetic storms, and psychic and Warp fluxes heartily encouraging you to stay back in safe space and do your Helljumps from there, instead of adding to the scattered atoms of interstellar space.

But we were planning on the Tachyon Drive, and I was This Close on the math and psicraft to get it working. The Harmonic drive was the core of the multipliers, as it wouldn’t be viable for more than closest system travel until we could get the multiplier into the thousands.

The eventual goal was parsecs per hour in speed. I could only gnash my teeth at not having true inertialess, but things would change at Twelve.

Gravity Drive plus full engine thrust was .35c. The Harmonic Drive could hit .5c by itself at this point. .85c combined was truly fast, and would draw a lot of attention from a lot of parties if unleashed.

But at Twelve, I would be able to upgrade the Harmonic Drive to .6c, and should be able to do an inertialess shunt like the elvar used for the speed boost for their Sunsails, for +.05.

That would technically get us to 1.00, but it really meant very, very close to light speed.

The Tribute already had potential Void Shield tech to deal with friction from molecules or objects in the void, the tachyon field basically forming almost a new pocket dimension in space so all that stuff just slid by. It would be like a fish swimming in spatial folds...

All the stars in the galaxy that hadn’t been messed with were in rotational alignment. They had gravimetric connections.

Gravity bent space and time. The gravitic paths between stars were basically areas of stressed space...

Eff me. That was all totally and utterly possible!

-My Princess, you’re still a wonder!- Hugs and kisses /emotes everywhere. –Hey, everyone!- I /dumped into Mark and Band to all the Ranthas. –My Princess had a small observation on phlogiston rivers. Those probably aren’t possible... but gravitic rivers between the stars most certainly are! Who wants to go exploring the nasty cold depths of the Heliosphere and find some for us?-

Everything lit up, as everybody with any Explorer-like Talent promptly pinged the shit out of me, and Delores Rantha promptly got inundated and smothered with well-wishing comments for the steal.

Yeah, she had quite the big family now.

Space was once again the final frontier, and we were going to chart it in a way only the most dedicated of scientists would ever bother to... except we’d actually have funding.

Which promptly meant a whole bunch of master sensor/div specs needed to be trained, we needed to calculate what we were looking for, and then we needed to make stuff that could find these points automatically, and automate the whole damn process to get our maps drawn up as fast as possible.

Finding out the formulas and things to look for to determine where the things were ahead of time would also be quite the thing. Happily, I had some major computing power with lots of downtime just sitting there with nothing to do, and it happened to have loads of sensor data from some very high-end scanners it could work with from historical records to get a jump on this whole process. The Tribute got to work.

Following a gravitic river that was already acting on space could be a x10 speed increase, maybe more. Furthermore, such a thing would be avoided by dark matter entities just like you’d avoid wandering into a fire hose going off. Warp incursions would be squeezed almost flat and useless, despite the planar stress.

How could it not be there? This was transmagical space, and magical gravity could already auto-accelerate ships to a tenth of light speed. Why wouldn’t there be rivers between the stars?

Of course, new ships had to be designed, new sensor suites printed off and installed, and they all had to have some legs because they were just bound to find Void races out there, as those types liked to play around at the edge of systems and in the Kuiper belts. They would be taken out just to be taken out.

Mmm. Escort duties for the new ships with Harmonic Drives, then? Better yet, some drones could be sent out to key areas, and see what was to be seen. Psi-link them with the correct runework, and even if they were lost, all it did was point out difficult things in the area... things that probably needed violent attention.

The fact that actually discovering spatial gravitic rivers would revolutionize astrophysics and turn potential travel between the stars upside down was a very secondary factor. I found myself wondering just what steps the Warp gods had taken to shut down heliosphere exploration and stumbling across the rivers we weren’t sure existed, and force FTL travel into the Helldive path...

I had to keep advancing, make Twelve, one more step on the road, and start shining that light of progress ahead of us once again.

As for all the interesting Mythos shit and bases we were absolutely going to find out there at the edge of the Heliosphere... well, the Mothball Fleet was continually raring for some action after their repairs and continuing upgrades, and since I didn’t want them leaving the system to help elsewhere, giving them continuous shit to do in the system made much more sense.

Mythos and Aberrants weren’t necessarily Chaotic, but they were pretty much all Evil, and Rantha-tech equipped ships were definitely going to have an edge over bog-standard Imperial designs facing them down. The surviving Fleet ships that had been towed to Threshold and were being refitted were also being imbued with Rantha-tech internal gear, but AMT ship designs were just as effective against Chaos as GAMT was against Evil, so there was no need for the Mothballs. If that dipshit and somewhat more subdued System Admiral Colos wanted to send some ships out to other systems calling for help, he could do it from his precious mainline Fleet, and the Mothball Fleet could live up to its name and stay home.

Hmm. Janusspace was still a Rim System, and thus a dumping ground for career officers who just didn’t display the needed connections or skills to move further up the ladder. Colos was a dogmatic ass who could handle traditional tactics and spend billions of lives without batting an eye, but had no strategic or tactical elegance, effectively exchanging lives and credits for victory.

Of course, with the right connections, that was a perfectly fine way to win, and there were definitely lots of blowhards at his level and above who won exactly the same way. But if you didn’t have the connections, and he didn’t, then you needed to be a genius with broad acclaim and recognition to get the nod. Connections only went so far when the key systems were involved, and they wanted the competent, not just the connected. The connected wanted subordinates who could cover for their lack of brilliance, too.

Thus, our System Admiral was basically sitting out here wasting away. They might give him an honorary promotion after he retired, but he was going to be a Rim-sitter until the day he did so, and he had to know it. Given his pride and arrogance, he definitely thought he deserved more.

In a happy coincidence, I wanted him out of the system, and preferably the subsector. Foisting him off on someone else and getting my own person in there was definitely something I wanted to do. The problem was that there was no one with the seniority to do so.

On the flip side, it wasn’t a position that necessarily needed to be filled. Threshold Admiral Ontiff certainly wouldn’t mind being the highest-ranked Admiral in the system, and he had first-hand experience of what it meant to see the Rantha Protocols at work. The Mothball Fleet was mine. Simply running the system logistics through Ontiff and an ‘expanded staff’ would do the job. Leaving the spot empty could easily be explained as leaving a dumping ground open for another Rim-sitter.

-------

Captain Francesca Rantha...

System Admiral Colos stewed at the name, staring at her records from the Academy. Flawless, almost raving assessments. A tactical planner and coordinator of genius-level or higher intelligence. She had beaten one no-win scenario, and her performance in several others bordered on the unreal.

She wasn’t alone. There were a score of Briggs and Ranthas who had similar numbers, and hers weren’t even the highest...

And she had requested a personal meeting with him.

He closed the nymphal’s file (A nymphal Fleet officer! The idea!) and turned to peruse his records of the Rantha Protocols.

He had ignored the Protocols entirely on his authority as System Admiral, taking personal command of the fleet and moving to engage the first thrust of the enemy. He still felt it was the proper decision, as they hadn’t had enough force to deploy in two areas and win, and the planet was basically doomed with the incoming fleet. He would win the battle that he could, perhaps die gloriously, and take some of the bastards with him.

And they had won.

He still felt a stick in his craw when he thought about the Mothball Fleet being restored under his nose, and he still didn’t know how they had possibly trained all those crew members so quickly. Ancient, Nymphal, and Downspire-born command crews... the taste in his throat was so sour he almost wanted to puke.

They had won in knife-like, lethal fashion. Even he had to admire the artistry of their maneuverings, and how the alien scum had seemed to dance to their tune. It was a combination of prescience, cunning, and a degree of skill in ship command and coordination only seen in the very best of Fleet actions. He knew for a fact that the local Academy had put the whole few days of battle actions right into their curriculum, lauding the skill and artistry that had gone into pulling the planet and system out from a disaster to a momentous win.

He could feel the political currents running, especially in his talks with the Twilight Dukes. Their lack of approval for his actions before the battle, and his lack of results relative to the Rantha Protocols during it, was obvious, despite their polite language.

He knew what that meant. While his career wasn’t in ruins, it was in stagnation and slow fall. His authority would be frittered away, command chains leading elsewhere, his flag would be moved to a sedentary position away from combat zones, and he would be sitting on a chair doing nothing unless a true emergency came up and they needed him. He would be nothing but a figurehead breathing out warm air, until he took the hint and retired, his name and long service to the Emperor to be forgotten among so many others...

The speaker beeped. “Tactician Captain Francesca Rantha here to see you, Admiral,” his ensign informed him crisply; she was a high-born lass of excellent pedigree, her voice professional and accent admirable.

“Send her in,” he grunted, loathing what was to come.

She came walking in, and despite himself, he could not help but watch her. She was a nymphal, and so her beauty was a byword. But the poise, control, ability to command, confidence, and sheer presence she radiated was ferocious. The eyes that met his own had no fear whatsoever, and he could tell the mind behind them was as formidable as her beauty.

This... this was an extremely dangerous woman, and he was on his guard despite himself.

She filled out her uniform very nicely, and he was sure that it had been tailored expertly, indeed. She carried a single leather binder, barely an attaché, and her sable hair was braided tight to her skull as a soldier’s should be, yet falling down behind her shoulders in a nod to a woman’s rights. Her skin was pale, smooth as cream, and her emerald eyes like a hunting cat stalking prey as they met his own.

System Admiral Colos, with life or death authority over billions through the command of the millions of men of the Fleet in this system and all its assets, swallowed despite himself, unable to help himself.

She was a nymphal, but... what a woman!