“So what’s the call?” I asked Anatolia, here in person for lunch, which was totally unnecessary, and meant things were important enough she felt she had to do so.

“We want to send you into the Abyss to map it,” she informed me directly, taking a sip of the wine.

I had to quirk an eyebrow. “You’re going to take that away from the Explorers?”

The Map of the Galaxy wasn’t complete, of course, and wasn’t going to be for some time when you’ve got billions of stars and only some tens of thousands of ships doing the in-depth assessments... plus lots of creatures who didn’t want you poking around their systems.

Still, we’d located most of the Phlo Highways that were usable, and our Phlo maps were quite thorough and interlinked for pretty much all of humanspace. There was a lot of other stuff out beyond humanspace where some very nasty stuff dwelled, and the Explorers all loved finding out about them and adding them to the Lexicon.

There were at least five other alien empires in the Milky Way that the majority of humanity didn’t have a clue existed. Sure, they weren’t as big as the Tellurian Empire, but that didn’t make them not threats... and they were all of the cold, logical, orange/blue logic types that characterized Mythos races so well.

On the other hand, those empires either didn’t know about or were staying far away from humanity for the most part, too. Poking the lion already clawing at the hyenas was a good way to get bit.

But the Abyss was the big thing. There were devoted friends of the Ruk updating the records for the packed stars around the core, and going even more in-depth, but the Abyss was the big one.

That blot of blackness a thousand light years across where the Elvar core worlds and the heart of their civilization had once been was not exactly a mystery, as acquiring information from tentative Elvar raiders and overly curious drow wasn’t actually all that hard at this point.

Thus, we had a good idea of the main worlds in there and what they were called now, and had been called in the past.

To a complete lack of anyone’s surprise, the place was war, Hell, despair, and chaos. Although Amourae had been the one to actually generate the Warp Event that created the place, the other Warp Gods had happily piled in and claimed territories of their own, remaking worlds and inhabitants in their own images, and using them to influence events in mortal space.

The Veil was naturally pretty thin in there, and the blackness that surrounded it was actually the reaction of the mortal world to the incursion, surrounding it in a layer of even tougher dimensional folds to contain the Warp that was omnipresent within. Punching through that skin required no less power than Helljumping, which was why movement out of the place was always visible if you were looking for it.

Furthermore, the resistance of the Veil was only punchable in certain areas, which had all been identified over the past thousands of years as Warp Fleets went in and out. So, entering the Abyss was always a crapshoot, as you didn’t know what might be waiting for you on the other side. Your entry would be noticed, and attract something over to investigate.

Or maybe not. It wasn’t like they were disciplined enough to have regular patrols everywhere. Some Warlords would patrol their areas vigorously, and some other areas just didn’t give a damn.

They had the Warp Gods there. What did they have to worry about invasions from? It would be like feeding souls into their mouths!

In addition to the Elvar homeworlds, worlds stolen by mass Warp Events had been disgorged into the Abyss, delivering unto them whole planetary populations of people and production facilities, up to and including at least two entire Forge Worlds, who were probably responsible for the maintenance of the Warp Fleets and the creation of what new vessels they actually produced.

We were of the opinion that most of the Warp Fleet came from losses while Helldiving, especially any military-grade vessels, based on what we’d harvested from the Sargasso... but that was only a guess. There were certainly enough Warped Mechanists to have been producing a lot of stuff over the millennia, and certainly they’d indulged in boundless amounts of piracy and trading with dark powers for darker stuff.

It helped when you were powered by demons and didn’t have to worry about mortal concerns anymore, too.

“Records from the Elvar and the Ruk indicate at least ten thousand systems in the Abyss, with perhaps that amount again which were basically stars with little around them. Space is pretty mutable there, but the biggest thing about the Warp is intent. If we can find out what is there, we get a lock, and can start expanding the Map, even if the geometry goes to fuck and all.”

“And the senior kids could come in and work off that if they had to.” I drummed my fingers on the table, careful not to chip it. “I’ll do it, that’s not an issue. The influence of the Warp there is incredible. There’ll need to be massive protective enhancements to prevent degradation. The Dojo is too big, although I’d love to take it. I’ll have to take a Gunboat.”

“Can the sensor suite be enhanced?” she asked, having an excellent idea of the capabilities of high-end MF Gunboats.

“Yes,” I nodded slowly. “The real exploratory sensor suites get assigned to the Alias ships at that size. If I go in without Gunners, I can fill the extra space with more sensory Gear. Protective stuff is going to have to go all over the hull, of course. If we want stealth capability against the Warp, we’re talking Angeltech at 20 with Psitech at 17. That means I’m going to have to be working directly with Hulkamania to make the thing. We don’t have any Psions at that Level, right?”

She glanced away, shook her head. “No. We’ve got some bonded ones hitting Sixteen, and a slew of them, including Coronals and Umbrans, given fresh life when they hit Fifteen and got the Advanced boost.

“None in the support divisions, of course. But we’ve got Crafters who can work in Psitech there, and Ronnie can handle the work personally, if she has to.

“As can I.” I did a knuckle-popping flexing of interwoven fingers, and she had to smile. Technically, she could help, too, but she had more important things demanding her time.

Me, I was just continuing with my A-game, opening up new avenues for the kids to take advantage of.

I was already /popping up new designs and running them past Ronnie, and the other kids who worked full time on ship design. The facilities on Hulkamania were undoubtedly our highest quality production facility, especially for custom jobs, and the World was happy to get started on a ridiculously expensive super-boat for the inevitable thrust into the Abyss.

It was time to make me a new Toy!

-------------

While I’d been using a lot of high-TL ships, including Mom’s Flitter and even the Dojo, this was the first ship that was going to be a single psionic magic item, and designed that way right from the start.

The skeleton of the ship was dura-Obdurium, a treasured material so strong and inert it defined the space it existed in. It was Ruk work, and they had sinister little gleams in their eyes as they cast it in a poly-dimensional mold all at once, one great framework for the whole Gunboat, and when the dimensions reset to normal, it reformed perfectly into the shape of the ship. Their Engineers were so happy to show off their restored psi-enhanced TL20 construction techniques they didn’t even charge me.

Given that all the information I discovered would be dumped to them, and that this ship was going to be showing them some truly masterful applications of psi-tech, that wasn’t even that unusual.

The internal fluid framework working around that basis was a winding mixture of Elvar, Gardener, and Human tech, combining modularity with speed, power, and lightness, and setting new standards for interchangeability which could replicate across multiple tech lines. Even the Ruk would be benefiting with this, and the Kappa declared it a wonderful application of their principles of elemental synergies.

The guns. Oh, them guns. They were as modular as the rest, and designed to butcher things of the Warp. The Life, Light, Axiomatic, Holy, Vivic, and Fire tech that went into those things. The gunsmiths designing them all got together in hee-hee-hee sessions late at night, drank too much nasty stuff, and did it all again in the morning.

Even I got headaches from some of that stuff. Damn, those were some good times discussing Weird Science, Weirder Science, and You’re-Pulling-Mah-Dayamn-Leg Science.

The hull plating. Oh, my, that Hull Plating. That ablative-inert-superconductive-dimensionally absolute holy-shitness of a Hull. Then you psionically reinforced the thing, then you made it +5 Defiant to the Warp, added on Protection from Law and Chaos at V, Astral Bars, and molecular-level Shield circuits inside the hull, outside the hull, around the ship, and tied in to form a new and unique set of shield-based point defenses that had our experts in Shielding technology gibbering in glee throughout half the galaxy.

The pieces of it were cast individually (by the molecule), Hardened and Tempered individually, enchanted individually, and then linked up and fused into the outside of the ship, using up enough E-elements to send the cost of this ship up over that of a cruiser, and we hadn’t even put in all the upgraded nominal tech yet.

Oh, the Compressed Magazines of Kill You Now stuff. Oh, that +5 White Hole Dark Matter Ignition Core, promptly dubbed the WHatta DaMn Core, and all the damn juice it could put out.

Every speed junkie and engine maven below me was shuddering as we put the engines in, and Mario Briggs had tears in his eyes as he patted each of them over and over, waiting for them to do things to matter that might not have been done before, all in pursuit of kiloparsecs per hour of speed.

The crew compartment was basically shrunk down to the back end of the cockpit for this mission, and the rest got filled in with stuff. Oh, the enhanced stealth suite. Oh, a double array of sensor dishes, and some sensor tech so finely modulated I think some of the Kappa and Elves held a ceremony for them. The nasty surprises concealed in the forward mandibles. The nastier Niven-tech surprises to the rear powered by the ship’s engines. The Capapsitors. The Gating Tech. The self-repair assemblers and printers, juiced to the nines.

There was even a fold-out, expandable box that could drop out of the underside of the ship and form a Compression Hold if I needed to store stuff for some reason.

This was definitely the most expensive ship per pound in the entire galaxy by the time I got done. The only thing it was not, was sapient.

Shipminds attracted the Warp like nothing else. We weren’t sure of why, but every ship we’d Bound a ghost to, or built up like a psicrystal, had attracted a very targeted Warp Event, and we’d had to destroy both the ship and its spirit to prevent the Warp from taking both. It didn’t matter the type or power of the tech. We even theorized that the Celestial Tribute had attracted disaster upon itself because of its AI, as its records detailed no other surviving ships with AI tech, even psi-enhanced, and even Founder was basically one of a kind for massive AI’s.

Burning that Warptech en vivus seemed to have rendered the Tribute immune to further tampering, so that was a bonus. But we had a surfeit of Greater Demons to sacrifice to Mom’s Finder for this purpose, although the potential was always there...