Chapter 420 - Far Future Ch. 130 – A Steal of a Deal (1/2)
I was watching everything, juggling and fine-tuning the machine that was rising with distinctly superhuman levels of intellectual ability. Briggs was doing the same, with emphasis on different sectors, and really doing more managing then I was since I was also doing some levels of deduction, inference, chaos math, and para-laws as I was Weird Sciencing our way up the tech tree. I was designing, testing, redesigning, testing again, getting results, and Briggs was handling the explosive production cycle behind it all with aplomb and enthusiasm. Briggs' loved to build.
New ship designs were rolling out of the shipyards we had taken over, and the snarkily named Greater Axiom Modular Technology foundations were now firmly in place. The inability of the Mechanist Guild to properly make such ships, even when supplied with the schematics (and yes, the schematics EXACTLY matched what was being made, thank you) was really making them fret, and those families, clans, and corporations deeply embedded into the whole AMT production tree were frightened, angry, resentful... and they really, really wanted a piece of the pie.
Without the Coronals and Umbrans standing directly behind us and buying everything they reasonably could, Rantha Corp would have been extinguished long ago from every vector imaginable, the technology buried under waves of lawsuits, assassinations, supply chokes, labor shortages, endless inspections, sabotage, asset seizure, 'random' Events, terrorist attacks, lack of funding, things falling out of the sky, and anything else they could think of to just bury the tech, us, and keep their monopolies.
Their past and current achievements in battle had given the Ranthas and Briggs Clans a formidable reputation that was completely deserved at all levels of combat. While it was plain they were vat-born, and there was plenty of sneering disdain for it, there was also cold and dreadful fear as they broke Seven like nothing, and ascended to Ten over heaps of corpses, crushing resistance under their heels, and moved together as a hivemind could only dream of doing. The mindclaw-armed street punks, the trash Beacon psions, the barely-educated Downspire workforces, and the drafted soldiers who didn't want to see combat had all evolved into an unbelievably skilled, strong, and united fighting and work force that was proving nigh-impossible to crack open, infiltrate, and subvert.
Well, it wasn't that it wasn't impossible, it was that it was deadly.
Inigo had completely taken over control of wet works operations. Her past life of being a garbage scrounger and pickpocket preying on the rich had left her with both a keen resentment of those born to incredible wealth, and a fire to step beyond petty street crime to sustain herself. She was born with a talent for crime, she was going to use it, and woe to anyone who crossed her family and tried to treat her as low-born trash!
Her ascension to one of the major crime lords of the city was quietly paved in a lot of blood. War was a fine time to remove the assets of her competitors, and making sure such assets got sent heartily into the line of fire was a wonderful way to do so. She was entirely heartless as she and Anatolia arranged for mafia family after family to be utterly destroyed, territories yielded up, assets seized, and their deaths all laid down in valiant support of the city, thank you.
She put her hand hard on the information strings of the city, she and the Goldilocks crew tracking down all the information brokers systematically, relentless at the task, and either subverting them or eliminating them, there was no room for negotiation, regardless of who their backer was. Umbran striker teams coming in to clear out someone working for aliens and cultists was something none of the Crownspire forces dared cross openly.
Her hand firmly on the black pulse of the underworld, it became exceedingly hard for existing forces to make moves without her knowing it... and by extension, the Umbrans and the Coronals. The Twilight Orders expanded their own information-processing divisions just to keep up with the amount of chaff information coming through, deftly cycling through the removal of violent people best sent off to die in the Empire's service, and those merely of low morals who could be bent to serve in other ways.
Her tendrils soon reached up into the underbelly of Crownspire, and those families and forces moving in the shadows against the Ranthas began to get sifted aggressively in ways both subtle and overt. The Patriarch of the Endgelgut family, a fine example of old blood, built-in racism and elitism, and a ruthless protector of his family's interests, slipped and fell on his ornamental poniard, twice. The accidental death was talked about for months.
Ruthless competition was a byword at the highest levels, given the amount of money and influence at work. The Twilight Dukes watched, the planetary governor spectated and tittered, and the high guildmasters and admiralty looked on, but the latters did not move under the eyes of the former. As long as production was maintained, and the war effort moved forwards, the petty schemes and deaths of nobles and corporate executives meant nothing to the Twilight Dukes. If families and corps suddenly deprived of their best blood suddenly had to sell off some vital assets to stay alive and affluent, well, that was business.
Newer businesses and corporations were arising from the Downspire families and clans forming. Some had Briggs Brothers or Ranthas at the helm, but most were simply Sources, trained in the G&G and now in pursuit of their dreams. With their own crews and families behind them, they were building and rising up aggressively... and the Ranthas were perfectly happy to let them do so, as long as their paths could combine. Sources following their Oaths were literally forces of nature, luck and fate bending to their paths, and combining to form a stream with so many branches that it couldn't be stopped or dammed as it hit the river and surged forth.
The Sources stepped into openings and voids made by the battles and losses so readily it was like they were made to be there, closing gaps in supply and production of key goods, working together like oiled machines as events fell into place. They naturally outnumbered the Ranthas and Briggs by an order of magnitude, and the Umbrans and Coronals were astonished to see that, after literally half the population of the planet had been slaughtered, production was actually going up!
Said effect also meant funds readily flowed to organizations with a Source at the head. That they were involved in the Markspace and were working towards the overarching goals therein only made it even easier.
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”What are we looking at?” Tiffany asked calmly, ensconced on the Saber's Throne and preparing to go to combat at any instant.
”Three ships, Captain,” Maurice on Divs called out. ”They are cloaked with holovoids, Elvar style, but we can't tell if they are drow or not. But they are definitely not in an escort formation.”
”The Sunhawk's personal squadron numbers four to eight ships. Let's see what happens.” The Bared Saber was not a cargo vessel, but the twenty tons of Void Osmium they had received did not take up much room at all. The psions were even now wiping the multiple psionic signatures left on the metal, repeatedly, and the procedures would be repeated multiple times as it was cut apart. Whether the Elvar were simply keeping them on their toes with the equivalent of teaching a lesson in competency or actually trying to sabotage whatever would be made of the oblivichrome was moot; the latent psychic signatures had to be purged utterly for the cargo to be useful.