-I have the Braincase telemetry,- Sheba’s sly razor of a voice confirmed it was operational.

-Look for any codes or maintenance that have to be done to keep this place active, and any self-destructs we need to disable.- he /replied promptly.

There was a /relayed click as Cat inserted a relay drive into a data socket, and Goldilocks crews half the Sector away began to work on the systems here through her Mark and Band. -Taking down the Interdiction in three, two, one... Kitten, time to cyberpath.-

He felt the mental shift as the petite psion teleported in right beside Cat several hundred feet above him. At the same time, schematics of the base were downloaded to him, and he processed them quickly, knowing where and what to look for.

He left the Braincase right where it was. The mouth of the Mentat was gaping open, frozen in a scream as his eyes quaked and twitched, the device going about its work and not needing Frank to be present.

The man could only watch him go, screaming where no one could hear him, no one cared, and his duty to his Empire and Order would be lost, unknown to anyone.

---

-This can’t be the only such place, can it?- Cat /asked him. -The Sector is a big place, and the births of Voids can’t be that uncommon.-

-Standard protocol should be at least three backups for any kind of in-depth, long-term reconnaissance mission,- he /answered as he headed for the self-destruct circuits that were currently having to deal with some cyberkinetic interference from a very deft cyberpath helped along by a roomful of some of the best hackers in the Empire.

Cat’s attention was drawn to an area of the schematics, drawing his attention by the way the razor of her thoughts turned on it, like a tigress about to strike. She swirled away from Kitten’s power-dozing of the systems here as she went to investigate it.

Cooling units, Frank noted, and had a good idea of what would be found there.

----

Kitten had already linked into the Braincase, which had already sifted out some important, recurring memories, including quite a few passwords and authorizations. Psi-active circuits might have tried to resist her, but under the correct codings became complacent... and then were pragmatically fried completely, so they wouldn’t be a problem in the future.

What they wanted would be hard-coded by configurations and equipment, not wrapped up in circuits molded from metals taken from the brains of dead men.

Cat tore open the vaulted door and walked inside, her Trembling Domain spreading out to gift her with an awful awareness of all the contents of the place.

Babies, dead babies, both male and female, frozen in preservative gels so that they could be retrieved and studied by the Mountain and the Silent Temple when contact was re-established. Why kill them and dispose of them? The secrets of their genetics were still unfathomable after all this time, could not be truly replicated by other powers or technology, but there was always hope as long as there was new material.

If the Empire could truly make new Voids at will, instead of having to rely on culling those randomly born from the masses of humanity, that would be ideal, after all. They could already do it to a degree by using parthenogenesis to grow new Vortices, but such artificially-conceived women were noticeably of lower potential and skill than those naturally born, and basically just formed a disposable troop and servant division of the Silent Sisterhood.

It was now well over two decades since the Rift had formed and cut the galaxy in two. There were hundreds of babies in this room...

-They have multiple teams out there harvesting Voids,- she /stated in no uncertain terms, her /voice cold enough to form a new polar cap. The sensation flowed through Markspace with her awareness of this place, and to those watching, razored silence swept through millions of minds in Markspace in almost no time at all.

-I want those teams found. I want their bases found. And then, they are all going to die,- Cat /stated.

Frank stared at her awareness of all those babies, feeling a sickening nausea rising in him, and a terrible, greater awareness sweeping through him with a killing intent that promised death to the powers that be on this planet.

-Our little Brothers and Sisters...- My Queen Egil /murmured from the depths of an irradiated hellhole under a bombed-out kiloplex on Janus III. It was the closest anyone had ever heard him come to showing emotion.

This was the dark side of the Empire they lived in, burying hope and possibility in favor of preserving the power and authority of the Emperor over all, forcing everyone into the path the Emperor predicted and was making happen, uncaring of the chance it might just be a horrifically wrong thing to do.

A voice of gossamer over adamant drifted through the entire Markspace. -Take that planet. Wipe those crews. Find the other locations. Repeat.- Her /voice echoed throughout the Markspace, and things began to move and change as Ranthas scrapped some new plans and made some others with terrifying speed and purpose.

-Hala, you’ve got the senior Goldilock Curseline. How long before you can get into this side of the Galaxy and compromise that information system here?-

-Not fast enough,- the Wirehead Talent /groused, as her girls echoed her sentiments. There was an iron-hard rule that Ranthas who couldn’t Riftcut weren’t allowed on this side of the galaxy... which clearly implied that being on the same side of the galaxy as the Emperor and his direct forces was dangerous.

It meant those Ranthas and their Swords needed to improve some. In the meantime, totally suborning the information systems that had created this abomination was going to be the focus of some very, very devoted coders...

--------

Infiltrating an Astropathic Guild message center was one of those utterly insane things that no decent thief in the galaxy would dare to attempt.

This place was swimming with psions. Oh, sure, the majority of them were low Level, but they were so many that sheer law of large numbers meant you were going to be seen if you tried something. The psionic circuitry was being touched by hundreds, if not thousands of minds directly, and waves of telepathic, reality-stroking force were flowing all over the place.

A really good dimension-walker might be able to get into the place, but as soon as they materialized, someone was going to notice something hinky.

Even a Void Brother wouldn’t come in here lightly, since the trail they left in such a concentrated environment would stand out like a vein of clear water in a muddy river. They wouldn’t be able to see him, but that trail would just be glaring here.

Likewise, a Source trying this would be like a lightbulb glowing in the murk, pushing away the rampant psychic energies flowing everywhere. It wouldn’t be disruptive, per se, but it would be totally obvious. You could feel the sun even if you couldn’t see it, after all.

But I was a Null, and in situations like this, I was perfectly fine.

Withdrawn and tight, I was effectively an inert part of the scenery, a lump of stone sitting in the middle of the pool, like part of the support foundation, stone, or steel. Yeah, if I wanted to, I could expand my Null out to twenty feet in radius, and be a really big rock disrupting the flow of everything. Restricted down to my Vajra, the psychic flows just bent around me without quibbling, and did what they were supposed to be doing.

That left the physical side of the infiltration, which wasn’t an issue. Even avoiding the fancier tech which might trip some of the more psensitive folks around, I had Stealth at 14 Ranks right now, and all the modifiers. If people weren’t looking directly at me and I wanted to hide, they simply weren’t going to notice me as long as I didn’t want them to.

Hide in Plain Sight is terrifyingly useful that way, and it operates at the level of ki, there’s no psychic energy being waved around to power it. While not exactly necessary to be a stealth op, it was just too cool not to have, as hiding in your own shadow and similar things is how the Shadow Stalking basic disciplines made their rep.

Mentat machines were often psychically powered and linked by tame cyberpaths, so Vampire’s Veil wouldn’t work that well on them... but they just didn’t have the wherewithal to cope with that many Ranks in something. After all, post-Six, Ranks started messing around with reality itself, fundamental uses of how the universe worked. Stealth was no different than Weird Science and Alchemy as you rose in Levels. Too small to hide behind? It still worked. No cover in the middle of a hundred-yard plaza? Hide in your own shadow. Tremblesense, heat vision, UV, gravity displacement, sensing thoughts, lateral line sensing, echolocation, blah blah blah?

If you were good enough, it still worked.

Now, I couldn’t walk through walls or anything, that was just unrealistic. Heh.

But making my way into the maintenance tunnels and suchlike, and not tripping any of the airflow monitors looking for displacement, that was totally a thing.

Kragamore was the Throneworld of Sector Caesar, with all the money, power, wealth, and abuse of such things that a Throneworld represented. It was close to an ecumenopolis, and would qualify as one if the nation-sized ‘wilderness’ places were recognized as the private parks and zoos that they actually were.

Throneworlds were hub sites for relayed information on the Voids and Vortices. So, I didn’t have to infiltrate all the planets of the Empire, I just had to infiltrate the nodes of all the Sector Crown and Throneworlds... and maybe the largest Forgeworlds, we’d have to see what happened with that level of development.

Despite being built to last for millennia, with molecularly-hardened wiring and crystal, and psions using their power to maintain and fix problems without actually having to lay hands on them, pure redundancy meant you needed to have access to the systems, just in case. If you didn’t have such access, when the Warp came in, infected one of the parts, and you couldn’t get rid of it in time... well, major Warp Events had started over much, much less than a machine which hundreds of psions were dumping power into going suddenly mad...

The Astropathic machinery of the main Guild on a Throneworld was two TL’s higher than on some remote outpost like Janus III, and I was unabashedly copying everything in my Tremblesense into Markspace to be downloaded and gone over. This wasn’t just so we could copy, correct, enhance, and rebuild the tech, although there were plenty of people coming into Ten who wanted to flex their muscles and learn all this stuff, crack it open, and advance beyond Ten on the never-ending road of improvements.

No, we also had to discern the hard-coding of the machinery, operating on a different level than the primary tech itself, which formed the secret, hidden underbelly of Imperial intelligence gathering in the Empire.

There was no way that information sent out through the Astropaths could be ‘secret’. The information had to ride on psionic waves, which meant real people were involved in ignoring distances of thousands of light years as the information was sent out. While the Guild was very scrupulous about memorizing and then auto-wiping the memories of their people, a necessary function just to do the job without overloading their brains, there was no way certain sections of the Empire would possibly allow all that information coming in and out to not be monitored.

The Umbrans were one of those factions, and not apologetic about it at all. They could and would act on and use information sent out between enormously powerful parties via the Astropaths against them if the situation called for it, or as evidence in cases against such.

Everybody knew it, of course, and so truly private messages had long had to be relayed by personal couriers, which had their own risks attached. Intelligence operatives intercepting couriers and either stealing the information, or putting modified versions of it back in place, was a time-honored tradition in the career of many spooks, especially between the mega-corps and criminal organizations.

As for the aliens, they’d just wipe the planet or totally suborn an information network, or extract the appropriate brains, as the situation called for it. Knocking off messengers was a bit too subtle for most of them... most of the time.