The Power Of Ten: Sama Rantha

In addition, its masters would be the paranoid types who didn"t trust tech or people, so they"d be regularly checking in. Technically, all I"d need to do is wait for another ship to come in... unless they were somehow repopulating with teleporting, but that would be wasting the time of some very high level psions.

Also, it would require some outrageously sophisticated tech to support, which would show up in my circuit outside.

I wasn"t worried about being seen; my hair cloaked me in transparency, and no tech was able to register me without some significant enhancements I highly doubted would be here.

I wasn"t even worried about Void Brothers. I was a Null. I didn"t leave tracks in the manafield, and I didn"t radiate psi or anything. I held the background absolute. The only weird thing about me was that within four inches of my skin, nothing was moving at all. If I was standing in front of one and his Helices. .h.i.t my Null, yeah, that immovability would shock the heck out of him.

But that would mean these cut-rate knockoffs of a Void Brother were very close to me. That wasn"t going to end well for them... scratch that, it was going to end very well for them, and not for their bosses, who would not appreciate my generosity.

I didn"t want that to happen until it was time, however.

I found their hidden primary hangar, left Grim there overlooking it to warn me of it as I glided circuits around the station.

Yeah, I could appreciate how surreal it was, hanging onto a frozen hunk of metal sitting out in the Void, continually recirculating my own air, ignoring the oxygen-freezing temperature, the hard rads from the dying sun, and the lack of gravity. My Vajra and heavyfoot was enough to keep me anch.o.r.ed to the hull without a problem, and so I busied myself gliding over and around it, just... looking, wasting time.

Depleting the natural atmosphere that would acc.u.mulate around the station was a security function, and could be read as ships coming across it and stripping the valuable oxygen off a drifting hulk... or doing so to better preserve it for later, your pick.

Bering and Dora would be here soon enough, and I could be patient. No need to Riftcut and probably set off an incursion alarm or three.

When I plopped down the anti-matter bomb to take out this station, I needed to put in exactly the right spot, after all.

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It was an in-system shuttle, and vectoring in from the direction of the second planet. It was dropping off supplies and picking up deliveries. I hadn"t seen another ship stop in from outsystem, and there was probably only the one...

A half-dozen infant boys were going with it.

I could only look down pa.s.sively through my Trembling Domain, making them out below me. Six families, six worlds that needed them denied their Voids.

The care and reverence the pilots had for them made me guess they were also Voids, and these kids were probably the equivalent of younger brothers to them. Well, they were going to get even more respectful soon enough.

n.o.body could have avoided their senses inside the shuttle, even the stealthiest of us, but outside the shuttle? I held on with my Vajra as they accelerated rapidly, synching into the inertial offset. A demon or something could do something similar, since they were made of ectoplasm and had funky physics interacting with matter, but any demon would glare to even these chopped-off Voids.

I was patient. The Empire had been getting Voids killed for millennia, I didn"t need to take action right now.

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I let go of the shuttle as it hit the atmosphere.

I wasn"t dumb enough to try a direct infiltration of the shuttle. The scanning it would undergo when it arrived would be unreal. Regardless of how good its tech was, the entire perimeter could not possibly be as well-guarded as the primary entry point.

I was infiltrating via planetfall. Normally this would result in a meteor streaking across the sky... and, I had little doubt, getting shot out of existence by some precise fast neutrons, just to be on the safe side.

To flame, you have to have friction. Vajras are next to frictionless. How do you have friction when you are rubbing on a soul?

I was literally squirting through the air, the air in front of me compressing, moving past me, and expanding back to normal as I shot through at miles per second.

I was surveying the world, and the Goldilocks crew was recording and breaking down everything, directing my attention here and there for more details.

The shuttle was moving towards a crater that was obviously the center of habitation here. There were plenty of settlements below, but the images getting examined confirmed they were all medieval technology, basically there to provide food and supplies for the crater area, and not much else. They"d probably been frozen at that level of tech development for at least seven thousand years...

It did make it easier to infiltrate from afar. Basically peasant level individuals would never see me pa.s.sing by, and the hidden technology meant to monitor them wasn"t going to see me, either.

There was obfuscation over the crater, some subtle holo-tech disguising the layout of the place, based on what was registering in the upper spectra. Straight visuals, it was almost seamless, looking like another bucolic land of primitive farms and herdsmen going about their business.

What was beneath it was going to be very, very different, indeed.

The planet was encircled by countless amounts of debris in orbit, not really planetary rings. It made it very easy to put observation points and satellites up there that would be very difficult to make out. The sensation of being watched by thousands of eyes from above was very real, and there"s no way we could possibly nail all such eyes from s.p.a.ce.

That said, they probably weren"t expecting an unarmored individual to make planetfall...

Saying nothing, air differentials that could shear steel sliding past my Vajra and waving me h.e.l.logoodbye at Mach 20, I headed for the surface of the planet.

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Featherweighting and dispersing my ma.s.s over the surrounding airflow in bubbles of motion slowed me down as I wished, or I could just grab onto the air and slow myself down with my hair. Regardless, my hair made for a perfect wing layer, and so maneuvering myself down was effortless. I glided for many miles as my speed dropped, coming down about two hundred miles from the far side of the crater from where the shuttle had entered.

The locals were the same kind of low tech, complete with horses and wagons, their society frozen in status, and any kind of movers and shakers dissatisfied with their lots in life expunged steadily through the centuries. Without a doubt these people would be about as ambitious as rocks, content to go through the exact same life as their parents and grandparents did, until they died, having exactly enough kids to keep the population stable and not stress the resources of the planet.

They would have no other purpose but sending food off to the crater.

Heh, a crater. The Mountain was located in a crater. I had to roll my eyes.

I set foot down on the planet, spread out my Domain as I reached down to touch the gra.s.s around me.

Huh. I didn"t have to exert myself to identify a lot of the things here.

They had exported an Earth-based ecology to this world. I sniffed the air, measuring the ga.s.ses that were here. Yeah, this was pretty close to an ideal, Tellus-type mix, used throughout the Empire, with some minor alterations for local elements, radiation, and being outside and not processed.

This was probably a dead world, given the sun, and they"d taken the time and effort to terraform it to human standards, seeding the world with native species of everything from Earth, spread them across the planet, and then settled it.

Some alien DNA might get into the system from ancient remains, but basically this was a place frozen in time, a sample of ancient Earth, before it was called Tellus, taken out into the stars and preserved here.

An ecology required predators and prey, so there were probably wolves and great cats or something around, because I could see birds flitting about, there was a mouse frozen in his tunnel thirty feet away from me, and I"d seen herds of deer on the way in. All those would quickly overpopulate everything without an auto-correcting supply of predators to eat them.

Didn"t matter, really. No natural animal of Earth was much of a threat to me, and that went up to and included T-Rexes. A dino would not want to get punched by me, and even less get cut by Chalice...

First order of business, set the Goldilocks crew to work.

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Finding one of their monitoring hubs wasn"t all that difficult. It was disguised as a big rock sitting in the middle of nowhere, nothing special about it whatsoever, but it was the wrong temperature, the wrong material, and there was radiation coming in and out of it that indicated it was no chunk of stone.

It was probably being observed from orbit, but there was nothing local to it that I couldn"t sidestep.

Once my Domain hit it, it was obviously not a rock, the veneer obviously Shaped into place by psionic power, and the innards basically a solid block of circuits and crystalline components set up in a fairly standard computing array, receiving broadcasts from local observational points and transmitting them on.

There wasn"t a human home within a few miles of it, so there was no risk of discovery. I had no idea that expansion lines and separation between farms and wild were strictly enforced, so wandering about in the wild and discovering new things would be frowned upon.

It was just a rough rock, half-buried in the ground, too steep to climb, nothing special here.

The access port shouldn"t have opened to me, but I fused the pressure sensor alarm to indicate it was still closed, discharged some Vajra electricity in it to reverse the magnets holding it shut, and the stony plate popped off in my hands readily enough as I clung to the thing fifteen feet off the ground, hair acting like a spider-harness.

The design was NOT AMT standard, which roused all sorts of questions, and there was definitely psionic power quietly involved in the functioning of what was going on. However, I could clearly see no organic components involved, probably because they"d wear out too much and with the sheer amount of pa.s.sive surveillance going on, they wouldn"t want to be coming out here to replace such stuff.

Undead organics could have lasted, but at least they hadn"t fallen that low.

At least they hadn"t changed the access ports. I swallowed that port in my Vajra as I put in the drive, quietly neutralizing any kind of alarm or acknowledgement signals, and slowly connecting the feeds one by one, watching what happened, and completely contrary to how such equipment was supposed to work, started them up, confusing the electronics that were trying to register them being there and execute communication protocols.

It was a Null Soulbound Cyberpathing device, a hideously dangerous piece of Angeltech to own. The Mekkers would shoot you instantly just for owning such a thing, and all the Ranthas who did infiltrations were crowing about them. The Goldilocks crews were patting one another on the back after devising them, and were on tenterhooks as the Soul Essence I"d injected into it formed a viable control link, and tapped into my psionic Reserves.

I had a lot of psionic Reserves, and if this thing wasn"t that powerful, it didn"t need to be. A good cyberpath could manipulate electronics from across the planet, this one had a range of thirty feet... but that was perfectly fine here. Electrokinesis to manipulate the dataflow and get into the system was all that was required...