What the Warp had done to the souls of the dead was horrible, but if they chose as a race to pursue this fate, then a different and equally dire doom awaited them... and their gods.

The Ruk abandoned the idea of soul-warding their people into reincarnation immediately. They were doing all this for the gods and their race, and trapping their race into such a limited cycle was unthinkable, given that they had stopped their decline and were starting to advance once more. If there was war in the afterlife for the fate of their souls... they were more than willing to fight it!

The fate of the Elvar was considered horrible, as the Warp Gods loved their souls and preyed on them. Thus, a soul ward wasn’t a bad idea... as long as it didn’t feed instantly into reincarnation and damn the whole race by breaking the supply of new souls.

Ways to keep the souls of the dead around until the Warp was cleansed were present among the Elvar, but never to the extent they were being used now. There were exceptions for the Vatted, but their Reclaimed Souls didn’t have the power to break the cycle of life, frail as they were.

The idea of Ghost Knights, intelligent Weapons, Constructs, and similar things that had been used here and there among some of the more radical Starhomes were centralized and put into place, a clear doctrine behind them explaining the whys and wherefores of it... and noting that when the Warp Gods were finally defeated, it would be their time to pass beyond the mortal plane to their true fate.

The ancestors of the Elvar would indeed be fighting alongside them, ever more clearly than before...

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-Just got a Summons for appearing before the High Councilors on Tellus!- Harley Rantha, interim Grandmother of Assassins, Galactic-level Embezzler of Imperial Funding, Born Liar, Mistress of the Mountain, The Big Spender, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary Extraordinaire, /announced in the Markspace Strategos.

A lot of eyes turned her way. Welp, we’d gotten way more than the expected decade out of the place, and had long emptied the secret accounts, the not-so-secret accounts, the very secret accounts, and the How The Shit Did You Find This accounts.

Oh, and whatever the current budget was got misdirected rather drastically and vanished off into the void, too. Oh, but those accountants were going to have a fun time finding all that cash... especially since none of it had actually returned to Imperial Space, being used to buy a Whole Lotta Stuff™ used to build up our unregistered worlds.

I turned my eyes from where a Mantle-Cracker was drilling down into the crust of a Warp Forgeworld, around their center of production. The point defenses were having fun times shooting down all the missiles the Limitless Forgers, the fallen Mekkers, were desperately shooting out at the locations... all of which were too late regardless, as the Crackers were a mile deep and moving quickly.

When they lit off, they’d literally blow a good chunk of the crust a mile into the air. Those nation-sized primary production facilities with their great shields, disdaining any and all attackers? Well, they didn’t have shields down below, and durasteel was heavier than stone. They’d get a free ride into the sky, and then they’d fall bubbling into the lava, there to explode in grandiose fashion, one after another.

Once they were done, we’d tractor out the good stuff, and begin reprocessing it. Solar Furnaces at TL 20 were really efficient at the job; Fuzzy had the first one in his Expeditionary Fleet, and I had the second.

Eating an ecumenopolis flush with Warp energies for fun and profit, that was me.

-This is an Emperor’s Eyes Event.- There was no doubting this would directly come to the attention of the Emperor. He was probably the only living Imperial authority who knew how and why the Void Forsaken were being collected; the rest just operated on the information the system He had set up provided.

There were literally countless ways what we were doing could actually come dangerously to the attention of the Empire. He had probably already noticed many things happening: the departure of the Goblins for another galaxy; the uptick in xenovore attacks; the destruction of the Federation of the Way, ostensibly by cellulocusts, of all things; the Ruk had been sighted by other races outside their ‘safe zone’ (and we’d found out the Empire had found out about them millennia ago, and were very happy to keep them there); different patterns of attacks from the Elvar; the startling success of Imperial forces in campaigns; the increased activity of Mythos Races; and even the rising, consolidating power of the Corunsun Foundation.

Still, it was amazing what just paying your taxes on time could gain for you in the way of forbearance, and positive news from the Twilight Orders sniffing around and finding the regular reports were actually pretty damn honest, too.

Our big thing had been the Empire getting a fleet around the Rift, and starting the link-up of the severed Khagan Sector. There was little doubt that the high-ups of the Empire knew something was going on there, given the divinations and, ah, alternate sources of information they could tap into, as Honest Bureaucrat Mata was quick to relay on to us, but they were expecting something ominous... just not in the way they were thinking.

We couldn’t crash the system for the Voids, as it would just be replaced, even if they had to replace every central computer system and every Beacon in the Empire. It might take a while, but they would do it... and we honestly didn’t want to go back in there and suborn them again, since they’d be looking for that.

That’s why the system still worked perfectly well; it was just we were receiving the information independently of who it was intended for... oh, and we had also replaced all those people it was intended for.

Of course, Harley had been planning for all of this for quite some time, with the enthusiasm of a born anarchist with a wonderful sense of humor about the whole process. She had quite the following in the less-than-respectful-of-the-Empire branch of the kids, and was big into the Punish-The-Assholes-Exploiting-The-Rules movement. Given how much money she was using to help that process along, she had kept her Grandmother of Assassins tag with approval from all of the more radical kids.

-Time to erase all the trails!- she /exclaimed cheerfully, setting into motion a whole bunch of fun activity that was going to create some major migraines on the part of some very powerful people.

The first thing was to evacuate the planet. After all, it was a bunch of people who liked to farm and raise food. Their productivity had skyrocketed in recent years with additions of some new tech, and they’d gotten more access to creature comforts in trade as a result. No reason to lose all of them, right?

There was a mass move impelled by ‘there’s an invasion coming and you need to go before the planet is torched!’-type alarms. The whole population was loaded onto trains, shipped off through Gates in remarkably little time, along with a large amount of the infrastructure needed, and most of the food animals, too.

The Mountain had long been gutted of most of its usable stuff, leaving it pretty much a big empty shell of nihilaen so dimensionally locked a psion would feel stifled just walking in. The mana released by Grandmom had long dissipated, of course...

The space station we’d fixed up as a supply relay was naturally gutted and rigged to blow, the kids taking great delight in how entertaining they could make it, while not wasting too much money.

As for the relay ships that accepted the babies, they had long since vanished, and since they didn’t officially exist, they weren’t missed.

It would have been nice to actually steal that huge nihilaen dome, but Harley settled for painting graffiti all over it, some of which was actually QL 30 artwork... and definitely letting the Empire know that Someone Knew about all of this, and was thumbing their nose at them.

--------

When the managing Grandfather didn’t show up on Tellus at the appointed time, Harley politely made tons of excuses in barely-plausible veins, was granted an extension, did it again, and again, and again...

Yeah, a Bluff check in the +80 range was a real chore to see past, even for direly suspicious bastards who thought they were her superior.

After about two years of that continued nonsense, and quiet investigations revealing some very troubling things going on, the other branches of the Assassins got together and sent their private Fleet to investigate, along with their own private batch of Legionnaires who did wetwork stuff, the Shadow Panthers.

They got to witness the thoughtfully reset automated defenses go off at them, which they found really annoying, and a couple of the lighter ships, eminently fatal. Going in with guns blazing, they got to watch the relay station blow apart in wonderfully orchestrated fashion; multi-colored flames, multiple tumbling bits and trails of debris, crashing steel, and the like. Took a good half hour and entranced the entire fleet, it did.

The spotters in the distance had it set to grandiose orchestral music, of course, coming in over the coms, so they could all tune in.

No survivors to interrogate, naturally.

The fleet swept onto the planet, and found it mostly emptied of life. They glared at the wildly-painted nihilaen dome of the Mountain, and the empty training grounds of the Crater... where all the technology had been long rooted out and taken away.

They went down and found the secret base of the most feared branch of the Imperial Assassins standing wide open... because the doors were missing. They walked inside, and kind of gaped at the sight of a big hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, and pretty much nothing left except for a nice mock office sitting off to one side on a slab of plascrete, with a single computer hooked up to a transmitter, and happy faces painted all over the walls and doors out of range of the camera.

When the info dump came streaming into the Booles of over a thousand worlds at once, identifying the homeworld of the Mountain, the sight of it gaily painted, and the Shadow Panthers standing around in full armor and dreadful weapons in hand with nothing to do, well, that spread like mad among the reigning powers, too.

Who had the nerve to wipe out an entire branch of Assassins?

Who had that kind of garish, juvenile style? With, um, pretty good technique...

Where had the population of the planet gone? The cattle, even?

Why wasn’t the planet razed?

Where... had all the Assassins gone?

Where... had all the money and assets gone?!

The Vizier, the ultimate head of all the Assassin organizations, a member of the High Council on Tellus, died in a raging fit of apoplexy after he saw the paintings all over the impossibly valuable shell of the mountain. What he read in them nobody else really knew, but Harley did, and just licked her finger and made a tally mark in the air.

You could use Bluff to kill? That got the kids in a tizzy, and even I had to smile, wondering what Grandmastery she had come up with to do that. It was naturally only available to Born Liars, and her Curseline, who were snickering to themselves about “Truth Hurts, Lies Hurt More, and Really Big Lies...”

The peanut gallery whistled and applauded such a novel Grandmastery. She delineated the steps for her kids, patted her Sixteen Expert self on the back, kicked up her feet in her new spacious office on Tellus in the Information Control department, where a completely fabricated but almost improvably valid resume had gotten her transferred in for her impeccable ability to subtly disinform and manipulate others. That she was totally manipulating the personnel department and all their investigators into her totally bogus background naturally totally escaped those responsible, and her credentials just sparkled, with just the right kind of shadiness to bring a tear to the eye.

She was only four ranks from the top of the department. She and Mata waved at one another from opposite sides of the aisle (and planet), and her suborning of the media channels of the Empire, long started by some opportunistic members of her Curseline on many worlds, was underway.

Everyone laughed at how she’d basically inserted herself Way Up in the hierarchy purely on her ability to pull off a grand lie, while Mata had worked herself in from the ground up. But, given the number of retirements, suicides, transfers, demotions, on-the-job fatalities, accidents, scandals, authority clashes, rivalries, influence peddling, and the like was soon going on, nobody gainsaid her.

A Dishonest Bureaucrat on Tellus was soon shooting and playing on several worlds, but on a different day than Honest Bureaucrat, and they made her a guy. One of the Marked Sources, named Slick Joe Targis, a Natural Actor and born con man with the most honest face evah, got to star in it.

Its numbers soon rivaled Honest Bureaucrat, and the merciless cutthroat politics and how Slick Joe’s character swam through them with a charming smile despite his most ruthless actions, could really unsettle much of the audience.

They just had to keep coming back the next week, however...