Eighteen months later a big Warp Fleet, something plenty huge and able to really cause a lot of terror somewhere unfortunate in the Empire, was spotted coming out of the Abyss.

Its course was calculated to take it into space outside of Imperial Space, so the Imperials watched it come, and watched it go, having a remarkable lack of desire to get in front of it, or chase it through the Warp.

Corunsun scout ships paralleling it in real space Tachyon Bubbles, however, were not quite so apathetic.

That Warp Fleet came out in system TK4-9948b (damn Mekkers), called Kikirrimo-space by the Kappa, meaning ‘at the foot of mountains to climb’, one of their primary border worlds and outposts.

Excitement followed.

The Warp Fleets didn’t know what they were really getting into, or where they were going, save for some divinations, and roared through the system in a flurry of Warp energies and mayhem... except the former was a bit weaker than they were expecting.

Still, Kikirrimo was put to the torch, demons rampaged through fields planted by faithful kappa, and the defending fleet was annihilated.

It was the kappa’s first time truly facing a foe bent on their utter destruction, not seizing world after world, and having no appreciation or care for the value of what was annihilated. Civilian transport and evacuation vehicles were preferred targets for the slaughter, and the Kappa were unable to stand off and snipe like they wanted to against these relentless, mad attackers.

Forced to place themselves between the Warp marauders and the helpless evacuation fleet, they were obliterated, and only a tithe of the planetary populations managed to get away.

They Sundove out beyond the heliosphere, and my watching scouts confirmed that they were actually using the Gravity Conduit Drive. It seemed the circumstances surrounding it were so famous that it couldn’t be buried, and they had tested it out and rushed it out into production, verifying their own brilliance, doubtless restoring the reputations of scientists and engineers long dead in the bargain.

That redemption was saving some of their people, while some scattered into the system, and could not be bothered to be chased down by the marauding fleet, who, by their coms, felt more irritated than triumphant here. One of their lighter vessels with some legs tried to track the remnant of the Kappa fleet, followed them outside the heliosphere, and abruptly lost all contact...

The lighter ships couldn’t seem to jump a Helldiving Portal to enter the Warp in this system, and had to follow the cruisers and larger ships through theirs. We watched calmly as they took off in the direction of another star nearby, leaving only a token fleet behind to harass any scouting ships or relief forces that came into the system too late.

They were probably not expecting a Ruk Citadel to show up out of literally nowhere, look around, decide they didn’t like what the Warped had done, and blow them screaming out of the Void with an executive decision.

They located the hidden remnant of the Kappa with ease, and calmly radioed them in Trade, the artificial language they’d devised over a hundred thousand years ago as a neutral language for dealing with alien races, and which any species in the galaxy that traded with others had a record of.

The Ruk were cold but not unfriendly, while the Kappa were understandably nervous and afraid, turning down any offer of aid in favor of waiting for a relief fleet. The Ruk simply acceded to their request and swept off silently into the night, leaving the awed Kappa behind.

---

The Ruk took off after the Warp fleet, which was commanded by a fairly famous ex-Wolf Dark Legionnaire called the Sunbreaker for some reason... and they weren’t the only ones.

The Anti-Life around the system were already gone, leaving along a spatial track paralleling the Warp Fleet as it burned through the Warp to their next target. The Ruk trundled after them, not really worried about them, but wary nonetheless. They had never undertaken active hostilities against the Anti-Life, and while their Dark Matter Cores could literally eat the creatures, they had no idea how they would fare in a direct fight against them.

More data was needed...

As for that Warp ship that was stupid enough to breech the heliosphere, it looked precisely like a tentacle made of neutronium had smashed into it at miles per second, and shattered it like a child’s toy. They might have seen it coming if they had demons looking at stuff, but there would have been literally nothing they could do to stop it.

They were swatted like a fly, and died just as easily.

If a couple Corunsun cargo ships ghosted into the system and made off with the remains of some fairly current Kappa ships, and specifically the bodies of a few dead Kappa Way Masters... nobody noticed, no harm, no foul...

We found the proper Phlogiston River to take, but it was only to save power, as we didn’t want to overtake the Anti-Life and let them know we were in the area. The Ruk followed, a mountain in motion, and we headed to the next Kappa system.

------

The Anti-Life broke around the system to be closer to the point of arrival, and there were three others present... four... five... and probably another three or four present out there in the void.

The ships of the whole Federation were coming.

Ostensibly there were seven allied species involved in the Federation, come to join The Way and living in peace and harmony to mutual benefit.

Now that we knew the Anti-Life were involved, we doubted that heavily. This whole trip was about gathering evidence. We were going to find out which races, we were going to follow them back to their homes, and we were going to get some proof.

‘Mutual defense’ was certainly on display as we made our way into the system. The Warp Fleet had already come out into this complex binary star system, with a very intensive asteroid belt and scattered ore-rich planets, a bonanza of an E-element mining system any species would covet and want to exploit... and full of all sorts of places for ambushes and skirmish fighting, which was the preferred tactic of the Federation, who preferred to kill their enemies rather than hold ground.

This refusal to engage in a straight-up fight naturally annoyed the Warp marauders, who after being sniped repeatedly by rapidly fleeing Federation vessels, and punished if their elements split off to chase, began to sweep the fields with waves of ships, digging them out of hiding as they swept back and forth in waves, forcing the ambushers to break cover and run again and again to get away from them, suffering their own losses as they did so.

Destroyed ships had dead crews and scannable tech, spinning off to be lost in the asteroids. We quickly hauled them away from the battle lines, gathered them in a drop point, and when the Ruk finally arrived and moved into the system, they swept past those places and left nothing behind.

-------

“What was that?” I turned my head and narrowed my eyes.

“Nothing on scope, Captain!”

“Coms are clear!” agreed Lt. Nii-kol.

I held up my hand. “Psi-waves. Bottom of the band, ultra-longs, like a long, low song.”

Scanners were adjusted, results popped up before me. “Definitely got something, Sama. Multiple sources, not very powerful, and scattered across space,” Lt. Meechak murmured, looking for matches in the database. “Oh, shit.” The match turned up.

Cellulocusts...

I considered. Emma’s attempts to open communication with the star-seeding plants had basically been ignored... although she hadn’t been focused-fried by a hundred-thousand square miles of organic reflectors, so that was a thing.

They were present in the system, but not in size. Scattered, in hiding-? They were biovores, implacable and irresistible as nature. Even xenovore fleets avoided them. What could crush and shatter them?

One guess, start with the first letter of the alphabet...

“Track the nearest source. Let’s pay the sun harvesters a visit...”

------

We hove into the shadow of the rock, a crater-pocked, half-cracked monster of an asteroid about twenty miles long and fourteen thick, vaguely bean-shaped. The telepathic signal vanished abruptly when we came close enough to be detected, and the rock ahead of us scanned cold and dead on the surface, with none of the reflective surfaces and crystalline patterns typical of the cellulocusts.

Then again, they were probably hunted incessantly by the locals, so there was that.

Star-seeders. The cellulocusts seeded worlds with life, to evolve on their own, and be harvested the next time they came through, which might take millions of years. In a magical universe, more than enough time for sentient creatures to arise in many forms.

Give them a barren galaxy, and in a galactic generation, they could have it teeming with life again.

The Anti-Life must loathe them, but since they would have problems seeing baryonic life, they wouldn’t be able to do much about them, and even Tekrons would have problems with the psionic powers and sheer scale of the starplants, a decent swarm of which could cover half a sun the size of Sol with their light-eating sails.

The only cellulocusts we knew of were full-size swarms. We’d never seen one shattered.

The only way that was possible was if the Anti-Life had caught them in the middle of a migration through the Void. Even the cellulocusts would have had trouble dealing with invisible creatures the size of Jupiter...

Let’s see if this one was willing to talk instead of fight...