Chapter 12: Annexation
In a clearing in the middle of a Silver-rank conflict zone on the planet of Makel, an encampment of roving murderers and extortionists ceased to exist. They were removed, not by a higher rank – though there were several on the planet – or by a more moral group of adventurers. Instead, they were erased by a rain of projectiles traveling faster than the speed of sound, leaving behind only a blasted crater.
Despite the grim solemnity of the task, Cato did take some satisfaction in executing people that he’d caught murdering juveniles still in their Copper ranks, basically kids. He didn’t know what their motives were, and he didn’t care. Since he had the ability to take them to task, he did.
His smaller railguns, the ones with a yield far below nuclear, were effective enough against the gold rank types and below. He could reach out and touch the worst offenders without having to be present himself, though Cato tried to restrict himself to only those performing the most blatant and obvious predation.
On one world, he had removed a similar group ambushing and murdering or robbing people leaving a dungeon. On another, he’d repeatedly eradicated a wandering elite that had a penchant for targeting the nearby lower-rank zone and those within it. Small touches like that he could manage, but little else until he was ready to make a larger move.
By pure logic he shouldn’t have even been doing the small things until he had thoroughly saturated System space, but pure logic hadn’t driven him to invade the System to begin with. If he was the one who had to watch people fighting and dying, or being enslaved, or otherwise being abused, then would take any actions short of risking the greater campaign to help. It was all he could do.
Until the System demanded more.
“Cato, we just got a quest,” Sili Kenek, née Leese Haekos, reported from the surface of that world, one at the edge of the frontier but comfortably in the middle of his expansion, thirty or forty hops from Ikent and a few thousand light years toward the galactic rim in real space. “There’s a new world opening up.”
“What.” Cato’s mind spun without catching for a few moments, the human frame sitting in the station on Haekos’ largest moon blinking dumbly at the wall. Then he took a long breath. “Is it to Ahrusk?”
“It says that the Gogri Portal Staging Area will be opening in three days,” Raine replied.