TL 12, Harmonic Drive and basic Tachyon Drive came online. The math finally made sense once we started thinking in That Direction, and the engineering looked like total freaking magic, as Weird Science must. But it worked, so those not a Twelve did not complain and set their sights a bit higher than Ten so they wouldn’t feel stupid at not knowing why it did.

Testing on the systems was done well above the solar ecliptic, out in the middle of nowhere. The elvar in particular were very interested in our Harmonic Drive, since it would trump their solar sails. It wouldn’t have if they’d bothered to update their inertial compensator tech, but they seemed to have lost the tech or the driving need to have it, so maybe us catching up to and dancing rings around their ships would impel them to up their tech curve again.

Stabilizing the power supply, grabbing all of the atoms of the ship and sending them vibrating in one direction... inertial compensator improvements, ship’s engines, gravimetrics...

We could sustain .6c in normal space, but it required TL 15 shields to deal with scattered debris we found on the way. Everyone groaned, but deflector shields ranging out ahead to clear a path were a must, and we couldn’t call them anything else. The demands on power supply really were too damn high, too...

Since we could print off TL 15 shields without kowtowing to the Mekkers, we went ahead and did so.

Putting all that together and doing a tachyon flood into a shielded bubble changed the spatial rules, and suddenly, things clicked. The Harmonic Drive neared 100%, time slowed, tachyon distortion kept it solid, and speed through real-time space multiplied.

50% Harmonic Drive became 2c. 60% became 2.5. 70% became 3.3. 80%, x5. 90%, x10. 95%, x 20. 98%, x 50...

---

We had to go outside the heliosphere for the higher multipliers, as we needed to stay at those speeds for some time to get proper performance data, and above 95% an hour would suffice to cross the entire system in a couple hours.

Suddenly, a star system wasn’t big enough anymore. The thought was tantalizing to just about everyone...

The violent clearing of exo-heliosphere space we’d undertaken was completely justified by what was going on. We needed room to run around as we clocked to .999c, and could do 1000 times the speed of light. That was a light year in under nine hours. That seemed nice, but when stars are light years apart, and the galaxy was 53,000 light years across, that was simply not viable, even for stars close by.

The standard was parsecs per hour, or multiples of 28,557c. In the Tachyon Drive, that was 99.999965% of light speed to reach 1pph.

That was very quick for nearby systems, but still very slow for heading off to Tellus thirty thousand light years away.

And thus, the Phlogiston Rivers.

---

The post-light speed era of physics had begun, which meant we were shooting down a whole new knowledge tree where things were even weirder than normal.

Going faster than light while remaining in the dimension, albeit within a tachyon bubble, meant space, dimensions, and energies were strange beasts outside. Light, for example, was completely unreliable, as was anything in the EM spectrum that moved at or below light speed. Basically, we had to futz around with tachyons, causality, forces becoming particles, and invent a whole new branch of FTL science to meet the demands we had.

Oh, the eggheaded joy of it!

First discovery was that gravity was much more perceptible at FTL. Permutations in gravity literally moved instantly as far as we could tell, a shift in a system over here was detectable on the far side of the galaxy instantly, if you had stuff that could register the shift. At FTL, those shifts became much more obvious, as a ripple half a light year in length could now be detected fairly easily. As a result, gravity basically became long range sensors, while tachyons became much more obedient and started acting almost like normal waves and particles once you were also moving at FTL. Reading neutrino splash with tachyons basically became short-range sensors, and creatively interpreting the whole mess, building alternate systems to engage at FTL, testing them, then miniaturizing them... yep, that took a LOT of brainpower.

It was wonderful. So much stuff to think about all the time. Vroom vroom! So much brainpower from so many Hagbloods wrapped up in this stuff. The laws of reality quaked under increasingly intense inspection by the Children of Rantha, rarr!

The Phlogiston Rivers were also much more perceptible at FTL, as the line of gravitic strings were the primary broadcast points for ripples and changes in the spatial curves. Since gravity permeated out from them and to them, it literally was like looking for rivers and holes. Map out the overlapping gravity waves, find where they converge, and suddenly the paramass spatial math began to click after finding the first one, verifying the waves and eliminating all the outlying data.

We found the second Phlo point a month after the first. The third took a week. The fourth, a day... and then it was just a case of how many sensors we could put on the task, and runs we could make around and through the system to get in range at FTL to find them.

---------

No, we didn’t tell the Mekkers we had it working, as GAMT didn’t require their approval or contributions, and we were adding Beacon-tech to the whole mix. Beacon Rantha-tech was incroidulously awesome at anti-Warp influence, ridiculously person-intensive and expensive, and set a whole new bar for the Coronal’s We Must Have This. Even the Dukes had to roll their eyes after they saw what went into the stuff, but every Knight and Inquisitor in the sector wanted a Power Armor suit with the stuff, and were clamoring for it for the cyberware for their Cohorts, and the systems for their ship’s shields and coms, and drives, and generators, and-and-and-and...

Our current highest degree of tech was dubbed Angeltech, as both the psis and working crew had to be Good for it to qualify. Beacon+AMT was as good as GAMT vs the Warp, but also against everything else, so to speak... so it was priced the next tier up, naturally.

Angeltech basically told the Warp to take a flying leap, unless you were staring down an avatar of a Warp God or something. Even Greater Demons couldn’t fry it at range, and got extremely fricking annoyed with it.

Demands for more of it flooded into the system, naturally. Of course, increasing the rate at which it was made required more Good psions, the greatest numbers of which were the Beacon psions on every world being treated like shit. So... the capapsitors started getting installed throughout the systems, and hundreds of Good psions, and thousands of the others who wanted to be that way and accepted a Mark just so they wouldn’t have to pump a damn Beacon, came streaming into Janus III and were put to work.

Overriding the objections of the Mechanists, Rantha Corp vakker-production facilities started popping up on multiple worlds, recruiting other Beacon psions and new people. Beacon AMT wasn’t Angel Tech, but was the next best thing, and could be ramped up a lot faster.

G&G and Rantha Corp were expanding to other systems, and the knowledgeable were very leery of it. The Cult of Man was especially wary of it, as seeing so many street scum empowered with the Emperor’s Gift was not exactly what the wealthy and powerful pontiffs of the Church had in mind. They were supposed to be obedient drones working for the glory of the Emperor with no thought for their own insignificant lives, not burgeoning psions, no matter how limited...

Seeing the reports from the Dukes Twilight on Janus, other Twilight Dukes were looking eagerly forwards to recruiting their own Guards, and the status of a Beacon psion vs. a Mentat began to improve tremendously in the eyes of the public. Mentats were elitist snobs, but a Beacon guy could be the fellow working right next to you on the line, after all.

---

The first Vats were brought online offworld, and my kids started having kids of their own, setting up their own Curselines. Their kids would merely be Enhanced, ‘Atlanteans’, +2 to all Stats, not Advanced like my own precious wuvvable sots... but they would still be Ranthas, and in the end, that was the most important part. Every Hagmother and Briggs doing so was at least a Ten, because the assassination attempts by various parties who did not want to deal with our competition were fairly continuous, and the drow in particular seemed to enjoy shadow-lurking around them and getting mysteriously ganked. Few of them had ready combat zones nearby for massive Karmic gain... but they were kingdom-building, and those kingdoms started growing very quickly...

-------

Smith and Jones came smoothly out of FTL just outside the heliopause of AK97-Proxima, the closest star to Janus. It was a small yellow sun with no planetoids larger than a moon, none of them habitable, with low mineral wealth. It had been mapped out a few thousand years ago, distantly monitored with standard sensors in case it tried to go nova or something, and was basically ignored.

A Helldive to get to a nearby system would take anywhere from a day to a week, helped along if it had a Beacon.

Smith and Jones had just carefully ridden the heart of the Phlo to AK97 Proxima, reaching the star 2.2 light years away in under two hours, without straining the systems.

.3pph, ten times normal speed in the gravity stream of the Phlo.

There were a lot of cheers in Markspace at their feat, and they brought the sublight sensor arrays online to do a new and updated scan of the system.

There were a whole lot of things moving in non-orbits within the orbital plane of the system, and the excitement of those watching rapidly dimmed.

Warily, the duo breached the heliopause, using the Harmonic Drive and laying off the gravimetrics for sake of stealth. The gravity distortion of a gravimetric-drive sent out a bow wave that could be sensed at immense distances. It cost them a good chunk of their approach speed, but given the sheer amount of sensor data that started coming in and which they were relaying on through multiple Mark contacts, the time was a non-factor.

------

Goblins. Anatolia’s Strategos Circle circulated the energy signatures among the databases and sensor techs of the Fleet, and the consensus was absolute. The burning energy drives of the goblins were quite singular, and pointedly, the goblins were generally keeping to the solar disk and shadows of the larger planetoids, so that spectroscopes couldn’t sight them in from Janusspace.

Nobody had held any clue they were there. Their coms were tight and sharp, showing no leakage in the direction of Janus... their presence was a complete surprise.

No Tachyon Drives were fully installed on military vessels yet, but the Widow’s Bite became the next ship due to be upgraded as Smith and Jones’ scout ship Alias came swooping silently into the system from well above the orbital ecliptic and began to map out everything. Harmonic Drives were already proliferating through newer vessels coming out, and the Reserve Fleet.

Immediate plans were made to survey all the nearby systems that were supposedly uninhabited. It suddenly became clear that the most recent surveys of the nearest dead systems had been done hundreds of years ago at least, and basically anything could be going on in them now...

-------

“Admiral Ontif, Admiral Colos, thank you for joining us,” Duke Parablum greeted the two men as their Markspace meeting began. “Colonel Sama, Commander Briggs.”

“Gentlemen,” I noted to all of them, sitting down mentally. Everyone there effectively had a bonded Rantha, but I was THE Rantha, the Mother, and the two Admirals mentally swallowed as Briggs and I sat down. A slew of post-40 Stats gives one quite the mental presence... and they were the only two who were not Twelves.

They had no idea how we had managed it so quickly, but it was what it was, and both men had already gained two Levels from their previous caps. As they worked energetically on building up the system, they were closing in on Ten, once a pipe dream, now a virtual guarantee.

“Is this about the Goblin presence in Proxima?” Admiral Colos asked urgently. Now that he was in the loop, the information he had access to was timely and accurate, and the things that he had not seen going on around him were revealed as meticulous and timely preparation for events at a sublimely terrifying degree of skill.