Anatolia mentally tapped a finger. “The location is not viable. The Mount needs to be moved. The Sargasso is an immense strategic resource of processed materials. The Ruk are master miners and refiners at the top of the tech curve. There is no way we could secure it if they desired to move a salvage fleet into the system and started to process it.”

“More to the point, their movement would be noticed, things would follow, and the Sargasso would quickly become a war zone,” Briggs added quickly. “Even a single Ruk ship departing from any holdings they have would likely be a momentous event, if they haven’t been secretly monitoring the galaxy... unlikely given the range of their opponents, who would like an isolated ship to pound on.”

“We have to move that ship!” Ronnie agreed quickly, and pretty much everyone nodded. Losing the Sargasso would be horrible; it was saving us decades, if not centuries, of work, like the biggest best mine of materials ever, combined with all sorts of wonderful new and horrible old tech trees to explore... or learn how to counter.

“Find a dead system and a place to drop it. We’re going to need a Gate structure big enough to slide it through, after we pull it out of the gravity well of the Sargasso.” Groans all around. We were hoping to be able put off the cost of doing something like that until TL 20, when our production costs of Energized Elements would take a nose-dive. Something like that would immediately become a Strategic Resource multiple races would be willing to go to war over.

Not even the drow could immediately shift a person from one side of the Galaxy to the other, and certainly not cheaply, given the energy costs. It would also involve moving from location to location through the Underweb, and those Portals were relatively fixed, and as we had proved, we could prey upon those fixed positions, if we knew where they were.

A point to point Gating tech? Even they didn’t have something readily usable in that category, only temporary Portals that could be opened in other locations with strenuous time and effort redirecting existing Portals to a new purpose.

It was because the primary advance of their technology was up the Shadow and Air trees. Shadows existed as a result of reality, and so they had to build them in mass shadows. Point-to-point dimensional transfers was treating space like water, folding over itself, flexible, and had nothing to do with Reality’s shadows. Shadowjumping was easier and more powerful, less costly than dimensional hopping or teleporting, but it had to use shadows...

“We’ll have to produce it at the Sargasso. The psychic waves and dimensional thinness are the biggest dissuasion for those trying to investigate it,” Ronnie spoke up, thousands of Marked already starting to move on our highest Tech Level project ever. Just the Energized Elements alone... ugh. It was good we didn’t have to deal with the Elvar anymore to get Void Osmium... although we still did, since we were trading them stuff we still didn’t need which was actually much cheaper to produce. Who came out better in the deal was a toss-up... but our reputation for fair and honest trading among the Elvar was pretty much set, something they were constantly trying to take advantage of for their own purposes, figuring we were like other parties selling out our race.

Our intrigue-minded sorts didn’t mind playing the game in their own way, and constantly underestimating post-40 Intellects was not a thing to do...

“I’ll use the Tribute to get the facilities in place,” Briggs promised. That long a Gate jump would require a significant amount of power... but we could afford it. There were a couple blue giants that wouldn’t mind giving up a few billion tons of mass to power the jump.

“In and out,” I told him in no uncertain terms. “You’re needed in Khagan Sector full time. It’s a big thing taking the Tribute out where you can’t Jump to systems that need him.”

He nodded. “Find me a Phlo route to a recharge star. I’ll finish up all production we’re doing. Start making and gathering what we need from our advanced facilities, and I’ll shuttle them and the supply fleet over. Use old supply vessels, or design them to be incorporated into the new production facility. I won’t be bringing them back.”

“You’ll save that for a monstrous haul of Energized Elements!” I half-laughed. The dying star was definitely not suitable for generating the wormhole energies needed to establish the Gate... and we certainly didn’t want to Gate into a place where shit was... phasing in from the Warp, too...

“Wait, could making Gates bring more derelicts into the Sargasso?” I asked abruptly, and everyone blinked.

“Where’d that come... oh... I see... that’s... dammit, Mom!” Ronnie blurted out, and everyone laughed...

------

Twenty-six derelicts vessels slowly phased into existence as they were drawn into the gravity signal of the Hellgate we were Stupid Enough to establish here, complete with extra gravity ripples to attract them... and then a whole bunch of the highest tech tractor beams in existence latching on to them and keeping them away from dropping into a random orbit around a space hulk... or into one.

There were a bunch of cheers as the ships materialized, outside both the horror zone and the gravity well. Of course, they were rippling with a lot of unhealthy energies, which likely would have been purged semi-quickly in the horror waves even driving out the demons... but after warm fusion baths laden with vivus, most of the visible tentacles, polyps, and exterior demons went away permanently, which only left interior stuff for the boarding teams to clear.

Boy, were those teams excited to get going.

Half the ships we pulled out were of human make, the rest split through nine alien races, including what a drifting, mutated Xenovore mothership that looked like it had been tossed into the Warp, which was a really bad place for a bioship to go...

------

“Blacklight that,” I noted, and a load of negative light swept over what passed for its soul, and eased it from this life, despite being a few miles long and definitely very tough, probably Possessed dozens of times over. Anchored to and infecting its body, the demons linked to it screamed and puffed out of existence, too.

Vivic flames promptly set it alight, and all the Possessed, maddened, and mutated stuff still alive inside it screamed and tried to get out as their dead mothership burned around them. The Crescents used them for target practice, and if not, mass tractors just dragged them back to burn with the mothership.

“Is that a Kappa ship?” I asked, pointing. The flying saucer format preferred by the defensively-minded, turtle-like aliens was hard to miss, having clean lines and aesthetics the AMT technology of the empire lacked in its baroque, gothic fun.

“It is,” confirmed the nav officer, drawing up its specs. We’d long transferred as much detail on alien races as we could beg, buy, or steal out of imperial systems, although the xenophobia of much of it rendered it wildly inaccurate, as truthful details were rewritten to encourage abhorrence, mistrust, and misunderstanding.

To much of the galaxy, humanity was a mindlessly murderous, conquering, annihilating race of monsters, eradicating anything that was even close to a threat to it, and many things that were not. If you didn’t have the firepower to stand up to us, and the survival skills to run when it was time and shield your populations, the Empire was happy to eradicate you and remove you from the galaxy permanently.

The humans who didn’t kill aliens straight off didn’t do so out of benevolence, but because they wanted to exploit them. The Cult of Man further fed this belief, with human superiority, xenos degeneracy, and any kind of propaganda necessary to keep the beliefs lit.

But the Kappa weren’t a violent species, and according to the intelligence reports, were quite happy to work with all kinds of races in a rather equitable manner, gradually bringing them into a kind of theocratic federation based around The Way, a philosophy naturally set up by the Kappa and which they were the greatest masters of. They were leading half a dozen races in an alliance that was actually pretty stable and open, and not stabbing one another in the back as different races were prone to here.

“That’s something called a Terrapin-class. It’s marked as a sensor or science vessel, not intended for combat,” Nav Officer Kempri reported. The daughter of a former knight on Amistad sold off to the drow by le Krov, she was in space now, wanting to be out picking on drow pirates, and earning her stripes before she got shipped off to help some of the kids who were doing just that. We generally tried to work with people’s career aspirations, after all, and she had a nice Talent for navigation, mixed with a huntress’ instincts for stalking prey.

“Science vessel. You think they were testing out a new drive and got sucked into the Warp, Sensei?” Captain Karthus asked me. He’d gotten over his awe of having me around, as I let him run his ship, and my impromptu and irregular demands for sudden stuff were actually the most exciting things going on around here. He’d come out of a sailing family on Amistad, and been enrolled into an actual Imperial Academy to get his basic training, before signing on with a ‘merchant marine’, and doing his time in patrol fleets and pirate hunting before taking up service here with Unshackled, the first Amistad-crewed ship in the Corunsun fleet, which they were all immensely proud of.

The Unshackled was considered Explorer-class, a large cruiser with a broader range of capabilities than just combat, able to undertake troop transport, mercantile endeavors, heavy patrol, or kit itself out for deep reconnaissance and extended isolation missions if it had to. It meant having a deeply cross-trained and highly skilled crew good at a variety of jobs depending on their mission requirements.

Fighting action-scientists delving into the workings of alien starships, and shooting the Warped remains of them with power armor and vivic-boosted weapons was the aspirations of much of the crew. There were casualties on the assault teams, and there were Levels to be gained there. Everybody had chances to be on the clearing teams, and very few refused the chance to rotate into them.

“That’s your target, then. Pull up what schematics you can, and prepare to clear that ship. The only Kappa tech we’ve seen is stuff we got from the black market. I want a better look at all their files if we can get them, although I don’t hold high hopes for that... and I want to know how they ended up in the Warp.”

“You got it, Sensei.”

-----------

The possessed Warbot blew apart under the Baned Sun Shots, while the team cursed it and the rail gun armaments that was punching holes into the ship’s hull as it shot at them. The demon howled in static and soul-heavy screams as the vivus ate into it, and blew through the wreck of the ‘bot in a guttering unwhite fireball.

They had some love of long-range weaponry, probably because they weren’t the fastest and most agile in personal combat. They also had a preponderance of mech-suits, Walkers, and similar things, meaning a heavy reliance on tech.

As our limited data had indicated, they didn’t seem to have any real kind of psychic attunement, and their tech was pretty much pure on that aspect. Even the Energized Elements they used were of a variety that pure tech could make, or were readily available from mining.

Their tech was in the 11 to 14 range, depending on how sophisticated it was, meaning higher than the Empire average, but not higher than the Empire’s best. Par for the course.

I pulled Chalice out of another warbot, Lightningphasing through the power circuits shorting out the demon’s control, and driving it out of the bot to pop into vivic oblivion before it could even materialize fully.

Between the lot of them, we’d have a whole bot to take apart and decipher. The local anti-grav tech promised to be pretty sweet, and the tech-boys were salivating to get their hands on it.

“How’s the situation?” I asked into local /Marktell, seeing nothing else around to kill. The White Knight, the duly appointed guy with the Vivic Flamethrower on his power armor, had already appeared to hose everything down here.

The all-clears rang out, as dead turtle-men in mechsuits or running drone-units were all burning cheerfully, with the demons that had been animating them painting everything white.