The attention of the Void Brothers made the worlds under our control virtual safehouses once they were in operation long enough, and had enough of a force there to assist them in what needed to be done.

The Land seemed to recognize what we had done, and the presence of true Void Brothers across the galaxy. More and more Void Brothers were being born, as if in reaction to their sudden freedom and deeds, and one of the things that we had to do was deal with them.

Slowly, surely, and grimly, we had dismantled the Void Acquisition teams, generally extremely violently. Among other things, this necessitated getting together collection teams for every world in the Empire those teams operated on. Naturally, that was not something we could just throw together overnight.

At the same time, we were running the operations of the Mountain with Nulls and Sources instead of Assassins, as long as the operations weren’t compromised. Seeing actual Assassins became quite a rare thing, as any that were active were being hunted down, stripped of their suits, and learning their true nature and what they were supposed to be... or they were dying in the process.

Given another ten years tops, there soon wouldn’t be any grown Assassins left, as they’d either have to strip their suits, or go mad and get auto-offed. We didn’t think there were even a score left in the galaxy anymore, and by now they knew they were being hunted, they just didn’t know by what, or why their organization was acting against them. Some were tearing off their suits, finding they were Brothers, and lost for what to do... before slowly finding themselves compelled to start a new and even more thankless job than before...

------

On the other side of the gender gap, a lot of Vortices were getting old and dying.

A huge debate raged over the propriety of giving Vortex girls to the Silent Sisters, and subjecting them to the brainwashing of the Empire.

This was solved by the simple process of elimination by age... and then some purging of the non-Sisters from the Temple on Titan by various means, including one ‘Warp infiltration by a spy’ that wreaked bloody havoc on the non-Sister command structure. Various highly-recommended individuals slipped into place, while other highly-recommended individuals ran into endless bureaucratic delays and reassignments elsewhere, and the Sisters continued to do their thing.

Some random time after their sell-by, the Sisters were ‘dying’, often on chaotic battlefields, against Warp Sorcerers and demonic filth that could be trusted to not leave bodies behind, and their remains vivified. Their armor and relics were returned to the Order, there to wait for the next generation of Silent Sisters to rise.

Said dead Sisters promptly unretired by going to places below the eyes of those not looking for them, and continuing their work in other guises... usually with a quietly grim Null or ambitious Source standing next to them.

It turned out Vortices and Voids didn’t get along all that well. Their similar gifts made it feel like each was yanking on the other all the time, and Voids were instinctively unhappy with the fact Vortices existed, and had lost their ability to procreate. Too, Vortices were rather jealous of the Voids’ ability to hear the Land, and the massive sense of purpose about them as a result.

While each of them could understand the other and the massive weight on one another’s shoulders, and having to live in a universe where they could feel the shit about themselves literally all the time... those similarities basically drove them apart, not together.

In the arms of Nulls and Sources, they could find blessed silence or steady warmth. Together, they only had disruption and reminders about the crappiness of their jobs.

It was kind of funny, really...

As for the training of the Voids, they basically got a planet to themselves. We continued with the task of removing the families of the Voids... by literally removing them and taking them away from wherever they were to this world for the Voids. Dutifully executed in the name of the Emperor, paperwork filed, disinformation published, carry on...

There, we started replicating some of the training programs, only this time to actually train them, ALL of them, up into Void Brothers, then send them back out into the galaxy to do what they had to do. That world was named Sequester, and soon became one of the biggest melting-pot planets in the whole Empire, due to the sheer number of people from so many worlds that ended up getting brought there and put to work.

This number was naturally hundreds a day, soon enough, as whole families were ‘excised’ properly, in case anyone was watching, and removed here to be put to use. Soon enough, they were asking if there was any way they could help their sons (and daughters), and the families themselves were being trained into the dedicated support teams for the Void Brothers.

------

On the other side, the amount of Deadshot ammunition available in the galaxy began to shrink rapidly, because there was no resupply of it. Those who knew its source complained heavily about the Assassins hoarding it all to themselves... and then Ronnie calmly came in with some repurposed Tekron tech and started selling the stuff for a nice profit. Credits came flooding in, and nobody gave a shit about the Assassins and where they used to get it from anymore, strangely enough...

It was all a numbers game. Time was passing; the kids were passing on the Curselines to the souls of those who had died valiantly in their service; new Ranthas and Briggs were coming online, making Eight to Ten and finding out who they used to be, and getting very interested in righting the wrongs that had brought them down the first time.

They could see the galaxy was a grimdark place, and they were instruments that could change it to a grimbright place. Given how we were all unafraid of failure and pretty ambitious, well, off the kids went to change the galaxy, one kiloplex, megacity, planet, or solar system at a time...

------

I stood back and gazed at The Map.

Thousands of people making several trips a day over the past decade or two, closing on three, had really filled in things now. We had every single known system in the Empire in place, and a whole lot of human and non-human ones outside it, mapped out and in place.

There was at least one of the kids on every planet, usually the girls, since they could alter their ears and blend in better.

Above and beyond that, the kids were all over the place fighting stuff. I could rake my eyes across the galaxy, and see at least a thousand fights going on at any one time. It was a big place.

The Federation of the Way was no more. Two of its races were completely extinct. A Warp Fleet had come down out of the Warp Storm and engaged the last of them, completing their extinction and thoroughly destroying the hopes of the Anti-Life. What remained of their races were scattered on different reservation worlds across the galaxy... and the two extinct races were being reborn from genetic remnants, Vatted back into existence, and seeing if they could regain their ability to work together and evolve without the Anti-Life.

I was pretty sure no Anti-Life were left in the area of the Warp Storm, as the para-gravity sensors we’d deployed in the surrounding systems weren’t reacting to any movements of dark matter at speed and scale.

------

The Ruk had been quick to seize on Ronnie’s design, their techies and engineers finding the challenge and joy of having to keep up with and equal someone who could actually understand so much of the tech they’d lost understanding of a wonderful stimulus force. There were already Engineers at Seventeen who could now once again understand the highest levels of their own tech, if not at the complete mastery level of a Twenty. Having a teacher was immensely helpful... and the Marks boosting Intellect didn’t hurt, either.

The Vatborn were having tons of kids, but also contributing in another way... Faith. They were generating and accumulating massive amounts of Faith, not using it for themselves, only for the kids and the rest of the race. Runespeakers and Forgepriests were once again becoming a somewhat viable profession to follow, if only waiting for the moment magic was cleansed once again.

Relentless experimentation and information-sharing had driven the Ruk’s understanding of a Ruk-centric path of psionics very quickly, laying out the disciplines and techniques most suited to their people clearly and obviously... and noting that several branches, like body transformation, telepathy, and unrestrained divination, had great dangers attached in this realm. Said warnings having multiple incidences of calamity attached, generally dealing with instant mutation, madness, brains exploding, Possession, and other things that stank of the Fallen Ruk.

There was no problem with the intentions and auras of the testers for many of these things. They died for their people, and the Ruk now had a deep understanding of what had been done to their kin, and why things had gone so wrong for them.

Their teachers ‘gifting’ them psionics had led them right down the wrong paths...

Ruk cherish their grudges deeply. There was Work, and there was War. Right now, they were rebuilding, a new energy sweeping through them at the possibilities before them... and their continuing conflicts with the Compact of the Black were beginning to shift markedly.

The Map and Markspace gave them a real-time coordination and information-sharing network that the Ruk took full advantage of, bless their little ever-more-silver hearts. Regaining knowledge of their tech, the advent of psionics, the return of their Priests, and the knowledge that they were working towards freeing their gods and the souls of the ancestors... all this was a mighty and glorious drive, beyond mere survival. Survival was, after all, fighting for a dead end.

The millions of Ruk kids getting added every day was a thing, too.

------

Sunhawk had gone ahead and made the decision for the Elvar, not giving a fig about the Oracles who couldn’t predict shit involved with us anyways, and started the Vatter project for the Elvar.

He specifically requested a world with a World-mind for this, perhaps on a whim. Olympia had agreed to host the Elvar, while Eden had agreed to manage the rebirth of the Xrik and the Naruff.

They had also both built Worldgates and moved themselves out of their Fringe systems to barren systems that had no true worlds in them other than scattered rocks... meaning there were no surprises, like Gloomgates, anywhere nearby, and none of the assorted alien races had found anything there worth investigating. Neither system had shown a single other visitor in the two decades since they’d been Mapped, and after the two planets set up their System Ward, and the systems vanished from the Warp, the likelihood of that happening was even lower.

Vatted Elvar were being spread across the world, but they had given birth to another Great Project... the Reclaimed Souls project.

This was worked out in concert with one of the Elvar Oracles who came on board, the great Dwarven Archpriest of the Grimshield, stepping out of time with knowledge of the proper paths of souls... and, of course, Ronnie and the kids.

The White Ward around the planets was designed to capture the souls of those who died and reincarnate them into newborns. This would repay all these new souls who could never advance beyond Six, assuring them of a new life as full members of their races when their time had come.

That it would deny the Warp those vulnerable Vatted souls was just another given.

This naturally sparked off massive discussion on the whole destination of souls thing on a theological level. There were naturally those who thought that if they could abuse the cycle of reincarnation, why shouldn’t they do so?

It was Grandmother who came down from On High with the nail in the coffin for those arguments. The instant a race elected constant reincarnation on their own merits, they cut themselves off from the supply of new souls, and effectively doomed themselves to perpetual reincarnation. Their race would never evolve, and could never grow, forever limited by what their ancestors had done.