A super-squidship a mere mile long got in the way of the beam as it was crossing over in front of the main target, but it didn’t matter, as the Nova Beam drove right through it and smashed into the front of the largest enslaved Acanti’s head, punching deep inside.

Oh, just to be contrary, Sundering was on the beam as well, helping guide the explosions to do the most damage to any objects. Any damage at all to anything would suddenly become severe damage to anything that was delicate in the slightest... such as all the bioorganic tech in the blast radius.

There was an internal blast as the concentrated power of the Nova Beam hit something inside and decided to erupt in all directions. Raging explosions spread throughout the artificial hallways woven through the organic body like parasitic roots, and erupted out of the nearest cancer-cities jutting from its hide in nuclear explosions.

Notably, bodywide motion and adjustments from the creature ended abruptly as all the command-and-control circuits and their controllers were destroyed, and it continued forward on its final course on inertia.

The energy generated by the great body vanished as it perished, the siphoning of cosmic radiation cut off, and the only thing the teeming legions of Brood riding it had to use were artificial power sources... which might have been able to keep their pustule-cities alive, but still left them alone on a dead hulk moving through space.

The moving corpse was already starting to be devoured from within by vivic fire. Soon enough it would shatter apart, and spill those pustule-cities of Brood haplessly into space at a significant fraction of the speed of light, tumbling forever helplessly into the void.

Soon enough whole swarms and fleets of bioships crammed with panicking queens and drones would be fleeing the zombified carriers, but for now there was merely picking them off from impossible range with impossible power.

The incoming slaver flotilla of massive Acanti and smaller bioships of various types slowed, and began to turn. But it was way too late for that to save them, because the Starholder was turning now, too.

The Nova Beam lanced out, rainbows and radiance splitting space, and the second largest zombie Acanti took the shot from the side, once again right in the braincase. Bereft of the true energy absorption powers of the space whales, it could not respond in time to the clashing harmonics made exactly to tear through its suborned instinctive defenses, and it too died.

“Captain, all the smaller Brood ships are coming this way! It’s a suicide attack!”

“We have the firepower. Have the free Acanti help us aim. Shotgun them.”

All three Spiders in the control room went absolutely mad painting targets at dozens per second, splashing hundreds and then thousands of the incoming Brood into the targeting array as we coasted to a halt with great speed.

“Fire!”

The Nova Shot went out again, this time pulsing in thousandth-of-a second beams, only visible as strobing thousands of miles away as they shot out for targets still many light-seconds away.

Hundreds of bioships either vanished or were cut apart instantly.

“One hundred percent energy release from the Starholder Core, and make that energy available to the Acanti!” Nova ordered, and the great archlines of the Starholder began to flare with energy ready for the space whales to draw on in a manner they never had before.

I Sang the patterns with them, showed them how to weave and focus, old and young alike. Their individual patterns and styles reached out, still meshing into a greater whole as they reached out for the power of the Starholder in ribbons and webs and threads of power in three spectra, focused them down, and suddenly there were hundreds of bright threads ranging out ahead of them.

The swiftest and smallest of the onrushing Brood vessels ran right into a hellstorm of firepower like nothing they had ever expected, let alone experienced. Bent along the tides of space with incredible accuracy, the Acanti reached out and freed the bioships from their slavery forever.

The Starholder Core really did put out the juice as screaming Brood found themselves in the most unbelievable position of running into the teeth of a merciless Acanti fusillade. Moreover, said salvoes had absolutely no effect on the Nova Beam itself, which reached out and continued its harvest on the scattering Brood flotilla.

Forward progress resumed with a surge of power as the incoming Brood fell to the Acanti weave-threads, and the blazing star-like figure of the Starholder resumed its course, aiming to get and keep as many of the carrier bioships in range as possible for as long as possible.

Raving radiant beams reached out, and massive slaveships died. In between them, the Nova Cannon recharged, and the Acanti Sang and wove into existence endless threads of death ahead of them, tearing apart the suicidally-charging Brood drones trying to protect their queens.

“Dynamo, can you and Kismet get out there, find the queens and remove them?” Captain Ryder asked urgently.

---

I didn’t have anything else to do here. “The Acanti should be able to sense the locus of the telepathy that is the heart of each swarm. Cross it with the sensor data and we should be able to pick off the queens.”

Our sensory data was suddenly cross-matched with energy patterns in the pspectrum.

“Ten lesser queens. Two are already dead. Their elder queen is ensconced on a world in the distance,” I muttered after a glance at it.

I directly Blinked outside the hull, with Kismet coming out of the hangar where she’d been standing ready to fight, racing to join me in a streak of gold. A second later we were shooting towards the Brood and ranging out very quickly ahead of the Starholder and the Acanti, who couldn’t advance any faster than they could deal with the suicidal charges of the incoming Brood drones trying to slow them down.

Nova/5’s couldn’t go anywhere near as fast as I could with the Beaubier speed buff, and Kismet could match me. Singing and feeding off the pspatial awareness of the Acanti with the Red Eyes warning me of anything in my path, we shot through the incoming swarm, avoiding the desperate incoming fire with only the tiniest of movements constantly back and forth. Organic railgun ammunition and various types of plasma and focused energies sang past and around us, and then we were past the screening flights, homing in on one of the two queens urgently trying to leave the area with an escort of a dozen of her drone ships.

They were not able to outmaneuver us, avoid us, outrun us, or shoot us down. Kismet pumped up the Nova saber-beamer on her arm as I did the same. Pure concussive force would take time to wear down a Brood queen, who were notoriously tough and hard to kill.

The Brood Queens naturally preferred Acanti for their regular rides, as the starwhales were capable of natural FTL once outside a gravity well, unlike the other species here. Alas for them, the edge of the gravity well here was some distance away, and they weren’t going to make it.

I paralleled Kismet until she flew into the mouth of the Acanti where the Broodqueen was ensconced, and eruptions followed henceforth as she blew her way towards the brain chamber used to control the ship, with the queen’s chamber generally right off of it.

I wasn’t worried about her dealing with a queen, but I had the Mark and one thoughtstream looking out her eyes, just in case, while I arced around and down, and went after the other one three light-seconds down and to the right.

The queens were evacuating the brain-chambers of their bigger rides in haste, but the fifth one didn’t make it out of the Devouring Blast radius of the Nova Beam that took out her merely fifteen-klik-long ride, and her with it.

The drones guarding her totally tried to shoot me down, and the Red Eyes were having a field day. But distances in space are so huge that merely the minutest of movements and adjustments were sufficient to make any and all manner of attacks miss me. Worse for them, Kismet wasn’t with me, which meant their technological weapons couldn’t register me. Their bioships could sense my gravimetric wave, but they didn’t have fire control, too bad, so sad.

Like Kismet, I didn’t bother trying to splat myself against the hide of the Acanti, which could take massive physical impacts without any problems whatsoever. I went in through the mouth of this merely two-hundred meter ‘swift escape vessel’, blowing my way through an airlock at the corner of its mouth with the explosive railgun on my other arm, crashing through it, and simply smashing my way through the hordes of Brood on the other side, pulping them with supersonic momentum and some Nova-boosted invulnerability and superspeed.

I was up in the control chamber in mere seconds, and simply spun around, shooting plasma charges in all directions. I buried the chamber and all those within in fire. The explosions were still sweeping out in their initial eruptions as I hit the chamber doors to the throne room, sending them flying into the pulsing chamber beyond, with the queen looming behind the protection of her personal guards.

They were partially psychically aware, but that didn’t mean they could keep up with my speed. I didn’t even bother contesting their strength as the whole ship shuddered and began to die from the neural network finally realizing there was no brain in charge anymore.

Lashing tentacles and a trio of energy beams caught my shadows, and then I was right next to the queen, looking in her eye as my arm paused in front of her needle-toothed jaws, and a railgun load discharged directly into her head.

Ablative hide and psi-force, up yours. Her entire skull lit up really, really hot, and the telepathic node the Acanti were sensing snuffed out instantly.

The saber beam hissed across, and I grabbed the high crest of her skull to keep as I zipped past and around the wild flailings of the guards. I was out the room less than two seconds after I entered it.

The Xandarans had mastered Hammerspace storage, and I flung her head into the spatial pocket I’d worked into my Disk. Their heads made self-empowering Baneskulls, thank you for being psionic nexii, you genocidal bitches.

Behind me, the guards were already falling into suicide mode as their reason for existence was abruptly removed. The drones of her fleet shuddered and curled up helplessly, unable to think for themselves, waiting for orders from above in crippling mental paralysis.

Kismet came streaking down to go after queen number six, who had just bailed out of the sixth carrier-bioship to die, and I shot past her to go after seven, who had wisely and pre-emptively bailed out of her own throne-beast to flee the area as fast as possible.

---

The Acanti had changed formation to a tighter cone around the Starholder, and were now modulating its defensive shields up before them in a massive web that was dealing with both the occasional stray energy blast that managed to reach them, and the debris coming in at miles per second. The energy pouring off the Starholder was harnessed ever more fluidly and fluently as they Sang along with me, the technological data of the ship’s sensors meshing ever more accurately into real-time with their own awareness of space and gravity.

Their outgoing firepower hadn’t changed much, but the closer formation allowed Peggy Carter to coordinate them more fluidly, which meant things like two-for-one shots, bioships blasted into or sent off course into the paths of others, or absorbing impacts or biocannon shots meant for us.

Combined shots reached out into the scattered kilometer or longer bioships being sent their way or running interference for the fleeing queens, almost all aboard Acanti slaveships. They weren’t as accurate as Cyclops was, but the range was less, and McCoy and Grimm were calculating flight paths that tried to make every Nova Beam shot at least a two-for-one, and if the Brood weren’t careful, three or more.

The Acanti read the distant wave-pulse of thought from the world in the distance, collective memories rising up and picturing it. Most of the command crew had wide-open telepathic reception at this point, getting feeds directly from the starwhales, and there was no disguising the alien malice and endless appetite in that mind.

The entire Brood flotilla crystalized and gelled, urgently making for the world in the distance, especially those drones who had just lost their queens.