Chapter 428 - Far Future Ch 138 – Visiting a Little Hole in the Ground (1/2)

I wanted to do a great many things. So much exciting stuff! At this time, I was still unfortunately on a tether, as I had to get back and give my addicted greater demon his fix or he would go off his rocker, and nobody really wanted to see what he could do to the Warp Zone if he was beyond barmy.

Alas, alas. It was a good thing I had so many ambitious kids out there, I guess.

Recruitment was ongoing and so key to the combination of rebuilding and reorganizing this stratified and feckless society of addicts and idiots. Senior Hagbloods were quite happy to give directions and 'issue quests' to their juniors about all these happy opportunities to exploit. People had different Talents, sometimes very conflicting, but knowing what your Talent was, catering to it, and bending it to benefit people was an art form we all loved to do, since we all started from the same place. That we could run undermafias, rob wealthy people blind, form upstanding companies churning out consumer products and wargoods, and hunt down lawbreakers as a family all at the same time was just more fun, when it came right down to it.

Still, going down to chat with a Tekron was interesting enough to be worth my time. It wasn't like I had to worry about Karmic accrual at this point. The Kids were passing up mountains of Allegiance Karma, and since I was sending it all back to them to build them up further, it was driving my Racial Levels up with the need to satisfy their demands for More Stuff To Do.

Now, Rantha Racial Levels were extremely expensive with all the bells and whistles, but my Allegiance, such as it was, was expanding monstrously, and with the continuous give-backs to help everyone out, the Duty and Loyalty ratings going through the roof meant all that did is make the pass-up ever higher. By investing in my people repeatedly, the virtuous cycle was repeating and growing massively.

I would be hitting Twelve very soon, upgrades to tech would be streaming online, everybody would go into a delirious tizzy of upgrades and reassessments and new ideas and possibilities and mini and major quest goals...

But now I had to talk with an emotionless robot from a line of sentient AI's with a profound irritation for biological life forms. I wondered if they were converted former biologicals themselves, or just ran on negative energy as an alternate fuel source? If so, the death of living creatures created more fuel, but no living creatures around basically cut off their own fuel sources.

The idea of letting the galaxy swarm with life and then reaping it all had occurred to us, but unfortunately millions-year deep archeology was one of those sciences of very low priority in an alien-infested universe, and asking the creatures who usually wanted to kill us tended not to get results. It was non-productive, in the end. Culling just deprived them of a fuel stream in return for a short-term glut. Went against logic. It was entirely possible that this Tekron was being sustained just by the natural deaths of the people in Janus Prime, and had simply harvested the dead of war for a reserve against tougher times ahead.

He should be somewhat protective of an agreeable fuel source, and as long as he wasn't actually eating souls, we didn't actually care. The Tekron race, on the other hand, would simply have the attitude that we were endlessly replaceable and simply not care if we were all extinguished...

We'd have to see what its priorities were.

---

Underspire was a complete mess after the fighting, and the repairs would be ongoing for at least the next century. That was fine, gave people work to do. Whole sections of the city were uninhabitable... well, by normal people. Tons of folk plenty happy to live in those zones, and really, if you just got water and sewage there, local power generation could take care of itself, and just do tiered farms instead of stuffing people in habs and feeding them drugs to keep them sated.

So naturally enough, that's what a lot of the kids were doing, transforming Janus Prime slowly with lots more green. After all, at some point the Warp Zone was going away, and the planet would be very different when it did. Bonus points, people were eating better. Upspire people naturally wanted to eat fresher produce, and didn't want to work to do so... but had monstrously hard times recruiting workers except at unviable pay scales, and couldn't really enter the business. Oh, too bad, so sad...

More deaths to sustain the Tekron, I suppose.

---

I wasn't tracked by any cameras or observed by any electronics, and the people certainly didn't register who I was. Underspire was still a place of odd attire and personal motifs, to say the least, and if you didn't look remarkable, you were basically invisible. Inverting my charisma to have people ignore me was a trick of the Stealth skill, Faceless in a Crowd, and so my heading into the newly credited area belonging to the Hole was untracked and untraced... and more eyes than mine were making sure.

Rantha True Seeing eyes were in a lot of places these days, as oh so many dops, Possessing demons, cerevores hiding in skulls, bodyjumper Warp sorcerers, and rogue psions were finding out... and the more mundane zwilniks were finding it ever harder to prosper in a career where sudden disappearances were the normal endings to their lives and futures. That so many of the addicts were pslaved by contaminated drugs was something that turned the majority of society against them. For those who just didn't give a frak, if they vanished, and drugs were involved, it was quietly spread that the zwilniks and their clientele got what was coming to them.

Those who tried to make use of this to off their rivals untraceably found that the people doing zwilnik removal were also very happy to get rid of opportunistic murderers, too. Zwilnik removal was all cleared and substantiated ahead of time, it just wasn't as loud and showy as some of the Juris wanted... although they got to hit all the distributors they wanted to, which often they didn't. Distributors had connections, and there were some connections going Upspire that were getting a bit worked up as their business model was failing and their guaranteed revenue stream, that should have been booming with PTSD'd civilians and soldiers, was instead drying up. Their employees, once enjoying an inexhaustible track of opportunity for ambitious sots from Under and Downspire, were going away, and new ones were getting clearly reluctant to end their lives within a short period.

I knew a lot of cold eyes were watching this death spiral of zwilniks unhappily. As their addicts were either cured or eliminated, surviving addicts became like sources of gold, prized possessions to be warred over, especially when the number of incoming addicts they were trying to make was nowhere near expectations. The prices of many drugs plummeted as desperate dealers tried to offload them, which only got the dealers removed all the faster, and things were shaking Upspire among many entrenched families and pharma corps who suddenly couldn't recoup their costs, suppliers who weren't getting paid, money wasn't moving, and people started exchanging bullets and bombs instead of bribes and blood money.

The Incursion had stopped, the fallout and the killing went on. Welcome to the future!

---

I simply tap-tap announced my presence, just in case the Tekron didn't know I was there, although the faint Band signal on my arm would be more than enough to register me. Communicating on the Band was still a stupid thing for it to do, so in an age of ever-dizzying high tech; face-to-face in a dead zone was still the safest way.