Nadir’s Sword Plan swept out, and opened a Rift on the back end of the Mountain’s nameless frigate. Tesla Rantha stepped through instantly, waving her hand to seal the Rift less than two seconds after it was opened.

A shuttle was quietly swooping into the frigate, delivering a load of a few children. When it departed, it would have a passenger. Soon enough, the world below would be admitting G&G teams to start up a certain number of businesses.

The people that shuttle was connected to were also going to be followed, their connections worked out, marked, and made ready to eliminate. Data about which worlds shipped their cargoes here was on the menu, and teams would slowly and surely be heading to those worlds as well.

This was another system Seat, Quamalspace, with enough traffic to make the frigate unremarkable, but not at the level of a true Throne or Crownworld, where questions might be asked. It went without saying that there were subtle influences at the higher levels that would pointedly ignore the traffic in missing human children happening in space above them.

That being said, it was also completely obvious that every world with a population of a billion or more had its own team on hand to go after any Void or Vortices that had popped up. That was actually a tremendous amount of manpower devoted to this task, and meant the numbers of Voids popping up, when the Empire as a whole was taken into consideration, was naturally quite impressive.

What happened to them all was something that Sama was finding out for everyone, and making their blood go even colder as they found out...

-------

Dead Magic ammunition, the specialized rounds made of magic and psi-dead components, specially used by the Umbrans, Assassins, and the most elite hunter-killers of the Legions, was made from Voids and Vortices who died in training.

I looked at the production facility below me, keeping my face still and my heart steady, despite the loathing whelming within me.

Bullets. Voids and Vortices they couldn’t control, who their precious suits couldn’t insulate, or who were of an Order they didn’t want, or who simply died in the merciless training they were put through, were rendered down into freaking projectiles, their ashes fused with nihilor cores and made into gyro rounds or cartridges for shooting demons and psions.

Needless to say, the demand for such ammunition easily kept up with the supply of Voids and Vortices.

Only good enough to be bullets...

While the kids were hitching rides across the galaxy to more and more new worlds, I’d been breaking into the local data servers and com systems, installing hardware and software, compromising all their precious security while their precious hypersensors and neutered Voids had no idea I was here.

Nulls just don’t leave trails. The Voids were geared to follow and sense their own kind, but not really me.

The atmosphere inside the city was sterilized and artificial. It felt unreal to me, and to a Void it had to be nearly maddening. Some of them just went freaking nuts after they were artificially Awakened, unable to tolerate the psi and magic-dead environment and how unnatural it was.

They were ground down into bullets.

Those who survived that process were given their suits, which they basically could only take off inside the Mountain here. Taking them off outside was enough to trigger a death sentence from the various implants administered to them. Likewise, surges of evolution in their Voids, or their Helices actually coming up fully, would trigger the same implants, and kill them where they stood.

I looked through their lesson plans and their physical training. The trainers knew the boys rapidly grew more intelligent and agile as their skills improved, and so even the less gifted ones could become formidable shooters and tech-users. Even if their natural Stat line didn’t emphasize either, the Forsaken Inherent bonuses they got to Intellect and Dexterity meant they improved rapidly in both categories, even if they weren’t the most nimble or smartest to start out with.

Of course, there were dozens of the babies in suspended animation coming in every week, and they didn’t need all of them as Assassins. They took the ones with superior characteristics once they reached a certain age, and those that failed out quietly became ammunition.

The ones left behind were rapidly aware of their shelf lives, how dangerous it was for them to lose their suits, how they’d ‘go mad’ if they lost them, and how wary they had to be.

They did actually have fairly decent lives, once they got past the death games, live action hunt and kills, lethal tests of skill and aptitude and loyalty, and the like. Women were provided to them, all of them attractive, trained to support them and please them, and even have their children.

Those children formed the support crews of the Mountain, or were trained to be the kill-crews sent off-world to harvest the dangerous free Voids who were such a danger to the Empire, bringing them back here to suffer the same fates as their fathers.

After all, the Empire had not found out how to make Voids or Vortices truly inheritable. There was a partial effect with the Vortices, but no success with Voids at all. Either the gene occurred naturally, or it didn’t take effect at all, and there was no way they’d found around it.

They never stopped trying, however. The research results were some of the things the Old Men of the Mountain received regular updates on. The fact the children of Voids were never Voids themselves truly vexed them...

-----

The Oldest Man of the Mountain was a Thirteen, in my estimation. He had a face like a carved rock and I was pretty sure he’d lost his soul somewhere around being a Three.

I followed a message carrier into his office, then stood there in the corner for six hours in the shadow of his little potted plant there, not really watching him.

He wasn’t the one responsible for all this. That responsibility fell right onto the bunch of crystallized bones sitting on his stupid Throne on Tellus. Gods damn it, how badly had that idiot screwed everything when he shut down the Void Brothers, just because he couldn’t control them?

But I stood there, not looking at him, hair draped around me and not moving as it bent aside light and psi and anything else he was using to sense.

He was a Mentat, and a high order one. He wasn’t an irreplaceable Fifteen, they wouldn’t be stuck here among the Voids, and he was definitely not the Grandfather operating things from Tellus. Nope, just the highest-level Mentat they could find to run things on site.

The crowning achievement of the psions, controlling the Voids.

He got done with whatever he was working on and fine-tuning, signing off on assassinations and training results, and left the office.

I would have at least twelve hours to work on his systems here. Me and my hair got to work.

Yeah, it was all psychically attuned TL 13 stuff, very high order, hush-hush stuff that normal folks never got to see. It wasn’t designed with Null hacker-engineers in mind, with a thousand other hackers looking on decoding, deciphering, and dismantling everything for maximum efficiency. I had a wall of hair combing through the solid-state crystals, punching here and there, and adding some interesting modifications to his computers. Unless he was a gear-head, and he wouldn’t have this job if he was, he wouldn’t be able to tell anything was wrong unless he could read deposited nanite code-threads a hundred molecules wide crawling around and through his systems like they were printed onto it.

Yeah, one of the girls had invented something to print off circuits using our hair as a carrier for the fabrication. Stephie Rantha and Jobba Briggs were wicked cunning at this stuff.

The psychic relay that was going to start dumping data to her when she got within range was going to be pretty sweet, and the data miners were already chaffing to get their mitts on thousands of years of the dark side of the Empire’s history.

I aimed to supply them.

----------

A handfang crashed into the side of a man’s head, liquifying his brain as he was dumped unceremoniously off a bridge.

A brawny mercenary opened a door right into a large bore pistol, and ended up moving in the opposite direction abruptly.

A slender, nondescript techie entered an elevator, and when it opened ten floors later, he was sprawled on the floor of it, his brains coming out the large hole in his ear.

A cold-eyed old man was bumped off a sidewalk straight into a hovercar racing by at 200 mph. He bounced quite a distance, and didn’t get back up, yet his Band and cyber implants were all missing somehow from his pulped corpse.

Telissa Offa, bondpsion and lethal telepath, took over the brains of the comms worker of this Void retrieval team, and he quite happily informed her of the proper algorithms, codes, protocols, and confirmations to use, before his burned-out neural centers slumped to the side.

They might be getting assignments, but mostly they’d be getting their accounts emptied, and Voids would be getting shuffled off to the far side of the galaxy...

--------

Jaxon was definitely in the worst spot of his life.

Okay, he’d been eager. He’d sensed another Void on the planet, and knew it wasn’t one of his fellow Assassins. He’d reported it through channels, even as he brought in a kill team to help him corral the dangerously free Void and eliminate him before he brought disaster upon everybody on Hennix III.

That kill team was now dead, with a speed and thoroughness that went beyond a superb ambush. Those brutes in power armor were at least equal to Legionnaires, the bladeboys could give Coronals a run for their money, the snipers using Sun Shots were some of the best he’d ever seen, and he himself had been taken out fast and smooth by someone he’d never seen coming.

He looked up at the woman smiling down at him, brown hair fluttering about her with a life of its own as the tentacles coming off her back tied him down, absolutely defying his Void without any effort as they did so. The play of her hair accented her pointed ears, her smile displayed double canines, and even with the blue-black runescar she was sporting, he had to admit she was pretty damn attractive.

“Good night,” she informed him, manhandling him without effort, raising her fist and bringing it down once, twice. Jaxon went dark.

Pina Rantha’s hands glowed with golden claws, and she ripped and tore at the zoot suit the guy wore that filtered out the Breath of the Land, and made some very fast incisions into the body of the Assassin she was holding up against the wall, including the back of his neck, under his ribs, at the bottom of his spine, and the top of his nasal cavity.

Electricity was delivered with deadly precision to short out some very sensitive items, while Vajras aligned around hair follicles were like pins and razors combined, cutting out cyberware and bioaugmetics with lethal speed and precision. It was nice that they had a very thorough grasp of the procedures from Frank’s operation and Mom Sama watching the installation procedures on videos she dumped to all of them.

When the removal of the corrupting organs and kill switches was done, she transferred the bleeding wounds to herself as she put her lips to his, and when he subconsciously attempted to draw in the power, she clamped onto his precious little Void draw, locked it there, and then force-fed two hundred Levels and a similar amount of psionic power right into him.

Jaxon woke up just in time for his mind to erupt with light, the purest, rawest psychic and magical power he could never have imagined blew into him, and no zoot suit or cybernetic interrupter was going to stop it now...

Frank looked on from a safe distance, having successfully lured one of his colleagues into a trap. It wasn’t a good tactic to re-use, as they’d be on guard against it quick, but it did make it easier to hunt down Assassins if he was on the same planet...