The Power of Ten: Book One: Sama Rantha, and Book Two: The Far Future

I disengaged the second I was through the Abyssal Wall, and drifted away. The extruded tentacles from the hull were already twitching with new life, and the sensors were bleeping me with cautions that there was a lot more Warp energy around than was healthy for somethings' continued sanity, and would I like to burn some of it?

I declined the latter, and smirked as I noted the Marktell was still up, active, and the juniors were all continuing to get their downloads. Planar Barriers didn’t stop a Marktell, so that emphatically meant the Abyssal Wall wasn’t a Ward effect, but a naturally reinforced section of the Veil, stopping the saturation from spreading.

It was sort of like the Warp Gods had stuck their thumbs through the Veil, and it had formed some scar tissue from its skin to contain the blister. I imagined how much power they were expending to keep this extant, and what sort of contamination they’d done to the local Veil to make this viable, and felt all the Void Brothers just sort of wince.

But it was a problem too big for the lads... for the moment. With the Veil so compromised here, their ability to find the heart of the problem and remove it would likewise not work too well... at least initially. They’d also have to keep tight rein on their refining ability in a place so suffused with corrupted Warp Mana, as they’d be literally trailing around a path of purity behind themselves if they didn’t.

Yeah, much better a Null do the job here.

“Sama’s Travelogue of the Abyss, Day One,” I said in solemn acknowledgement for history, and promptly got razzed from all over, as there had been zillions of Elvar, at the very least, who’d been here, so the view wasn’t all that new... well, Rantha eyeballs are on the high end, so yeah, the view was pretty new from that perspective.

Only the most powerful psionic Divs buffed up had visual abilities as wide as Rantha eyes, and they didn’t have the mental architecture to take it without their brains melting and inviting in a whole lot of unholy chaos as they did so.

All the non-Hagbloods shuttered themselves as I swept my eyes over the Wall.

There were Chaos Runes there, living flows of power light years tall, formed of endless Runes within nested Rune cycles, changing slowly and constantly. Without enough perceptive ability, a normal person couldn’t even see them as more than background darkness on the Wall, which was painted in different colors of the rainbow... and in three other spectra, looking progressively more foul as you moved between them.

Grandmother was watching, and was probably the only one who could actually understand what was going on. I could feel a hint of interest from her, and had the feeling these were lesser versions of some of the shit that wafted through the Warp and made it the property of the Warp Gods.

Having a ‘universe’ with a background of shifting colors, too many of them jolting pastels, bleeding gore, rotting space, and kaleidoscopic nebula, would have been maddening in and of itself. The Elvar had installed all sorts of polarizing features into their sensors and windows for when they came here, and sometimes it still wasn’t enough if they weren’t strong-willed.

Meh. I hadn’t been to the TRUE Abyss, the home of all demonkind, the true Soulborn of Chaos and Evil, but succubi were from there, and angels could fight there if they needed to. This... actually meant nothing to a Rantha at Eight or higher.

Sure, it was obscenely powerful... math, math, math... yep, power wastage up the kazoo. But compared to the layered universes and demon realms of the Princes and gods that dwelled in the Abyss (question: Why would even a Chaotic Evil chucklehead want to live THERE?), this was a child’s game.

I’m sure it looked impressive from their standpoint, however, a permanent extrusion of the Warp into the Mortal Realm, pheer me and duhspare!

Uh huh...

A very, very... okay, it was pretty much stripped of all features and new ones way too plain were subbed in... Map of the Abyss began to scroll into the making, grabbing data from the Elvar and beginning to make a rough starting point as I stayed in stealth and followed this fleet of much-abused Warp twats and their Possessed ships towards wherever their repair and construction facilities were.

That would probably be a world under Klaw’s domain, as he was big on tech of all kinds. jRaztl tended to focus on psionics and Warp sorcery, maybe getting involved in Energized Elements and some of the Alchemical aspects of Weird Science. Riggibuhl had the workforce and tenacity to work around the clock, but not the brains... although they were happy to borrow brains via cyberizing. Amourae’s people would be more involved in design work and the ‘artistic attachments’ than anything else, as unless it made a statement, they didn’t want to mess with it... but if they did, they would literally work themselves to death to get it done.

Meh...

Physics here were wonky, and there was no Hell-diving. The ships began to pick up speed, and space began to bend to accommodate their desire to get somewhere. This was an extrusion of an astral space, and willpower was as or more powerful than thrust.

I didn’t have any lack of either, but I didn’t know where I was going, and I was indeed mapping where I was going, using all those shifting Runes as reference points. It didn’t matter that the Runes were changing, because their whole purpose was to keep this intrusion into the mortal realm static. That meant that there was some part of them that had to remain static somehow, meaning anchored to something to provide a foundation.

The Void Brothers all had glittery eyes. They were already bantering theories about, and if they didn’t want to look at the Runes too close, they could certainly ask us to, and start drawing conclusions based on that.

Their instincts would also be on point. The first thing they agreed on was that certain planets would be the anchors, not stars or systems. Without living thought, stars were useless to the Warp Gods. It was likely some transformed worlds had been made into massive stelae or Shrines to them, and were the anchors to what was, in effect, a huge Warp Sorcery pattern.

Take out those worlds or the anchoring effects, and the Warp Gods would be up Shit Creek without a paddle.

How to do that was another problem, but this was the kind of shit people exceeded Ten for. I had some combat-oriented kids who were really chaffing at the bit to get out here and apply some vivic balms to the Land. They didn’t have to worry about stealing Karma and fun from all the pure humans who wanted to make Ten if they went apeshit here.

This was a playground for applying ultimate violence as a solution, and the Warp Gods would only love it if you did. If you got out of control, they could drop a demon army in on you to make things even livelier, and those would literally never run out.

That thought had a lot of the kids absolutely salivating, with ping-ping-ping jackpot sounds everywhere sounding in Markspace at the idea of a Karmic Buffet of such size.

Man, we better not get back into normal Creation, or they’re going to be traipsing into the Lower Planes to get involved in the Primal War just for the Karma Harvests, I thought to myself.

More ominously, Grandmom was watching this all with great, great interest. That didn’t bode well for the Warp Gods at all... which, I was not too jaded to say, made me smile expectantly.

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It took a few days of travel, while I charted a path that bent and twisted through Abyssal space, even as neither I nor any of the Warp ships actually altered course at all. The orientation of the Wall would move around us as directions changed and our course altered, without us actually maneuvering at all.

Freaking astral realms. But it was fine, there were algorithms automatically compensating for it, as I was watching everything as our convoluted course swept us into the heart of the Abyss at many multiples of light speed, without ever looking like we’d come out of Tactical.

Stars were hot points of light and reality against the dreamy/gory/rotten/excitable background of the Abyss, more real than the crap behind them and drawing the eye for it. We closed in on one, the substance of the Warp seemed to thin as we got closer, and when we breached the heliosphere, the background hues of the Abyss were much, much fainter, like faded painting against the defiance of the stars and their endless converting of hydrogen to helium.

The background was still equal to a Warp hot spot, and that was out here in the void, but that was nowhere near as bad as the ocean of unreal muck outside.

The Elvar didn’t know this system, or rather, had never seen it in the current state. The spectra of the star had a tentative match, but without getting closer, the Warp distortions made it look like the star was made out of combusting Styrofoam and butterfly scales.

Readings on the orbiting planets nailed it down some more... although there were three extra ones in the same orbit, spaced equally apart. There was much rolling of eyes as we ventured into a system with four goddamn Forge Worlds in it, all ecumenoplis-covered worlds, and all of them demolished and reset according to proper Runeforms of worship to one Warp God each.

Frak, they even had World-Rings...

The Warp fleet split up, each going to their own world to get the tender unloving care/torture/mutation/rebuilding/punishment or whatever they deserved from their own faction or people.

Klaw and Riggibuhl’s worlds definitely had the numbers. The other two had other strengths.

I had no intention of attacking anything, especially given the awareness of some of the entities messing around here. At least a couple of the moons around Riggibuhl’s world were in fact comatose Sluggors, and its World-Ring seemed more organic than metal. I watched a ship dock as several tentacles bigger than it was reached out and fit it into an appropriate docking bay that opened like a mouth or clitoris or... I just rolled my eyes and forgot about it, noting that the xenosyms were like children here. One of those moons was equal to a Xenosym Worldmother, and we weren’t even in the Warp!...

Even the planet below had tentacles, moving about slowly, although they seemed more ectoplasmic defensive things than limbs, probably points of the world-wide Rune Pattern. The whole place seemed to be festooned with flies and worse, oceans of bile, rivers of pus, landscape like bruises, sores, jaundice, clouds like pestilence floating through sickening smoke and mist...

Big industrial world, I judged, passing by and watching the stuff getting done in orbit. This seemed to be the place where the skeletons of the ships were laid.

Having the feeling I was going to be watching a rare scene of Warp cooperation, which was probably why all the ships were headed here, I flew over to the Klaw world. It was backlit by a sky the hue of dried blood, brazen runeways scribed in molten metal upon the screaming world, and uncounted furnaces and forges were driving foul smoke and heat into the atmosphere.

This was a place for war, and I could see entire sections of the landscape devoted just to fighting one another, and forces getting shipped in from the other worlds. The weak would die, and the newly-blooded strong would be shipped out to fight in battles elsewhere. It was significant to say that there were always new troop transports landing or rising from this world.

Its World-Ring burned with flames, totally overdone in placement of weapons, power generators, defensive screens, more weapons, more burning power cores, and then some more weapons. Somehow they managed to stick in shipyards between all the massive guns and at the attached space stations which could be cut free in case of attack, wherein they put much smaller guns on the ships, installed demonic power cores and engines, and slapped on the hull armor. The unlucky techies had to put in mundane things like living quarters, computers, and sensor suites, lay the cables and install the electronics.

The completed, heavily-built and very spartan, if overbearing and brutally designed, ships were then sent off to jRaztl’s world. That was the world where the Warp Sorcery was scribed onto and about the ship, and a great demon enticed and bound into it to strengthen it and give it purpose and might its lacking technological level would otherwise deny it.

The ecumenopolis below was a chaotic mess, the layout of the World-Runes uneven, and seeming to disappear and reappear with no visible reason. I was aware that the Runes were laid at multiple levels of complexity and height, crossing above and below one another, probably boring right through the planet, meaning the sky that was always alive with Northern Lights had planetary field defenses that were probably comparable to Hulkamania.

The World-Minds were taking careful notes, and also calculating how to crack these planets. They were all extremely offended by the corruption they could feel radiating from all these planets, after all, and there was no way I was getting within their magnetospheres and probable sensor ranges, even with my Stealth TL where it was...