The Gates themselves were taking form up there in midair, in the null-grav in the center of the tubular dome. A lot of drones, vehicles, and people in mech-suits were engaged in some very high-end technical work, while below on the ground Spidey Base One was opening Rifts to bring in components, with Ronnie actually arranging large amounts to come in at one time via Gates.

Rift-launches were now ubiquitous yet discreet among our production and transport facilities. Any Rift lasted at least 150 seconds. That was a LOT of time if you have, say, a bullet train moving at speed. The only problem was how big a Rift was, as a basic one was only eight foot in diameter tops. It took a full Gate to reach twenty feet and take a full-sized load of cargo, or really big items.

That actually wasn’t hard to accommodate. The trains were built very close to the rails, and there were different cargo modules for each type of portal being open, and for people being transferred. Tuck your legs in, get the rail up to speed, open the portal and foom! You could get a few miles worth of cargo through even a Rift without any problem.

If two Rifts opened at the same time, zip from world to world without stopping, keep your hands on the rails,please...

We were going to be doing something of the same sort here. The big Gates weren’t intended to bring things here, they were intended to bring things through here and away. Smaller Gates, once we got them, or more Rifts were the idea behind Spidey-base, which was basically a dispatch center for Rantha stuff moving here and there. The only long-term residents of Spidey-base were the hyn basically manning it full time now, facilitating war and trade across the galaxy and loving it.

The Ruk were definitely enjoying working with some massive high tech again, especially given how few, if any, of their people actually understood their own highest end tech. The return of the Grimshield had really brought some hope to their people, a sign of the ancient times returning, and new times before them.

Change, and evolution. Not things the Ruk did easily, but with my firm boot in the rear, definitely something taking place.

Racial teamwork, rah rah rah.

Mah Fuzzy was about to announce to the galaxy the discovery of a long-lost race of humans of short stature on a forgotten world in the Khagan Sector. Given how the Emperor had probably removed that gene from humanity, this would be another kick in his crystal teeth. I guess we’d just have to leave the part where the drow rediscovered that out of things.

Making a perfect set of ten-mile wide space-bending rings was definitely an engineering challenge, but the Ruk were up to it and loving it. Since they would have explicit permission to access it, what it might do for them being able to move around, yet go back home quickly if required, was a definite thing.

Or go to a White World full of Vatted being attacked from nowhere...

I was actually helping with some of the math in the back of my head as I looked up at the massive construction going on. It should be up and running in another three months, if the Ruk could get everything made. Their production facilities still had more scale than ours, after all, but we were still growing in out of the way places. Only Janus III’s ever-increasing orbital ring, most of the scrap cleaned up and furnaced back for reuse, was anything resembling a primary base for us. Most of the worlds still were making AMT stuff for Imperial-issue ships, after all, a never-ending sink of resources it was hard to replace and upgrade...

Gates allowing instant access across the galaxy. The only limit was the amount of psionic power and energy available to get them working. The more capapsitors we had and the speed we could recharge them at, the faster these things could be used. Even TL20 tech was faster and smoother with psychic power, after all, and shielded by the Underweb and a whole lot of You-Can’t-See-Me, the Warp couldn’t reach here unless we devolved to using magic, which wasn’t going to happen.

Having static Gates outside was asking for trouble, as we might have to blow them if any such position was seriously attacked. Mah Fuzzy was expanding his realm, but he wasn’t anything resembling a serious galactic player, more like an annoying upstart with delusions of grandeur, not even having control of a third of a true border Sector, let alone someplace important and developed. There were star clusters with more people than all his worlds combined... which was kind of an indication of how many people there were in the core worlds, more than putting down that there were literally over a trillion people already caught up in what Briggs was doing.

I had hit Fifteen Melee Warlording the battle of the Unforgotten. I would hit Sixteen when this Gate came online, and our strategic options exploded.

I wasn’t even the second person to hit Twenty among us. Anatolia rode her place at the head of the Strategos as Expert all the way to Twenty, and was calmly now working on her Rantha Levels as she continued her work of guiding our efforts across the galaxy.

My own Expert Levels were also rising, as I was still the number two or three person below Ronnie for a lot of Stuff, although more and more of the girls were rising to take over aspects of development here and there, often by finally getting control of their own worlds and beginning to develop the heck out of them in the desired direction. Plenty of opportunity for Warlording and Rantha Karma putting down all those objecting to the new road they were planning, if they were inheriting the positions from the recalcitrant.

That was fine.

In the meantime, it was time to take the fight to the Xenoswarm fleets.

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Finding them was not hard. The fleets of the Xenosym numbered billions of bioships, strung out over thousands of light years below the galaxy. They weren’t moving with much speed, and elements of them would peel upwards and into the galaxy at various targets they were alerted to by cerevore infiltrators... or perhaps agents of the Compact of the Black.

They only attacked and raided, and were fought back, destroyed, or were successful.

There was no attacking, no dissuasion, no retribution. They attacked us, we never attacked them, the very definition of a stupid strategy. All defenses would fall in time.

There were plenty of Ruk ‘advisors’ on the ships of the Reaper Fleet. A profound anti-Aberrant Rune was inscribed prominently on every single ship here, rendering them Defiant to the Aberrant, while every single Weapon mounted on these Ships were Bane to them.

These were not ships made for system defense, raiding other races, scouting, or anything else. They were made to hunt the Xenos.

Great containment spheres were housed in a big cargo hauler behind us as we plowed through a coordinated Gravity Braided Conduit down and into the side of a swarm rising up from the uncounted numbers of the Xenos below, aiming for what looked like the Sherinji Cluster.

-------

There were only twenty warships in this fleet as of now, with a couple support ships. There was only so much material and manpower we could spare on this effort, after all, so twenty ships was actually a pretty big sacrifice on our end.

With the backing of the Ruk, however, increasing the number of these ships shouldn’t be an issue. They had the resources and the production facilities; they just didn’t have the numbers or inclination to be manning ships so small.

The Ruk with us were all those undertaking the advancement of their psionic abilities. The Xenos had been among the species responsible for their downfall, and knowing they were minions of the Compact of the Black only settled the desire for revenge further into their hearts.

However, like anyone else, they had to earn their positions. Their psionic abilities were definitely not as developed, and while their crafting and engineering abilities were not in question, this was a warship, not a Citadel. There also would be surprisingly little melee combat, if all things went well. Indeed, if it came to boarding, we were doing something seriously wrong.

The Xenos were definitely not expecting to encounter any kind of force out here in the Void, and all our scopes were absolutely clear of Anti-Life as far as we could tell, for at least several parsecs.

Their Sundiving transition was not hard to take advantage of. We flashed up behind them at much greater speed than their simplistic Sundiving, and twenty motherships suddenly broke out of Jam and transitioned back to realspace with us as we hit their gravity well. Both sets of us dropped to tactical speed.

They had just about enough time to be startled and start putting up their psi-shields when the ships flashed forwards with Harmonic Drive, got in weapon range, and played the Blacklight Beamers across them.

Their thicker carapace-hulls might have been able to sink enough of the radiant death coming at them, but they had too many tentacles, flippers, and fins out, all pulsing with transgravitic energies.

Those pulses faded instantly, and the lights extending into the motherships stiffened and went dark. Tentacles and tendrils froze, and then went stiffly limp.

On the psychic level, there were massive, unbelieving screams. Washes of dread, fear, and oblivion, the sensation of death stealing up, life turning at right angles and ripping free of every living cell, spreading on and on and on to the next living cell, shook the mindscape with the strange horror and disbelief of the Xenos motherships.

Our psychic jammers were up and making sure that was only fading background pstatic to the rest of the Xenos fleet moving ahead at FTL.

The bioships shuddered, and lost all propulsion. Gravitic tides began decelerating them to orbital speed, even as the many, many living creatures inside them began to panic and pscream for help into the uncaring void.

The cargo carrier rumbled smoothly in, and all its boxes opened.

There were only twenty Gardeners in this load, although the entire species was watching events in Markspace. They flowed out organically, spreading out like sails, riding light and aetheric currents forward on the galactic wind with beauty and control, if not speed, and swept down on the drifting motherships several dozen times their size like great predatory nets.

The secondary guns of the fleet began to spit out pulsars, needle beams, and saber beams, all of them tinged in vivus. The dead organic matter began to burn and break apart, forming entry points for the Gardeners to begin a fusion-powered digestion process.

Great tendrils bored into every entry point, tearing the wounds wider, spreading the vivic flame, hastening the spread of it, while countless roots and feelers spread into the carcass... hunting down those within.

Psi-energized roots wound about with vivus ripped and tore everything, shredding the crystal and metal-hard body of the mothership, pulping and rupturing, and the minor organisms within were crushed and mashed along with it.

Some of the creatures aboard tried to get out via sphincter-launched spore ships, were idly picked off by the ships waiting on station. Every hint of life and motion was felt by miles of cellulaen fibers, hunted down, and extinguished mercilessly and constantly.

The tendrils that weren’t shredding things began to plant themselves in the burning biomass, and started to swell.

The Death Collectors hovering overhead collected the huge amounts of negative energy that comes when miles-long living organisms and all the millions of lesser ones inside it die.

Roots and tendrils pulsing, the Gardeners were wreathed in white fires as they feasted on the black-carapaced mother-ships, the fusion cores helping power the process pulsing energy into them as they began to feed, and to grow on all the biomass...