Chapter 508 - Far Future Ch. 218 – You Stand Before the Mountain (1/2)

Space shuttles don't exist in, ah, a vacuum... er, they had to get resupplied eventually. Recycling only goes so far, even with the technology of the future here. As this thing was pretending to be decrepit to casual scans, it couldn't be gleaming with the newest and best tech.

In addition, its masters would be the paranoid types who didn't trust tech or people, so they'd be regularly checking in. Technically, all I'd need to do is wait for another ship to come in... unless they were somehow repopulating with teleporting, but that would be wasting the time of some very high level psions.

Also, it would require some outrageously sophisticated tech to support, which would show up in my circuit outside.

I wasn't worried about being seen; my hair cloaked me in transparency, and no tech was able to register me without some significant enhancements I highly doubted would be here.

I wasn't even worried about Void Brothers. I was a Null. I didn't leave tracks in the manafield, and I didn't radiate psi or anything. I held the background absolute. The only weird thing about me was that within four inches of my skin, nothing was moving at all. If I was standing in front of one and his Helices hit my Null, yeah, that immovability would shock the heck out of him.

But that would mean these cut-rate knockoffs of a Void Brother were very close to me. That wasn't going to end well for them... scratch that, it was going to end very well for them, and not for their bosses, who would not appreciate my generosity.

I didn't want that to happen until it was time, however.

I found their hidden primary hangar, left Grim there overlooking it to warn me of it as I glided circuits around the station.

Yeah, I could appreciate how surreal it was, hanging onto a frozen hunk of metal sitting out in the Void, continually recirculating my own air, ignoring the oxygen-freezing temperature, the hard rads from the dying sun, and the lack of gravity. My Vajra and heavyfoot was enough to keep me anchored to the hull without a problem, and so I busied myself gliding over and around it, just... looking, wasting time.

Depleting the natural atmosphere that would accumulate around the station was a security function, and could be read as ships coming across it and stripping the valuable oxygen off a drifting hulk... or doing so to better preserve it for later, your pick.

Bering and Dora would be here soon enough, and I could be patient. No need to Riftcut and probably set off an incursion alarm or three.

When I plopped down the anti-matter bomb to take out this station, I needed to put in exactly the right spot, after all.

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It was an in-system shuttle, and vectoring in from the direction of the second planet. It was dropping off supplies and picking up deliveries. I hadn't seen another ship stop in from outsystem, and there was probably only the one...

A half-dozen infant boys were going with it.

I could only look down passively through my Trembling Domain, making them out below me. Six families, six worlds that needed them denied their Voids.

The care and reverence the pilots had for them made me guess they were also Voids, and these kids were probably the equivalent of younger brothers to them. Well, they were going to get even more respectful soon enough.

Nobody could have avoided their senses inside the shuttle, even the stealthiest of us, but outside the shuttle? I held on with my Vajra as they accelerated rapidly, synching into the inertial offset. A demon or something could do something similar, since they were made of ectoplasm and had funky physics interacting with matter, but any demon would glare to even these chopped-off Voids.

I was patient. The Empire had been getting Voids killed for millennia, I didn't need to take action right now.

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I let go of the shuttle as it hit the atmosphere.

I wasn't dumb enough to try a direct infiltration of the shuttle. The scanning it would undergo when it arrived would be unreal. Regardless of how good its tech was, the entire perimeter could not possibly be as well-guarded as the primary entry point.

I was infiltrating via planetfall. Normally this would result in a meteor streaking across the sky... and, I had little doubt, getting shot out of existence by some precise fast neutrons, just to be on the safe side.

To flame, you have to have friction. Vajras are next to frictionless. How do you have friction when you are rubbing on a soul?

I was literally squirting through the air, the air in front of me compressing, moving past me, and expanding back to normal as I shot through at miles per second.

I was surveying the world, and the Goldilocks crew was recording and breaking down everything, directing my attention here and there for more details.

The shuttle was moving towards a crater that was obviously the center of habitation here. There were plenty of settlements below, but the images getting examined confirmed they were all medieval technology, basically there to provide food and supplies for the crater area, and not much else. They'd probably been frozen at that level of tech development for at least seven thousand years...

It did make it easier to infiltrate from afar. Basically peasant level individuals would never see me passing by, and the hidden technology meant to monitor them wasn't going to see me, either.

There was obfuscation over the crater, some subtle holo-tech disguising the layout of the place, based on what was registering in the upper spectra. Straight visuals, it was almost seamless, looking like another bucolic land of primitive farms and herdsmen going about their business.