In less than one day, fifty-seven Assassins scattered across the Empire vanished with their kill teams. White smears were all that were found of most of them.

The next day, a hundred and six more vanished. Very quietly, Assassin teams on active missions across many, many worlds began to go dark. The fact their mission details had been decoded at the Mountain might have had something to do with that, and the Ranthas had been urgently getting Riftcutting coordinates for more and more worlds, adding new ones every day in ever-increasing numbers as the number of Alias-class ships continued to increase, and Ranthas and Briggs slowly dispersed across the Empire.

Retrieval teams could reach ever more worlds faster and faster, starting with the Seat worlds and moving out from there according to population.

On a quieter note, the absences of over five hundred different V&V recovery teams was not missed at all. Given the number of planets in the Empire, it was unsurprising. There were well over a million more inhabited worlds, after all, what was .05% going silent? Just no children of interest getting born, was all...

---------

Ronnie Rantha, ‘The Fantastic Rantha’, threw the switch symbolically.

She ran over the calculations and components one final time, and sisters actually smarter than she was double-checked all the math, just to be sure.

Power hummed, subdued, yet strong.

Building a planet-wide Ward to keep out the Warp was a hideously expensive and demanding process that probably wouldn’t be viable until they could do full-on suntaps and use that level of energy in the construction process. Really, you’d need TL 20 fabbers to make it viable.

But... the best way to lock out the Warp was to strengthen the Veil. The best tool to strengthen the Veil was vivic energy feeding into the land. The best thing to feed vivic energy with was death... death energy.

The death energy collected by the Tekrons. The death energy that powered Dead Walking Events.

By consuming the energy that started the one Event, they could also stop the other.

The necroic siphons had been installed in every existing mega-city and kiloplex on the planet, harnessing the constant flow of negative energy from people dying from deaths natural and otherwise. The Tekrons used it to defy time and power their systems. She... was using it to build massive efficient vivic torches pumping that energy directly into the Veil, radiating out slowly and constantly from the vivic torches.

She couldn’t really tell if it was taking effect, as Nulls are only sensitive to breaches in the Veil, not to it getting stronger. However, Mindring Egil Rosenblaum, My Queen, and Shadowknife Terse were on hand to provide their opinion of the effectiveness of what was going on.

Helices up, the men short and tall felt the Veil of Reality separating the planet from threats high and low. Transparent crystalline helices and liquid grey-silver reached out and felt, feeling the Veil flowing through and around them.

“I’ll defer to my Senior Brother, but by my estimation, the strength of the Veil has already doubled in this area, and it is expanding slowly,” My Queen attested in his normal flat voice.

The hyn slowly nodded. “The Prime Plane is not my expertise, but that seems reasonable. How fast is it expanding?”

“We believe about a foot for every person dying in range, below about the hundred an hour required to maintain it. If we manage to saturate the planet, the maintenance rate should plummet to half that rate or less,” Ronnie sighed.

That was indeed a lot of people dying. Fortunately or otherwise, it wasn’t a hard number to meet for even the smaller kiloplexes. The megacities had no difficulties doing so whatsoever.

“Based on calculations, how long will it take for the planet to be Shrouded?”

“Three or four weeks, unless there’s a mass genocide event to spur things along.”

“That should reach the Warp Zone very quickly then...”

“No.” Ronnie shook her head, a faraway look in her eyes. “The Warp Zone is coming down within three days.”

“Oh.” Egil naturally had seen the Celestial Tribute, so he knew about the great ship, and the delays that had been taken before it would take off. The Warp Zone had been termed cleared months ago, and a trooper named Kalek Hash had been credited with the last demon kill within it, and was promptly dubbed ‘The Final Nail.’

“Because I just hit Fifteen, and I just figured out the next stage of the Tachyon Drive.”

-------

Ronnie’s achievement rippled across Markspace, igniting a nerd frenzy. Countless Ranthas and Briggs bemoaned and celebrated her Achievement as she took over first place on the Leveling Leaderboards.

As the NPC Expert Class.

NPC Classes required half the Karma to advance that a PC class did, and a twelfth or less of what advancing the Rantha racial Class did. Just not having to pay full price for breaking the Ceiling at Ten ensured that she’d catch up to the Ranthas who had made Eleven, and would blow right on by them... which she had, in dramatic fashion.

A viable, useful, self-sustaining method to vastly increase the strength of the Veil on a planetary level was a huge defense against the Warp, as it made Warp Events nigh impossible, Warp Sorcery very hard to pull off, and even tamped down general psionic ability.

In an engineering chamber in the core of the great ship in Tribute City, at the heart of the Warp Zone, a certain Spell Weaver knew that its day was at hand as it unmade the great formation erected upon the mighty power cores of the great ship, and laughed and laughed as the great work was undone, his master’s plan was foiled, and it, it was responsible!

Then Constanz Rantha finaly got to kill it, triggering her own leap to Eleven, and that vivic energy went into the collapsing formation, and out.

-------

The Warp Zone exploded with vivic power on a scale none of us had ever seen. Seething dimensional touches that had been briefly held at bay now collapsed entirely as the energy that had sustained them was consumed. A whole world’s worth and more of energy, ripped directly from the Warp, ignited, shearing across time and space, and rolled across the world like a harrowing wind.

The psions could all feel it, like a massive, living force, pushing against their minds and souls, the feeling of a great and massive force rolling over and, if not waking, responding to a mighty stimulus. A screaming white wind tore across the world, and began to unmake what had been made.

The life seared away by the energies of the Warp erupted as that energy was returned to the land. Time and space were unmade, and DNA from dust and ash long past respun into living organisms once more.

Grasses, shrubs, whole trees erupted forth. Water fell from the sky, burst forth from the land, and began to run. The caustic salts and bitter bases that dominated earth and sky spontaneously uncombined, and the ever-present dusts vanished from the air, and fell away into the land.

Over a billion eyes in Janus Prime were watching the vid feed as that white wall swept across the Spiked Plains outside the city, and those endless razored crystalline formations, thrusting up from the supersaturated oceans below... fell apart and melted away, like sand castles in the rain.

Behind them was left clear expanses of blue water, cold and clear and completely mind-blowing.

---

Up in orbit, the ships and crews on station could only stare in awe as the white stretched out, all-hungry, all-devouring, chasing down every last bit of the time and space-rending energy that had turned the planet into what it was, and took it all back.

Colors swirled through the yellow-white dust and haze that had covered the planet. The blues of water, the whites of ice, the greens of forest, the yellows of plains, the earth tones of hills and mountains. Clouds swirled into existence, storms began to run and rumble with new energy, and auroras suddenly danced about the poles of the planet as they never had before.

“Sir, there’s a ship rising from the Warp Zone!” called out a Marked member of Flight Control.

Admiral Ontif had been read in some time ago, and just stood there nodding. “Send the Duke Corunsun our congratulations, and wish him godspeed, Ensign!”

“Yes, sir!” the controller called back, his voice not betraying a bit of emotion at the news.

That flash of silver rose above the spreading vortex from the clear zone at the heart of the whiteness, where many an interested party could see that some sort of settlement had been constructed deep in the heart of the Warp Zone.

While those who were not read in were agog at the very idea of a settlement existing in the heart of a Warp Zone, the massive ship rose smoothly and lightly into orbit, moving with very little of the ponderous grace to be expected of a ship of its size... that size made quite noticeable by the numbers of escort craft that were rising with it.

“Emperor’s Throne!” blurted out a visiting captain from one of the walkways of the Orbus Station. “That’s a colony ship!”

There were two dreadnoughts pulling escort duty next to it, built with the new, clean lines of Angeltech shipyards, and a whole flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, scout vessels, fighters, transports, and cargo vessels.

The whole flotilla, a fleet of new starships dwarfed by the silver hull of the mighty vessel they were escorting, paraded past the tower and the gaping eyes of the Fleet admiral and captains there for everyone to see.

The amount of firepower there wasn’t that far below the System Fleet!

Moving with improbable speed, the flotilla streamed past the Threshold stations, picking up speed very quickly indeed, aiming for the nearest edge of the gravity field. The fighters smoothly docked to their carriers as they crossed the threshold of the gravity plane, and then the whole flotilla went to jam in perfect synchronicity, flashing away at a considerable chunk of the speed of light, and was lost to sight almost instantly.

-------

News of the Celestial Tribute, its fleet, and the Duke Corunsun commanding it had the astropathic stations of the whole sector humming in very short order. There was no doubt that it was definitely the hottest news item since the Rift itself had cut them off from the empire.

In multiple Mechanist facilities, leading in a straight line to the Throneworld of the Sector, prominent cyborgs cursed and swore as they realized that thousands of years of plotting and planning had been for utterly nothing. Their only hope now was to attempt to claim the ship and its ancient technology for the good of the Empire. and try to investigate very harshly how it had been restored, and who was responsible for it.

A day after the Tribute left Janusspace, all those individuals were dead by various accidents, including one very senior Mechwright who plugged himself into three different power circuits at the same time. Data raiders went in and managed to abscond with some very, very old Mechanist files that even the Guild’s recovery teams were unable to find the contents of.

Now, everyone wanted to know who the Duke Corunsun was, how he had done what he had, and why the Coronals and Umbrans hadn’t bothered to do anything about it or announce the fact to anyone.

Hard questions were going to be asked, and heavy hands were starting to move...