The Power Of Ten: Sama Rantha 341 Far Future, Ch. 51 – Second Generation, Part Three

The megcity sprawled out before them, with a tiny dot for my holdings, and literally thousands of other factions at work throughout the city, many of them in shades from the bottom third of the Alignment grid.

Naturally it also swiveled in 3d and displayed territories of the Undergangs and major players to the extent I knew.

I zoomed in, and in, and in again, and finally my personal holdings were a decent part of the display.

I briefly went through my blok holdings, factories and other a.s.sets, revenue streams, layouts, demands on time, expansion constraints, and what links I had, to who and what. They all had no problem filing it all away, as they all had a 22 Int, human suprgenius, and a Visual File to match.

"Biggest bottleneck?" I asked rhetorically as the view shrank off to the side.

"MARKED!" they all answered in knowing unison.

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"Three minutes a person." I looked out over all of them. "Your Grandmother gamed the system here. Ah, yes, she did!" My daughters all whooped in appreciation. "She didn't want to just drop a Karmic Seven out of nowhere, even a Null, so she made sure that we all came in no higher than a Three... BUT, we have a +7 AB, both ranged and melee. That also means that our elective Skill Point limit is..."

"SEVEN!" they all whooped.

"And I'm hoping I just heard you hit Scout Levels and grab seven Ranks in Tattoo Artist so you can start applying Marks that can key to my own... and once you hit Eight, can be rea.s.signed to yours."

Their eyes all got that flicker of momentary attention elsewhere, and then they all flinched the same way.

"Yes, that's right, that is the last Level you will ever take. From now on, everything has to be bought piecemeal. Every point of Health and Soak, every PP, every Slot of Null Valences, every Stat advance, every increase in special ability. Let me tell you, only being able to grab one point of energy resistance a day is VERY annoying!" They all did the math and cringed. Better than half a year to complete our immunities alone... wait, that was forty days between early Rantha levels, minimum? Oh, yes...

"And money." I held up a Belt in my hand. "Guess how many Gravity Belts I have?"

"Ewww!" they all winced. They looked around, did the math on just how much money they were going to need to all get equipped...

"I've got reams of price lists in your Bands, and you can naturally go bouncing around and get some lists drawn up in the Boole and the Quanta, the local internets. I can tell you right now that while my Charisma mind-track is basically running my Marks.p.a.ce, my Wisdom mind-track is known as a terrifyingly skilled gambler online, and when not gaming, is endlessly trawling for useful stuff and working with my Goldilocks crew to take advantage of it.

"My Intellect tracks, now, are all over the place. I've got multiple lines of research going on, resource management and coordination, security precautions and faction monitoring, programming, and coding work being spun out constantly..." I sighed. "I am inhumanly, impossibly busy all the time, and it is not enough! The scale of the problem is too big.

"I need all of you to get to where I am now, and I need to advance the stage, drive the tech tree up, compound our wealth, expand our authority, and just plain f.u.c.king grow like there's no tomorrow!

"The main bottleneck is people! We need to recruit people, and the only way to do that reliably, and get people we can both trust and who can improve, is to Mark them, get them to advance their Marks and their Stats, and raise their Level and the floor with it."

It was my turn for my eyes to glow as I looked at them, and they all grinned despite themselves.

Oh, yeah, they were going to have a lot more sisters. Which meant...

Hands went up.

The image of Habberblok rose behind me. The information about it laid out, and they read it as fast as it scrolled down.

"All of these souls are tainted with Evil by the combination of the Warp and negative energy. The best of them are Neutral, although they can be brought into the light by bonding to a living person and eroding away the negative influences on them. Of course, a considerable number of them were total a.s.sholes to begin with, but the Curse eats them up just the same...

"So, if you want to have daughters, who will all be Atlantean Ranthas, there is a resource of souls here. If we manage to exhaust them... well, there's billions of people. Finding appropriate souls is really not going to be hard."

They all grimaced and smiled at that. It was true, especially in a grimdark world...

"I'm not going to go into galactic history and how small we are right now. However, here is my current guess as to major events, which are naturally obfuscated by the official history.

"The Eternal Emperor sits on his throne on Tellus, empowering the Celestial Beacon which provides direction and temporal conformity to the capital of the Empire throughout the galaxy.

"Thousands of years ago, he ran afoul of the Warp G.o.ds. Tales are murky, but yes, there was an insurrection in his own genetically-engineered legions of super warriors. He vat-grew the original Primogenitors of his Legions, and they all went stark f.u.c.king nuts, tore the galaxy apart, and tried to off him.

"Somehow, he had the pure raw power to keep psionics from being utterly corrupted by the Warp. Psionic power kept the Empire alive, and brought down many of the corrupted Legions, but not before Warp Sorcery wielded by the Primogenitors did the job the Warp G.o.ds wanted.

"He hasn't moved from the Eternal Throne for millennia. He may not even be living. It takes a million psions or more to power that thing and keep it active, and his will to hold it steady. The Terrestrial Beacon here requires about ten or twenty thousand constantly, I believe.

"I believe the Eternal Emperor was a Human Exemplar who reached post-Twenty as a Psion and Psychic Warrior.

"His Primogenitors were supposedly made from his own flesh, and if so, would be Exemplar Lites from birth... combined with the dehumanizing of not being attached to the human akasha by being vat-grown because the idiot didn't want to involve women, they could very well be considered a separate species and so were alienated from humanity.

"His elite Legions were derived from the Primogenitors, giving them a clear bloodline affiliation with them. However, this is a treatment thing... Imperial Marines are made, not born, and so do think of themselves as human."

I let that hover in the air for a moment, while they digested that.

"The Eternal Emperor has held the Empire of Humanity together for millennia. The Cult of Humanity wors.h.i.+ps him as a G.o.d. He may well be a demiG.o.d-level ent.i.ty, although he is definitely not a full G.o.d, or Reality would have pushed him out into the Warp. He is Powered, an Eternal-level psion, his mental powers beyond our comprehension, and while he may have lost a battle to the Warp G.o.ds, he has not conceded the war.

"As an Archpsion, you know he is doing divinations, fate-tracking, luck-spinning, playing those probabilities, and it is likely the touch of his hand reaches across the entire galaxy. There is no doubt he has a plan and is feeling the way forward, trying to reach a point where humanity will experience a ma.s.sive uplift and be able to deal with all the things that are out there, and unseat the Warp G.o.ds."

Everyone nodded slowly. It was a grand and grim plan, fit for a Powered Eternal.

"And now we are here."

Silence, as thoughts began to spread out from that.

"Nulls, who are Beyond Fate and Chaos, and aware of Good and Evil."

Eyes widened very slowly.

"We... are in n.o.body's plans. n.o.body's sight. We are from Outside this very Reality. Everything we are doing... will disrupt plans with an invisible hand.

"Our plans, our goals, are alien to the forces at play here. Vakker-tech alone is going to turn some plans on their ears. How fast the Warp moves to neutralize the threat it represents means we are on a time clock, and it is ticking. We have to disseminate the tech, get it off-world, expand, and grow-grow-grow. Only the fact Nulls are behind it is keeping it below the radar right now.

"Sama Rantha, your grandmother, is our Exemplar. It is very likely her goals clash with those of the Emperor.

"I am likely the equivalent of a Legion Primogenitor. You... are the born, not made, equivalent of His Imperial Majesty's Legionnaires, as Rantha Hags instead of gene-modded humans."

They all looked at one another, and I nodded. "Yes, we are going to need a lot more of you..." at least if 40k was any guide. A thousand Chapters with a thousand Marines each... "And your children will be the equivalent of standard gene-mod humans starting, except for the fact they are Ranthas. Of course, just being a Rantha is pretty d.a.m.n nice, but the Karmic cost is incredible..."

They all groaned in sympathy. So many Levels, time, ugh...

"Thankfully, the planet comes with a surfeit of powerful and dangerous beasts outside the walls, that sometimes get in the walls, and powerful factions with powerful servants, and ma.s.sive amounts of Quest Karma for taking them down... and making more enemies to generate more Karma with..."

Feral grins arose as eyes narrowed.

"Once you have your Acid Immunity at Six and can head outside the walls, Karma should be a steady thing. You're also going to Name your Focus, and you better be working on it as an Item Familiar and get that Teleporting ability right away. We need the mobility!

"Okay, let's get out of reals.p.a.ce and start crunching some real data. Plug some hair into the dataport on your Band there, integrate it into your Visual File with three Ranks in Computer Engineering and Programming, and go on the Quanta to Fakemarkchatroom.qua." I showed my hair snaking down my arm into my Band, and they emulated it quickly.

I already had thoughtstreams there, so I didn't have to s.h.i.+ft focus. However, I had to develop the minds and brains of my other six, so no reason not to use them to do this.

Everybody got through the security protocols with their Bands and arrived in the Quanta room within six seconds of one another. They looked around in interest at the virtual s.p.a.ce.

[Unlike the Archmage, I can't make a virtual s.p.a.ce that generates template-modifying Karma. He'd have to have been a High Eternal, by what we know of magic, to do that], I told them, surrounded by floating rows of charts and lights... my resource requirements and amounts broken down in detail.

[You're all going to be helping with Marked, first for myself, and until you can get your own after Eight. But, I need you to not be going as Deep as me, because I need specialists to start taking over multiple operations here, and I need you to be infiltrating existing power structures and spreading power and influence over them from multiple angles and venues.]

Jobs popped up. Lots and lots of jobs.

[So, we're going to do jobs. But... we're gonna do them smart. Because you all have a secondary Talent besides Natural Swordswoman, and that Talent you directly inherited from your mother-soul.]

256 Names popped up. "Out with it, girls. Let's see them Talents, and then we'll see where you can change the world!"