In contrast to the fleeing Brood, the Acanti’s thoughts were dominated by an overwhelming sense of grief and almost religious anticipation.

“Let them go,” Dynamo’s voice came over coms. “The Acanti have to feed.”

Everybody blinked in surprise, including the Acanti themselves. “Come again, Dynamo?” Captain Ryder asked, stunned at the recommendation.

“All that dead biomatter of the big Acanti is getting converted into vivic energy. I don’t think I have to tell you what directly absorbing the power and mass of their elders can do for the Acanti here.”

There was a great and trembling wave of anticipation that shuddered through the starwhales as they realized the possibilities.

“Kismet and I are going to start setting as many of the tumbling corpses on vivic fire. Send the smaller Acanti with us to consume them,” Dynamo went on with cool pragmatism. “Captain, take the Starholder and start popping the cancer-holds of the Brood on those floating carcasses, and get the elders to feeding on them urgently. Strafe the carcasses a few times to accelerate the flames if you need to.

“This bonanza is going to save them literally tens of thousands of years of growth if done right.”

Richard looked around the bridge. “We’ve got a week before the coronation.” He glanced at the holo display, where all the surviving Brood ships were urgently leaving the main display. “Drop sensor drones and send them towards that world out there. I want a positional fix ASAP. Mr. Grimm, close in on the nearest carcass and start picking off the Brood positions. Use scattershots and set as much of the carcass on fire as you can while you do it.

“Acanti, allocate your members to start feeding on the dead as they are reverted to vivus.” He rose from the chair. “I’ll join the external effort torching the smaller bioships for the younger Acanti. Jewel, the same, you can ride one of the Acanti if you have to.”

“Yes, sir!” his girl replied, and tossed him the enruned arm-cannon she had already gone to fetch, smiling. “Let’s feed the Brood to the whales!”

------

There were millions, if not billions, of tons of biomatter currently floating in the void.

The Acanti and the Starholder were fully capable of dragging even the largest carcasses to a halt with tractors and gravimetric control, and shoving them together if necessary. Sure, they were heading in all directions at speed, but the vectors of the smaller ones were fairly close together, while there weren’t that many of the big ones, and the Acanti were remarkably quick.

I soon had a score of Acanti working with me, flitting first from carcass to carcass and eliminating their momentum as we sped into the distance, then sending tumbling corpses spinning into one another in slow motion. The many thousands of dead slaveships were rounded up with energetic speed and excitement by my, Kismet’s, Nova’s, and Jewel’s pods of starwhales, and then were set on vivic fire.

The Songs of the starwhales were totally capable of accelerating the power of the vivic flames, and the energy they were sucking off the dead as tons of matter vanished by the second was more than enough to keep their efforts going.

And the Acanti began to grow.

Suckling blue whales had no comparison to what was going on. The smaller Acanti were growing with visible speed, adding tons of mass, and their speed of consumption only increased as they grew larger.

Dead Brood individually provided almost nothing to the Acanti, but starsharks, spacesquids, astrohawks, and especially other Acanti were incredible to them. They had never imagined anything like this was possible.

Moreover, they had never imagined that they would suddenly have weapons usable against those who would attack them!

I could outrun and outfly the starwhales, but I couldn’t move the bigger carcasses around like them, so I satisfied myself with moving between locations as the starwhales heaped up the carcasses, I set them all on vivus, and they left one of their number behind to feed as they gathered up more carcasses they’d robbed of momentum.

I noticed that one of the smaller whales in my pod was being treated with reverential deference, and was not gathering any of the dead. Instead, he was feeding constantly, and the other Acanti were making sure he always had something to feed on as he did so.

He started singing to me in his language, which I’d naturally picked up inside an hour, and I was happy to Sing back to him in the Sublime Chord, to his own immense delight and wonder.

He was a little fellow, but still quite old, and a member of a starfaring species that had been around for literally a few billion years or something. He was still astonished when I let him touch my mind and he could see it working, the focus and clarity very different from the long and timeless manner of their own thoughts.

Indeed, friendly humanoid thoughts were a rarity for them to encounter, so they were very intrigued by the variety and differences between all the minds they were sensing on our ship, including the highly variable range of power among them... of which I definitely stood at the apex.

I politely asked them not to make that obvious to my fellows, and they were kind enough not to do so.

This little fellow who was putting on the tonnage and the meters like no tomorrow was their Starsinger, the prophet and guide of the whole race. Or at least, he was meant to be, as he was the sole Acanti who could contain the Starsoul of the Acanti.

That Starsoul was located over there, on the Broodworld ahead of us that held the single largest planetary collection of the Brood that the Acanti knew of, for a single reason.

It also held the corpse of the last Starsinger of the Acanti, who the Brood had managed to murder many years ago!

His memory images matched very precisely the scenes that soon came back from the drones dispatched to that world, stealthed observers sliding past the busy bioships in orbit to get a look at the planet below... or more precisely, what was on the planet.

The former Starsinger had been the size of a moon!

Its corpse, curving around the world below in rotting splendor, was literally longer than a continent. The decaying arches of its ribs poked up for over a thousand miles, extending well out of the atmosphere. Even after centuries, perhaps millennia, all of the flesh hadn’t managed to be consumed off of its bones, and you could still see masses of flesh greater than mountains that had not collapsed into rot, offal, and fertilizer for the many, many biosystems that had sprung up all along, up, and down the length and height of the utterly massive carcass of the Acanti leader.

His size represented at least a hundred million years of growth, and the Brood had slain him while trying to enslave him and effectively get their own motile planet to run around and ravage space in. Their pustule-cities, domes of glass and hardened goo, were everywhere on and about the creature, while a landscape pulsing with life stolen from the decay of the great starwhale lived around them, probably bred by the Brood and released to flourish there.

“So, you’re saying the Starsoul of your people is trapped somewhere in the corpse of your ancestor there?” I asked slowly, hosing down the whole mass of what had to be half a million tons of biomass gathered here, just for this guy. Nova-blasts ringed with vivus detonated and set the corpses on fire, were fanned into a furnace by the Song of the Starsinger, and then streamed into his gaping mouth.

He’d gone from fifty meters long to three hundred meters in basically an hour, and was only growing faster now.

He affirmed that in song. He could sense the Starsoul, but it was located deep inside the corpse of the ancient Starsinger and could not break free, although it was hidden from the Brood, who had no idea it was why the Acanti were still in this system after all this time.

“Well, there’s two ways to do that,” I told the fellow, getting ready to flit into the distance and light up some more carcasses. “You can simply have the Starholder fly overhead and drill a hole down into the head with a needle beam, setting the Starsoul free. All you’d have to do is aim for it.

“The second is to set the whole damn carcass of your ancestor on vivic fire and eat your way down to it.”

The telepathic Note that flared out was downright ominous in its intensity. The amount of mass we were talking about was potentially in the quadrillions or more of tons.

If just the few hundred Acanti here consumed that, they’d all be dozens or hundreds of miles long, each.

I zipped away to another cluster of corpses a few thousand miles away, but I was in full range of their Song, so it was no issue.

“Perhaps you might wish to gather a whole lot of Acanti, show them what you have learned, and bring them all back here to reclaim your ancestor and your Starsoul. There’s a few other things I can show you, too. Like, say, how to make up a gemstone that makes you immune to diseases... like, oh, the slaver viruses the Brood use on your people.”

Trembling notes were soaring through the song of the Acanti. They could not believe the good fortune they’d had running into me.

“Yes, yes, I know, I’m a great person, I am.” I pointed mentally. “You all, eat. Then, I want you to pull out of this system, and come with us into Shi’ar space. I trust you have no hostile history with them to speak of, and in any event, you’ll be coming in as our escort.

“If you can have as many other pods of Acanti as possible meet you there, then once we conclude our business there, we can escort you back here, liberate your Starsoul, and give the whole Acanti race a massive shot in the arm.

“If we’re lucky, the Brood will be tracking some of the pods and might even follow you to Shi’ar space to hunt you, and you can get some of the other Acanti fed right.

“Just know that when you display the power to weave cosmic energies, the reputation of your entire species is going to change. I’m not sure if it’s going to be better or worse for you when you are able to defend yourselves, but I’m certain it will be different for you.”

The many Acanti could only agree with that sentiment, but the idea that they could start taking their fate and defense into their own hands, instead of merely running away, definitely held their enthusiasm.

Even the unthinkable idea of leaving the Starsoul behind for a short time was palatable in the face of what might be the biggest change to hit their entire race in tens of millions of years.

--------

The Starholder basically ran picket duty after the dead were all set up, picking off bioship scouts, which an Acanti would then run over to and drag off to add to the menu.

Were the Brood getting pictures as the Acanti devoured the mountains of dead and began to swell in size? If they were, were they considering it a wild opportunity to get more huge Acanti mounts, or were they recognizing it as the massive threat it was?

Could they hear the hypersong traveling across FTL space to other distant pods, calling to assemble the species at a chosen destination?

Did they realize the Song of the Acanti could now make shields and attack beams, and the Starholder wasn’t necessary to the process, it just juiced it up?

Also, the Acanti weren’t stupid, and realized the power of technology. The Brood had proven that Acanti bodies could tolerate and adapt to technological intrusion, so was there a capability for the Acanti to gain some of this technology to use on their own?

I had to explain to the Acanti the differences in technology and power among the many races, and how rivalries between races resulted in competition and war, and that the things they could accomplish were very different between them. Furthermore, I had to go into economics and exchange and mutual benefit and profits and some of the very basic drives that motivated other races, things that were not part of the very communal-oriented society of the starwhales, whose ancient lives had long outgrown such limited, material struggles.

On the other hand, the starwhales were very, very well-traveled, and had seen much and knew even more. I let them know that the information they all held as to livable worlds, minable worlds, mineral deposits, energy sources, cosmic phenomena, interstellar and intergalactic routes of travel, and even potential services as travelers, freighters, and the like all had immense value they could trade for technological services.