It would be a long time before we could afford the E-elements just to make a pure racer to break the speed record, but I was definitely going to give this Mom’s Finder the full throttle.

It didn’t so much roar as thrum ominously. The materials were too strong and the Angeltech too complete to waste that much energy, but I could just feel the vibes rolling through the Gunboat... and of course I knew all the math behind it, so I knew just how many joules were aching to get free, burn matter Dark and normal, and get moving.

I threaded her forward and whooped despite myself as forty g's after the best inertial compensator currently active in the galaxy slammed me back in my chair. My speed was climbing inside tactical range at what any enemy would find a VERY alarming pace, not much slower than a decent missile, slicing through the turbid resistance of magic space physics and zipping towards the multiple miles/seconds paces that characterized the fastest tactical ships... and blowing right past them as the Finder aimed to get the heck out of Hulkamania’s mass shadow.

A normal human not using psi-buffering would have been pancaked by the steady acceleration before I threaded my way to a balancing point between the mass shadows of Hulkamania and his sun, kicked in the Harmonic Drive, and everything aligned most wonderfully, kicking up over .99c instantly.

I wasn’t catching the photons, but they only had a few meters/second on me!

Hulkamania naturally had all the information on the overlapping mass shadows, magnetics, and gravity profiles for his system, and a proper acceleration point was only an AU out above him.

I deployed the sensor grids to validate everything, threading a course to the convergence point where I could kick in the Tachyon Drive. Temporal offsets didn’t completely ward against time dilation, but I did have enhanced reflexes, so the eight minutes flashed by in more like eighteen seconds, I hit the Drive Point, and flooded the area with Tachyons.

I’m sure the sun would have protested what I was doing to its magnetosphere as my verra high fraction of light speed inverted and became multipliers, and I tore out of the system at parsecs/hour, blowing out of the heliosphere in seconds, converging on a Phlo as twenty thousand light years of travel drew up in front of me. I could fill in some Phlo routes while I was at it, no reason to waste time and this sensor array, right?

Star systems were zipping by like crossroads as I dipped into and out of Phlos, Gravity Rifling bursting my speed up to an even crazier rate of travel.

Yeah, I could have Gated to a much closer system and simply zipped in, but maiden cruise and all. Despite the QL’s all being 50+ for this ship, including literally the most awesomely comfortable chair I had ever sat in, we still had to make sure everything was functioning all together as a seamless whole.

All my Toys were giggling as they monitored and tested out their own systems, feeding data back and forth and through my Markspace. Like anything else, more data helped those building more stuff like this, and while pretty much nobody else actually needed a full-out model Gunboat like this one, elements of it were most certainly going to be replicating out to our fleet across the galaxy... as soon as we could design the production gear to make the stuff.

The Briggs boys were crowing at the challenge, and the Ruk accepted. Three Worldminds were drawn into the calculations and spec designs, and twelve others not quite at that level were watching in awe, while the Great DM was advising and thoroughly enjoying this multi-Elemental tech tree harmonization stuff in what could only be described as intellectual bliss.

The slowest points of travel were the rotations around a system to get to a new Phlo, but the Whatta Damn Core could Gravity Braid in open space, which really helped that part of the journey as it amplified the slinging effect around a system’s heliosphere. The new sensor array was awesome for charting all the Kuiper objects that might get in the way and drop me down to Tactical to get out of their way. I’d pick up a new Phlo on the far side, and continue on my way.

I slid into the Khagan Superphlo, the massive Phlo-lane jutting out from the center of the galaxy, a hundred times the size of a normal Phlo. It had only materialized once the Rift had closed, and we’d had to chart it from beginning to end once that happened, as a dozen of the Highways had reformed after the Warp stopped chopping them apart and affecting stellar drifts and stuff.

Orbital paths for a third of the galaxy had been affected by that damn Rift, as a huge portion of the galaxy’s tethering of the stars had been weakened. Assholes. If it continued too long, the stars would have been flung off into their own nebula...

On the Superphlo, hitting a thousand parsecs an hour was a done deal, not even that difficult. Gravity Rifling hit x4 here, and I shot past 2k pph, and was climbing towards three as the engines warmed up and kept demanding I do more. As the goal was 1k pph in normal space, I was perfectly willing to do so, and this galactic Autobahn was just the place to do so.

Stars in the distance grew, flared slightly through the light-interpretive window, and then zipped past me, just skipping stones on my journey. 3000 pph went by smoothly, and I watched 3100 and 3200 slide on past as the Superphlo skipped in and out, light years sliding by in less than a second now.

3.5k, 3.6k, 3.7k... At this speed, positional indicators relied on mass indicators of the stars we passed, as visible light could be extremely variable. Neutrino production, tachyon distortion, and gravimetric weight were far, far more precise.

Plugged into the diagnostics, there weren’t any holo displays in front of me, as they were a waste of space with a neural feed. Only the most initial indicators I needed to look at would come up on holo before I plugged in, and then I was wearing the ship and seeing on a whole lot of levels with multiple thoughtstreams, while my Hag-boosted eyes were beholding profound views of the universe at FTL that even this level of technology couldn’t see.

Naturally, there were a bunch of the kids extremely interested in those views, too. Looking at distant stars was looking back in time, after all, and I was going through three years of history every second. Temporal and material manipulations that took place over great lengths of time were MUCH more apparent at such speeds...

3.9k...

My branching was going to come up in less than a minute, and I watched the engines thrum, Harmonics settle in, and the Rifling get tighter and tighter as tachyons whooped and saturated space with a momentary change in rulings as to how fast stuff could go.

4000 pph slid on by, which was a full thousand outside a Phlo. The speed freaks all cheered in glee, completely in rapturous awe at how fast the stars were going by. I was closing in on four light years a second, slid past it, and I kept it steady at 4112 pph.

Under eight hours to cross the galaxy on a Superphlo.

I didn’t go higher, as limits were something to push when you needed to push them... and I was hardly going to take away the fun for the kids. Designs for speed racers were already percolating among those Speed Demon Talents...

Anyways, this was far from the top speed possible, as the Hyperphlos between galaxies could be massively wider and stronger. We hadn’t located one yet, as the damn things were only like an AU wide. Trying to find one in a cross section of millions of square light years was the definition of a needle in a haystack, and the damn things could easily jump around a light year or more if a supernova lit off on the other side of the universe, if two galaxies moved through one another, and the like.

There’d been some this-is-not-math algorithms recovered from some Mythos wrecks that gave us hope of tracking the things down, and potentially opening up the universe to travel that didn’t involve stupendous amounts of energy wasted on Gating out there. Even Gloom was basically restricted to the shadows of this galaxy, and flying to another area of Shadow for another galaxy would be little different there than doing it here.

Nah, worse. Bouncing between shadows to travel unimaginable distances was clearly something you did with magic, and which we couldn’t do here. When the Warp fell...

I hit my turnoff, making a parsec-wide turn out of the Khagan Superflo and into a route that would take me by several worlds that hadn’t been properly Phlo-plotted, and towards the Abyss.

Ten thousand light years. I could be there inside two hours, but no reason not to do the surveys. Call it four, with this sensor rig.

=========

The most well-known entry point to the Abyss had a lot of dreadfully ominous names. The Maw. The Mouth. The Hole. The Pit of Despair. The Road to Hell.

Due to the I’m Sure Was Completely Coincidental shape of the nebula around it, the Elvar called it the Fangs of the Forlorn, and the Ruk agreed and called it the Fangs as well.

There was fairly constant traffic going into and out of the Fangs, as Chaos fleets bringing supplies and reinforcements were always leaving and returning from Helljumps outside the Abyss, and entering the Fangs to head into the Abyss. Obviously, Helljumping from inside the Abyss to the mortal realm was not possible, which gave all sorts of arguments for the area inside being a sort of Interdicted space where special rules were at work.

The Elvar had long confirmed that it was difficult to reach other worlds within if you didn’t know the correct pathways between them, which could easily change over time and didn’t seem to have any relationship to their actual celestial coordinates. This surprised exactly nobody, as Warp asshattery was completely expected by all present, and exactly why I had such a fast and div-capable ship around me.

The Finder could find those routes, travel them quickly, put down Markers of one sort or another, and allow us to do at least some preliminary plotting.

Also, when we started blowing up the suns here with vivic fire, a lot of the asshattery was going to take a Hard Reality powder, but that was a topic for Eternal level, which we weren’t quite at yet.

More to the point, we had some nasty plans for this place, totally suitable for getting the ire of its natives up.

------

My infiltration method was pretty simple. While their Possessed ships had some supernatural senses, the pstealth tech on the Finder was at our limit, and as long as I didn’t have any hostile intent, the ships couldn’t possibly sense me when it was engaged.

Since I just wanted to enter through the Fangs and not blow them out of space, that was all well and cool. I parked out there in passive pstealth and fed a lot of high-end data to those behind me, watching ships come out within an area the size of a system, and just waiting for something to return.

It only took a few days, as the scale of the Warp Fleets having fun with the Emperor were pretty huge. A chunk of their armada the size of a System Fleet, looking muchly beat up and the worse for wear, was vomited out of the warp about twenty AU’s from me. I sidled over behind one of them, and was literally hanging about a hundred yards off their lower stern as they closed in on the wall of the Abyss.

I maneuvered in closer, being careful to stay close to the gaping hole punched in the starboard side, surrounded by blistered metal and a notable lack of the flies and tentacles that seemed to be swarming closer to the ship. It looked like some necroic flames had gotten in there and eaten away at the Possessing spirit, whose tentacles were kind of limp as the ship shuddered along after the bigger and equally beat-up bastards all around me.

Everyone was very happy to see them all shot the fuck up like that, and regretting there wasn’t a fleet right here to finish them all off, but we could only shrug.

The damaged power core of the ship still managed to put out enough power to open a rift through the Abyssal Wall, while also putting out enough rads that nothing human was going to be alive to fix the damn thing. I was less than ten meters from its hull, enough to share in the gap as I drifted on through with it.

I could feel the strength of the Veil here on my Null... yeah, this was an order of magnitude stronger than normal. Whatever was within was definitely playing dimensional shenanigans, and Reality had revolted against it...