We couldn’t hit every planet in the sector, but by Tek, we could hit a bunch of them. Hooking Tek in through the Markspace, our Curses providing conduits of faith and belief to power him up and represent the will of millions of organics, perhaps billions, the akasha of the human race providing all the infinite space he needed to grow, and his post-living energy state removing any material restrictions from his existence, while his ‘living soul’ of Ronnie and all her girls provided him a perfect material anchor...

Well, Tek was in quite the sweet spot.

He was probably really surprised that Ronnie was a Seventeen with a 50 Charisma and he couldn’t dominate her in the slightest, but in the end, that was a moot point.

There was a new god in town, and he wasn’t in the Warp. He was in the human akasha, below it, outside it, perhaps ‘before’ the Warp, that place where souls came from that the Warp still didn’t own, and where current thought existed, which the Warp could only feed from, not become.

I hit Sixteen as Tek’s presence surged through the Markspace... and right about then, he looked Up.

Up, at Grandmother Sama looking down and watching him coolly from the Warp.

-Sama Rantha.- His /voice was still mechanical, still precise, and he was even talking in Necrus. -Who is that?-

-That is my mom, the one I told you about. The one from outside this Universe.-

-Oh.- Sounded so un-Tekish, but it still fit. After all, he was Ronnie, he had grown tremendously. He had emotions now. -What does she want?-

-She wants you to be very, very, very careful, or something very big is going to come up and kill you. Both from the mortal plane, and from the Warp.-

He calculated swiftly. -The gods of the Warp... and the Emperor?- he /conjectured rapidly.

-We don’t know how they could reach you... but we don’t doubt that they might.-

-Ah.- Revisions of a sudden and massive rise to divinity were prudently quashed. -Perhaps some suggestions of how to proceed might be in order?-

-You’ve got a Priesthood, ask them!- I /replied in amusement, both fobbing off the responsibility and giving it to those who had been preparing for it.

Tek redirected his attention down to his Curseline, while Ronnie rolled her eyes at me for heaping more stuff onto her.

Meh, she could take it.

She had hit Eighteen when she opened up Tek. There was no doubt whatsoever she was going to be the first of us to hit Twenty... but you couldn’t take an NPC Class like Expert post-Twenty, so at that point she’d have to turn around and start pumping either her Melee Level or her Rantha Levels, probably the latter, as the Stat buffs were too sweet to turn down, and damn if she wasn’t going to need them.

-------

With that, the Church of the God of the Machine quietly began to grow, but in a very different manner from the Church of Man, which glorified psionics, or the Machine God of the Mechanists, who fixated on technology.

Nope, their doctrine was that everything was a machine, and machines can be improved... biological, technological, psionic. It was all one thing. It was the right and will of humanity to grow, evolve, and improve themselves... and to defy the Warp.

Psionics wasn’t needed or necessary... but if it was there, use it! It was a tool! Technology wasn’t mandatory... but if it was there, use it! It was a tool!

And if Powered could touch on a divine power and access Faith Magic pulled from a bonded Rantha of the Ronnie Curseline, well, wouldn’t that just send all sorts of things into an uproar? Especially if they were Psion/Clerics and could use Enlightened Theurgy, that totally overpowered counterpart to Warp Sorcery?

A transcendental intellect watched from the Akasha as another one watched from the Warp, and steps were being taken...

As for me, bringing a non-finite divine entity into existence brought my Rantha Level to Sixteen, so I wasn’t too far from the top of things, either. Pass-up Karma could be a wonderful thing.

I had something else to do, and steps to take for it. Gotta have plans, after all...

-----------

Getting myself hired by TransGalactic wasn’t all that hard. I simply went out and made obscene amounts of money leveraging my information network.

I borrowed large amounts of money, and then paid them back while making three, five, ten or more times the amount off breaking financial information, before the astropaths could send it all on. Do this a couple times, and wealthy people take notice, and want to do more business with you.

Then they want to give you more money to play with, and let you earn fees while you make them money, and they try to figure out what you are doing so they don’t have to pay you anymore.

I was polite about it all as I got into the giga-dollar market of financial trades on information, where making or breaking was one bit of news true and false away, phone calls and judgements could crush careful plans, and rolling over an uppity nymphal who thought she was hot stuff trying to mess with the big boys was just business as normal.

I had a god on my side, the Markspace, and lots and lots of high-Level geniuses. Hulkamania, the living world Brus and Jen were having fun with, and which was rapidly becoming one of our primary computing and data hubs, was perfectly happy to start working with TL 18 coding and do some transcendentally profound algorithms with forest/computers sprawling across a continent. Or six.

There were assassins, wine and cheese parties, several poisonings, dances, explosions, art auctions, crashing starships, plays and operas, mercenary hit teams, board meetings, techno-killers trying to kill me with hacked computer networks, quarterly reports, suicides, sizable bonuses and stock options, at least one nuclear blast in an inconvenient place, proxy fights, contract breaches with lethal consequences, and a large number of dramatic firings.

Three trading houses with a combined history of four thousand years crashed and burned. Ninety-three boutique investment houses and ‘expert traders’ folded. Four import/export alliances of shippers got massively in debt to me after trying to manipulate contracts to ruin me... and finding I had alternate sources that left them holding multi-giga assets with no way to dump them, and that I could find places to deliver multi-giga cargoes when guaranteed markets were abruptly closed to me. Two Houses Noble and a dozen of their Vassals slid into ruin, with a number of them fleeing for their lives (and not getting very far).

One of their hackers somehow managed to steal one of the lesser trading algorithms we were using from us. Shock! Horror!

------

“Contessa Rantha, a pleasure to meet you in person.”

No, not that Countess Rantha, the famous Writ Noble with a dozen others under her in Vassalage. I was a Contessa because I had driven two noble families to bankruptcy, seized their lands and the titles that came with them, including two planets and their governorships, shot the vast majority of the blood members, put down three attempts at rebellion with some inspired methodology called G&G and a new religion, cracked four monopolies and two cartels, and really had a reputation as a strong businesswoman who somehow stood by her words and made lots of money.

Took some time. Had to build my Wall Street cred.

TransGalactic was the bank that managed the money for the Corunsun Foundation. Surely not a coincidence, yes?

“The pleasure is mine, Director.” I gave him a small smile, and he tried very hard not to sweat.

Director Brans was a very powerful man, with very strong connections. The only way to get a Directorship, head of an entire planetary banking branch, was over the sudden retirements of a whole lot of your rivals for it. Given how long people could live if they had money, once you got a position like this, you could hold onto it for literally generations, soaking the money, power, and authority you had like nothing else.

His predecessor had died rather shockingly, something to do with orgies and excessive sexual exertions was tittered behind hands, but probably was because of a cocktail of stuff shoved into him calculated to pop his cerebellum and reduce it to mush.

I understood six of the twelve rivals for the Director’s seat didn’t survive the vetting process. Director Brams had an easy smile, slender build, affected glasses when biotech could keep your eyes good forever, and looked like an accountant. He had proven quite happy to kill people with their own money, and large accounts leaving TransGalactic’s branch here didn’t happen without some sanguinary payments taking place, one way or another.

His profit lines were pretty solid for the last seventeen solar cycles. He was a good businessman, too.

He did not have a 50+ Charisma, and he was not a Sixteen. He was a Ten Expert, with some very high end bioware and cyberware, and some Techno and Vizard Levels to back it up. He wasn’t even psionic, although I understood it was one of his dreams.

Still, he was only a Human/1. He could potentially make Human/3, but it would take a massive mindset shift from him. I didn’t think he had it in him, but who knows?

He was suddenly quite nervous, as well he should be. He was subliminally aware that he was sharing a room with a horrifically deadly person on all the levels, and suddenly his sense of security in his power and position seemed rather ephemeral.

“I imagine you are curious as to why I asked to meet you, Contessa,” he asked, seeing me to a seat, and taking his seat behind his desk. It had an impressive array of defensive measures and potential attacking tech that could be triggered there, and I was fairly sure a number of people must have died in my chair.

“Most matters can be determined with a holoconference, unless it means real money and signatures you don’t want on networks. This is about money, Director,” I replied forthrightly, crossing my legs and making his eyes drop powerlessly. Yes, child, those are MY calves. “I don’t have any business with TransGalactic directly, other than a few contracts some debtors I bought out had, and I understand our lawyers are currently negotiating over.” With three TG attorneys having holes in their heads after the most recent set of negotiations went violently sour, but when 114.36 billion credits are in play, that’s to be expected. “What does your bank want with me?”

He yanked his eyes back up, the first beads of sweat on his head. Yes, dear, all the psi-sensors and Wards in this room cannot pick up what sixteen Ranks and a +50 modifier are doing to you. You’re a helpless little Ten with NPC Classes sitting on a few quintillion dollars of capital, and I am going to own you.

“Well, we are curious why you’ve never come to us for funding for some of your... endeavors, such as they are.” Those who loaned money to me had made their money back, sometimes a little faster than expected, making them very eager to give me that money again, and hopefully make them good money for a longer period of time, a banker’s dream.

Those who loaned money to those who went up against me had to deal with my lawyers when I bought them out. I had EXCELLENT lawyers, in some of the best power armor. Their hourly rates were totally worth it. Several competing firms specializing in these kind of negotiations were out of business after employee retention rates fell to sanguinary levels, i.e. they were bleeding money. I was kind and did handle the death benefits to the survivors for them, however.

“Forgive me for being blunt, but the clients you have tend to be of the conservative kind, and not quite ready for the investment areas I work in. The stories of the terms on your funds, and your jumpiness in pulling funding over threats real, imagined, or convenient do not give me a great deal of faith in your firm.”