"No biomass," I muttered.

"Stripped right clean by something," Briggs agreed. "A virus would have left inorganics behind, something..."

"So, a biovore?" I looked back at the ten-mile plain of glass around the ship. It had been shooting at enough creatures to turn that entire area to glass... and judging by the desert, it had failed to contain them.

"A lot of biovores. Trying to get away from the ship..." Briggs murmured.

"Uh huh. And just where might all of those biovores have come from?"

We both looked at the mass of the huge colony ship in front of us.

"To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life, new civilizations..." his voice almost cracked. A colony ship, full of volunteers on their way to a new life in the stars, full of hope and wonder.

"Boldly going where no man has gone before," I finished for him, and my hands popped as I clenched them. "Briggs, I really, really hate this place..."

"Yeah," he agreed, and in tandem, we turned in opposite directions, looking around.

Something had come out of the ship. The question was, where had it gone?

-------

Crim's Markdoor lit back up as he came inside the Ward, but I knew the news wasn't great by the emotions coming through.

-Sage Sama, given the sensitive nature of the information, we executed every cut-out protocol we could, complete with using a Marked psi-crystal Matrix clone-out to do the accessing. We found an old nobleman with a hobby of collecting information about antique ships who had what we wanted, but...- His /voice was a bit shaken, the girls who'd done the work had probably been a bit tense.

-The whole datafile was a worm at TL 14+?- I /hazarded coolly.

-Yes!- he /breathed in relief when I got ahead of him, thanking the stars Ranthas were so smart. -The access site was bombarded within two minutes of datatouch, and a Mekker forensic team was on site and in the Boole going crazy behind the scenes trying to find out who did it via teleport thirty seconds later. The worm was actually psychoactive, and they had to dust the psi-crystal that was transferring the video before it was sublimated. There was teleport-tracking and obscene amounts of video tracking and analysis going on from all directions, looking for potential tie-ins.-

Since they knew what had been done, that also meant the girls had taken precautions and kept two and three steps ahead, probably considering it a light intellectual challenge. -What was their estimation of discovery?-

He /sighed in relief. -They said because of Beyond Law and Chaos, under 1%, and they'd need a Sixteen on-site right now for that to happen.-

Like, oh, that Tekron down in The Hole. I was sure if a Sixteen was present, the Powers That Be would know. The Mekkers were good, but keeping one of their own of that Level of power hidden from the Mentats and Umbrans for any period of time was basically impossible. Hyperanalytic divinations would reveal that they were present, even if nothing about who they actually were... but knowing they were there, the psions would go looking, and asking questions. The Guild could be secretive, but stonewalling the Umbrans was a Guild-wiping mistake in judgement.

Vampire's Veil, Beyond Law and Chaos, and teleportation were freaking nightmares for any data-happy surveillance network and number-crunching analytical software to deal with. I had girls who literally did not exist as far as the system was concerned, and they very proudly and thoroughly kept it that way. Some considered it a challenge to not exist in the information files, while others had multiple identities, none of which were real, which they could expose and throw away on a lark as required.

After all, the whole range of human Talents was present on them, and some of them had Talents dealing with hyperterritorial paranoia. They were really, really good at staying off the radar, while others were Self-Reliant to a degree that would make Libertarians weep with joy. Sisterly support meant woo-hoo! enthusiasm in support of casual law-breaking for a good cause, and away they went, them rebellious criminal scum, them!

Given how many Ranthas were scattered among the Juris upholding the law and righteousness, and laughing at their sisters doing all this criminal shit in support of the Right Thing, it was good times all around.

And of course, informing the Juris and the Umbrans that a covert Mekker forensic team had fried a couple buildings in a condemned zone and crawled all over it with their men without telling anyone was always good for laughs. Mekkers' lies were unconvincing because they were so out of tune with emotions the bit-heads could only try the robotic approach and repeat the same words, thinking that they would be believed by sheer repetition...

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"There is a Galactic Omega Threat existing at the center of the Warp Zone," Vala told Duke Parablum. "Bluma is telling Duke Rimval in his Quiet Room right now as well."

Duke Parablum stared at Vala. He trusted her, because she was a part of him. A Galactic Omega threat... that meant humanity-ending, or worse!

"And you can't tell me the particulars." His voice indicated he was not surprised.

"The only people who know the full details are Sources and Nulls, to ensure it does not permeate in the Mindscape or Dream. And... the Mechanists have always known it was there."

Duke Parablum stared into those dark eyes, which were cold and hard right now, a lethal edge to them he had never seen. Concealing a Galactic Omega threat... was grounds for termination, from high to low, of every member of the guild on Janus III, and their superiors who knew about it. It could reach all the way back to Tellus!

And he obviously could do nothing, as letting the word out on a wide scale would have devastating consequences...

"Sama discovered it?" he asked. It was very telling that she had not even used the Marktell to warn him.

"Yes, and she is going to take steps to handle it. She will keep Bluma and I fully informed on the behalf of you and Duke Rimval. This..." she paused for a moment, "There is a statistical certainty that there is a biovore threat extant on Janus III. She does not know where or how, but the likelihood that it has not infiltrated human society somewhere is negligible."

Biovores... "Does she know what type?" he asked grimly. The mass xenosym fleets were the largest known biovore threat, but the Kundi, the Shuggoth, the Gatherers, the Zygom, and the Cellulocusts also existed out there, all harvesting all the biomass they could with utter ruthlessness. Only the xenosym were known to work with other races, as the cerevores had somehow found a way to subdue and use members of their populations... or perhaps were extensions of the xenosym hive-mind themselves...

"No, but if there has been no alarm about it, it is likely an infiltrator. That narrows the choices greatly."

The only type that could infiltrate would be the xenosyms, working with the cerevores. Although the others could snipe at the fringes, a true Shuggoth invasion would mean an increase in unicellular organisms on a vast scale, not just the standard mutation rate associated with phrenic empowerment. The city would be swimming in omnivorous oozes, and the waste facilities and algae vats would have bred them by the megatons.

Stupid Elder Race and their damn creation of ooze slaves...

"We will assume there has been cerevore infestation and proceed with countermeasures," he nodded, and sighed with experience. "As soon as they are discovered... things will erupt."

Vala nodded to him. "This started a very long time ago. We had best be ready to crash Traffic Control."

--------

Kylee Rantha had Sticky Fingers.

She was very amused by her Talent, which basically made her very good at touch-based activities, and all forms of Sleight of Hand, including card dealing and shuffling. She had put her Minstrel Ranks into maxing out Performance Magic and learning all the ins and outs of card tricks, coin tricks... and picking locks and pockets.

Her hand drifted over the sensors of the personal safe of Gusman Huldeiver, widely known to the be the richest person in Janus Prime. Person, not family, not corp, just one man with an assload of money he'd gotten in a lot of ways fair and foul, and used to buy himself all sorts of sweet shit. While he didn't have the power and influence of the noble Houses or the megacorps, he had plenty of local might and name recognition... as a fatass tyrant with trust issues all too willing to stomp on anyone who defied him.

Ripping him off was going to be so nice.

A glass from a public gala she'd waitressed at had provided prints and DNA, easily scanned into the gloves she was wearing to fool the sensors on the pads. It was an eight digit-code, and two of the numbers repeated, but that was fine.

She had Sticky Fingers, and her ability to sense stuff with her hands was better than Big Mom's. She could feel the impacts on the keys, molecular-level signs of wear and tear invisible to the eye, and she could also feel the way they layered and scuffed, indicating what finger came first, what followed what as the hand moved subtly to follow the next digit, came back to touch others.

She plotted them out as her hair held up the false eyeball to the retina scanner, and spoke into the microphone in a voice not her own, "Open up, babe, it's your sugar daddy."

Her fingers danced across the keys, sensors read the appropriate genetic information, body heat fine, fingerprints okay.

He should have scanned the lightbulbs in his office better. They'd recorded the order of operations, the words he'd used, and the number of keystrokes he typed in... and the fact he only used one finger to do so.

The safe clicked open, and she slapped the delay circuit onto it, which would loop the outgoing system notifying him that his safe was opened. That gave her about thirty seconds headway.

Her hair reached in, grabbed everything in hundreds of little hands, and pulled it out. Into the plumbum-lined bag it all went, which went into her Masspack, and she scuttled back across the ceiling on her way out of the room.

The doorway in was also rigged to not show it was opened. Tremblesense showed no one outside, so, still scampering on the ceiling upside down, she went out the door into the hall, her hands sparking with her restrained Claws as she dragged herself forwards.

Okay, there was a guard around the corner here, but he had no arc of sight above him. A tap, and a tiny charge hissed and fizzed in a power outlet behind her, the pop of electricity and faint vein of static instantly getting the armored man's attention. He immediately stiffened, spoke into his mic, and turned to march towards the disturbance as she slid past him on the ceiling, around a corner before he turned back, and then dropped to the ground to tear open the door to the terrace and sprint.

Three seconds later, the alarms went off, gears whirred, and weapon mounts flopped up from under flower boxes and sculptures, hunting for a target.

Pulses of hot light hissed around her, trying to track her as she fled, feet skating across plascrete and durasteel, nicely covered with gene-mod ironwood and ceramic tiles set off with gold. The bundles of hot plasma blew superheated craters in the roof beneath her, not quite managing to track her as they should as she slid away from the path of the extra two shooters who popped up, quite ignoring their broadcast orders to halt and surrender and do other nonsensical stuff. Private guards had no law enforcement powers and were far more liable to just shoot and kill then capture.

Header off the building time!

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Author's Note: This arc with Kyla is actually a rewrite of my original Sama in the Future story.