Fuzzy was finally off to the stars with his own fleet... a fleet that was constantly growing as the Tribute made more. All it needed was raw supplies at this point.

We were in a flurry of activity with the constant upgrades. TL 13 stuff making the stuff that could make TL 14 stuff, which could then make the stuff that made TL 15 stuff. Fabbers could only make stuff two TL lower, so having devoted systems able to make your current tech level was a thing.

The fabricators of the Celestial Tribute could reach TL 15, which meant the first upgrades could happen very quickly. Of course, us having access to TL 15 was one of those things that we didn’t tell anybody, especially the Mekkers salivating after functioning tech of that level.

Of course, the fact that TL 15 was mere bridge tech to what we actually wanted would have dumbfounded them. It was basically a truism to them that organics couldn’t comprehend TL 17 tech, completely ignoring the evidence to the contrary. That we were doing so meant we had to be dealing with the Warp or aliens or infected by some outside force, enabling us to do such things...

The fabbers could make TL 15 tech, or they could make systems that could make the TL 15 tech, and potentially TL 16 tech. There was no doubt what the proper way to go was, and Fuzzy was now out there visiting the worlds we had settled and mining, scooping up megatons of raw materials, turning them into technology, and disseminating them to our people.

Our greatest vulnerability was, of course, our lack of armed forces to defend all the places we were spread out into, so we could only rely on Sources determining Fate, Nulls that couldn’t readily be traced, and a whole lot of secrecy. The systems we were in were not visited for reasons, and as long as those reasons continued, we wouldn’t have a problem.

At the same time, if alien forces found those systems, we couldn’t call on the Empire to save them, only our private strength. Granted that strength was impressive on an individual level, as our ships were literally the finest being produced in series right now, but on a macro level, it was miniscule. We were just heavily outnumbered by lower tech ships that could simply overwhelm ours when acting in concert.

Fuzzy’s flotilla being able to move between our worlds at increasingly fast speeds along the Phlos was a big step forward, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. We had to scale up, there was no helping it, and the sheer amount of scaling up we had to do was just mindboggling.

Even here, on the other side of the Rift, the number of systems occupied by the Empire was at least a million, and while not every system even had a capital ship, a very good chunk of them did, and certain of them had massive fleets just waiting to be dispatched.

Unless you just had numbers to throw away, nobody could possibly maintain a strong protective force in every system. Worlds had to be important to be allocated a standing cruiser, and Very Important to have a functional System Fleet. Even then, their fleet often wasn’t strong enough to stand up against a devoted piratical raid from another race, and certainly couldn’t deal with an actual invasion.

Thus, standard Fleet procedure was delay, delay, delay, while a force from one of the hub systems was dispatched to deal with the threat. Sometimes that was possible, sometimes it wasn’t, and sometimes planets died. Normally what happened with a full-on invading force was it took out two or three systems entirely before being caught by the incoming fleet, and either fought to a standstill or was eradicated, shattering into small elements that fled in every direction and had to be hunted down, consuming more years of time and keeping the Imperial Fleet busybusybusy.

The Tachyon Drive and the Harmonic Drive, especially the upgraded ones, were starting to turn that required strategic emplacement on its head.

Because Helldiving required coming in from the edge of the system or randomly placed gravity well intersections, there was a considerable amount of time used up normally just entering the inner systems where all the goodies were, ranging from hours to days. Getting word out, mustering a fleet, and then Helldiving towards the afflicted system consumed a lot of time, and when they arrived, they’d be at the edge of the system, having to follow the same course as the attackers, meaning they were yet further behind.

The Tachyon Drive made running off to nearby systems a very quick thing, and the Harmonic Drive was now the fastest in-system sublight drive system around, save for the inertialess stuff from the Tekrons, able to rival all but the fastest of the Elvar Sunsails.

Outsystem, we were up into parsecs per hour easy coasting, and could start on orders of magnitude now, with the tech increasing as it did. That meant systems from an increasing range could converge on trouble spots, as opposed to one massive fleet dispatched from a central location, and having to deal with the uncertain chronal effects of traveling through the Warp.

Markspace meant communication of threats was instantaneous across galactic distances. There were no worries about astropathic jamming or distortions in the Warp cutting off communication with other systems, so all that remained was getting the ships there in time to be of use.

That communication system, and the continual expansion of our sphere of awareness, also meant that we had the single best strategic view of forces in the galaxy in real time, bar none!

It was possible that the elvar, drow, and high strategists on Tellus had access to knowledge of forces of other races and what systems they held and where their forces were... but they would be inevitably out of date, and certainly tracking the shifting courses of them in real time was impossible. Everything was lost track of, given the distances, the vagaries of the Warp, and the violence endemic to the galaxy.

One Marked in the right position – say, planetary traffic control – could basically provide real time information for an entire system. This got even better if they could work in the Umbran or Coronal data centers.

Information from so many sources, increasing rapidly in complexity, necessitated a change in how we ran our own operations. The kids put up ideas, and I let them run with it.

--------

Anatolia had put forth the most radical revision, and moved the entire Strategos collective, as well as the operating core of the Goldilocks, off-world.

She had filled up five massive cargo vessels with nothing but high-end computer equipment and data storage, which Ronnie had gone over and done some crazy yet effective revisions of. These computer storage vessels had been tied to five pie-shaped special vessels, who came together into a certain five-sided figure to form the new military, corporate, and governing center of the Gold and Green, and Rantha Corp.

Outsiders wondered why we called it the Pentagon instead of the Pentagram, but let it ride.

Operating out of a cavern etched out of a floating minor moon around a gas giant in an unpopulated system light years from anything going on, the Pentagon was there to provide operational brainpower for everybody, and it was where all the best organizational minds, Hagbloods and otherwise, gravitated to, providing the support for the major meta decisions that guided the what, where, and how.

It was pretty much all Nulls and Bonded Psions, as Sources needed to be among who they led. The Pentagon provided support to everyone via Markspace, and could help run wars, battles, and even solo combats from the other side of the galaxy, if needed. They analyzed the movements of goods and cargoes, began tracking ship movements like no other force could, identified empty spots in our intelligence, and what needed to be searched and verified by the scouting vessels that were cracking open the galaxy for us.

Given the rapidly expanding size of our operations, this naturally required at first tens of thousands of people drawn from different locations, and rapidly ramped upwards to hundreds of thousands as the chores and duties required of them increased.

Requests, orders, desires, objectives, requirements, and obligations poured into the Pentagon, and came back out as fact and capability-backed plans, how to go about them, and what needed to be done to achieve them. With Ranthas, Briggs, and G&G Sources all over the place, having blueprints to follow, overarching objectives to synergize and complement one another, and knowing what your enemies were doing was also priceless, and really helped solidify the foundations of what we were trying to build.

------

Spidey Base One was now a constantly-active travel hub, being used to shuffle hundreds of people at a time from one location to another as Rifts were cut coming and going from location to location, with running feet from one location subbing for planes and vehicles.

Places that got a LOT of traffic, like incoming immigrant worlds, the kids got inventive and set up devoted tracks designed just to send massive amounts of people or goods through the narrow Rift in 90 seconds or less.

Rifts were double-sided on both ends, after all. You could have a screaming load of passengers hurtling from SB1 to a matching track on the right side of the Rift, while on the left side an empty or full load could come screaming into SB1 at the same time. Thus, hundreds or even thousands of people could be shunted to a new place, depending on how fast the carrier was moving, and large amounts of small-volume goods appropriately packed and sized could do the same.

We still couldn’t readily open a Rift that was more than man-sized, of course, and definitely weren’t constructing actual Portals. Even the fact that so many Rifts were going up in a very small area didn’t make the Underweb react much, because they were always to so many different areas, and never lasted long, making any connections ephemeral and rapidly overwritten.

It did mean we couldn’t send tanks and larger machinery to those places, but... we could send carefully packaged disassembled tanks and larger machinery through, if needed. They only needed to have a track to receive them.

90 seconds wasn’t a lot of time, but when the incoming load is moving at 200 mph, that’s five miles of cargo that can go through...

Needless to say, Spidey Base One went through some lengthy expansions to fit the narrow trains that were being put in place, as the kids maximized their ability to move people and things from here to there. Our ability to move forces and rapidly expand to new worlds and locations naturally increased substantially.

The limiting factor of these movements was naturally the amount of people who could Riftcut, which naturally meant those Tens with Weapons that had seen something in excess of four hundred days of Naming Karma, i.e., a LOT of fighting. At this point that wasn’t all my kids, of course, and there were plenty of Nulls and Sources who had dreams of their own to pursue, and didn’t want to be directly under one of us.

Naturally, they didn’t want to give up the Markspace and all the help, either. It was emphasized over and over that the Pentagon was there to support and coordinate, advise and analyze, not to command. Sources had to make the decisions to satisfy their Oaths... but having people there to help you make the best decision could only help them in the end. If sometimes your decisions were weird, well, that ultimately was what Sources did, and what made them so individual and unpredictable to those watching them.

The Pentagon just shrugged in amusement and compensated for it. Given the nature of Sources... such ‘inefficient’ decisions somehow just made things go along smoother, just because they didn’t fight them...

Getting a thousand people in place on a civilized world to start up a G&G branch meant getting off to a very fast start; recruitment and expansion could happen rapidly. The lads and lasses who could Riftcut found entire worlds opening up to them, settled or unsettled as they liked, and could literally pick and choose where they wanted to go.

Over a million Marked were being added a day now, down in the sublevels below my grandkids. Hagbloods were infiltrating cities across the galaxy, signing up for Termite duty to get that precious Karma, that recognition, and those Levels, while trained G&G personnel were moving into Planetary Guard positions on worlds after worlds...