Chapter 506 - Far Future Ch. 216 – The Information Feed (1/2)

So, the Goldilocks crews had managed to track down this place on Kragamaore as a major hub of where the information was sent. It had involved infiltrating and directly cracking open the public welfare systems of the fifty largest worlds in this subsector, looking for anything tracking the discovery of Voids and Vortices, and then following the trail of messages being sent to and from hub to hub.

Some of the job could be done by cyberpathy, but suborning the hardware required a hands-on touch.

Two hundred of my girls with Intellects and Talents regarding computer tech, runecrafting, computer engineering, programming, and hacking the crap out of amoral fuckheads pulling off this disastrous shit were working with me as I took a break between shooting Warped rebels on Baldur IV and my upcoming trip to the suborned Forgeworld of Hekkonaides to do a little personal insertion.

My Intellect was higher than theirs, my Exemplar Lite bonus made me very good at everything, so they were basically running their awareness of the situation and Talents through my backbrain like a convenient co-processor as they disassembled this building-sized contraption in my Trembling Domain. My hair was splayed out in every direction like a living thing, magnifying the sensitivity of my Vajra of all the impressions I was getting from this, and if my awareness wasn't at the molecular level down to the end, it at least stayed at the cellular, and I could send my hair shooting this way and that to get better readings.

Damn stuff was over twenty feet long now. So lucky I could Compress it short at will. I was my own walking Trembling radar dish.

We had discovered that the maker of this system was pretty cocksure, and the safeguards against the information being monitored, altered, or adjusted were pretty skimpy. There were acknowledgement protocols, and simple follow-ups and confirmations, but the complexity of the coding and the fact you actually had to be looking for what was going on meant that they felt pretty damn safe about the flow of it.

Heck, because this was hardware-based, without cyberpathy being able to track individual electron streams from afar, even the Tekrons wouldn't be able to discern what was going on here. They would only see the occasional diffused programs operating through the system as inefficiencies, or loose code, not some greater pattern connected by the hardware it was being channeled through.

The sheer breadth and scope of the effort made it plain just how importantly this project was viewed by the Emperor. I could only assume that at some point it had become plain that the Emperor was setting himself on a course that would lead to ruination, the Void Brothers had moved to stop him... and they had lost that fight somehow.

By putting this system into place, he had basically rendered them extinct, with all new Void Brothers being subsumed by the Empire, and the old ones killed or dying off in the course of their duties. Maybe by trying to kill him, who knew?

It was our job to bring this system crashing down.

I slid through the information feeder system, analyzing and adjusting, and noting the structure of everything being made. This was a hardware detection thing, not a software. It meant there were gaps that cyberpathy could not jump across, triggers being pulled by mechanical and psionic means, instead of just programs activating.

Without knowing what to look for, I wouldn't have been able to find anything in this molecule-level crystal lattice fabbing. Learning what to look for had cost a lot of man-hours of some impossibly smart and Talented Ranthas who just wouldn't admit they couldn't do the job. It had taken ten thousand of my kids, and a link to the Celestial Tribute's main computer core, to dissect the Janus Prime astropath station and finally decipher what was going on and how it was happening.

The principles involved were still beyond them, but they'd cracked through the -30 Level penalty with the TL 14 basis I made possible, and figured out what was being done.

This monster of an Astropath sender was even more complex, but now we knew what to look for, and had the basic outline of the formation array constructed through combinations of coding and crystal. Once I found several key points, we mapped them out to the inferred formation, looked for more, and then because of scale, went looking at high probability areas for newer and upgrade formations. It actually wasn't all that hard.

For two hundred Intellects at close to 40 and devoted Talents, anyways, while I sat there for an hour in the heart of the machine, my hair moving this way and that to get better readings and fill in a lot of blanks in their schematic of this thing.

Once that was done, there was only to insert the TL 15 recorders and receivers the Celestial Tribute had thoughtfully printed off for us in the appropriate positions. Some were hardware, some were code, all of them were psychically-enhanced to get past the TL gap.

All this, just so we could figure out where the code was being sent to.

The amount of ship traffic going to and from the Mountain was going to be minimal at best, and was going to ghost in and ghost out, never being recorded on any records, just inserted into calculations by Traffic Control and then erased... we knew, we'd found the code for it. Thus, finding an Assassin ship was going to be difficult without finding an Assassin, and one that knew the way to the Mountain even harder. The Assassins basically had no knowledge of where the Mountain was in the galaxy, and because their Helices were so suppressed, had no planetary attunement that would have allowed them to pick it out from across the galaxy.

It was like someone knew their capabilities, or something.

The things I was putting into place were no bigger than fingernails, meshing right into the structure of the Relay, and wouldn't be found without a scan actually looking for them and knowing what did not belong. They didn't disrupt anything here, they didn't drain any power, and they didn't actually record and transmit anything.

The 'transmitter' was a sympathetic resonator, which altered when one of these sensors was tripped. The 'receiver' just changed with it, shifting to match its twin in form through the quantum field, no energy projection or retention involved. It was like having a light switch that went on when the one in the bedroom of the Emperor went on, nothing more.