“Transit, go pick up another load.”

“Acknowledged, Dojo,” the hauler replied, pulling out and away with remarkable speed for something so big. As soon as it hit the edge of the gravity well, it flashed into Jam, put up its Tachyon Bubble, and was ascending the parsecs per hour back to our staging area a thousand light years away.

Another twenty Gardeners were indicating their great excitement.

“Let’s make some more fertilizer,” I ordered, and the Reaper Fleet peeled smoothly away. The Death Collectors took up station behind us as we left the Gravity Well and went to Jam, chasing after the rest of the Xenos Fleet.

They were less than an hour ahead. We’d catch up in literally minutes under the Tachyon Drive.

------------

It only took one good shot to kill the bioships.

If they had their full psionic shields up, they could deflect the Blacklight. The first attack was meant to get in before that happened.

Still, we only had to make contact once. Thus, if the shields were up to deal with energy attacks, a breacher shot went out on railgun, exploded against the fields and dispersed the localized energy. A TL 20 saber beam sliced out, shearing space and opening a wound in the black skin of the creature. It exchanged out with the Blacklight Beamer right next to it, which sent an inky-black stream of darklight into the innards of the creature.

The Gardeners had provided some extruded pieces to test how an organic creature could fight the blacklight. Being covered by enough layers of inert or dead material was absolutely effective against a blacklight assault. Likewise, the spread of the death radiation wasn’t instantaneous through a sizable body, and so, with quick enough reactions, limbs could be sacrificed, and organs and body mass cut loose, to save the rest of the creature.

That was a lot more difficult when the shots were plunging hundreds of yards into the bioship’s internal mass, equivalent to getting shot in the chest. What were they going to sacrifice in time when the blacklight was flashing through their neural network?

Transit dropped off three more loads of Gardeners, and the void burned unwhite as they began to feed. I sent a message off asking how many of the hundreds of Gardeners wanted to get in on this.

The answer I got back was impressively ambitious.

-------------

The sky was full of tumbling, stiffened mothership corpses. There were no explosions, no flames, no lights, save the occasional popping of a sporeship or fifty being blown apart by pulse cannons.

Chalice cut space, and a Gate opened.

In FRT-2ZA space, Anatolia did the same with Codex.

Both ends of our Gates opened up in Gloom between the great rings there, only ten feet apart.

From the opposite side of the Gate in front of her, there was a boom as air was forced out of the way, and a blur of motion forty feet high raced out of her Gate, and into mine, moving at miles per second.

The air roiled harshly before the suppressors kicked in and kept it away from the solid wall of matter making the ten-foot transit between the Gates. Thousands of watchers paused to watch the line of mass going in and out, trying to calculate how much volume it was.

It was hundreds of Gardeners, end to end, moving at miles per second, their bodies morphed down to tubes of fibers and tendrils as they plunged in one Gate and out the other.

I watched them spray out like water from a hose, diverting in continuous spirals and flowing into their leafy sail-patterns, an awesomely beautiful sight as they morphed and unfolded in spiral after spiral of great crystalline flowers... hungry, predatory flowers.

The locations of the many scattered bioships were painted into their Maps before they hit the void, and the first ones headed for the ones the furthest away quickly, eager for a great and momentous meal.

The Reaper fleet was on station, along with a lot of fighters, there to light things up for them. The Death Collectors were waiting to harvest the lesser lives inside each ship, and the Gardeners went to work with remorseless, grim efficiency.

The reaping had taken place with murderous efficiency. Instead of picking off a few ships from the rear of the fleet, we’d brought in an Interdictor who could generate a gravity well a million miles wide, put it up front, and Harmonic Drove it down through the Sundiving Xenos Swarm.

Hundreds of Xenos ships had been caught in the Interdiction field, or slammed right into it once it was up, clustering them up awkwardly in surprise and confusion as the rest of the Swarm fell into the distance at FTL, the psychic communication between them suddenly reduced to background static and idle silence.

The Reapers came at them from all directions. Blacklight cannons took out scores in the first few seconds, the Xenos having no idea what was going on. As their shields materialized in crackling auras of frantic psychic lightning, triple-firing guns breached, cut, and injected. Harmonic drives flashed them into new positions in the middle of clusters of ships, and as the Xenos tried to fire, triple salvoes flared, injected death, and the Reapers shot away as the offenses around them faltered and died.

Some spores and biofighters did manage to hit the void, but the MF Gunboats were on the job and ready to deal with them, as were the point defenses of the Reapers. Snap shots of autocannon Blacklight Beamers one-shot every lesser bioform, turning them into tumbling biomaterial. Only hardened spores with unstable payloads were anything resembling a danger, and the point defenses took care of most of them, while the Ruk-grade ablative hulls bounced the rest.

In less than ten minutes, over three hundred bioships were reduced to drifting carcasses, while the cerevores inside them went mad with desperation.

Their emotions in the mindscape when the Gardeners came down with their crystalline sails, the stars dancing and distorting in rainbows behind them, weren’t exactly brave in the face of death, either.

--------

There were enough bioships for all the Gardeners we’d brought in, with some going to be eating more than one of the smaller carcasses: the frigate, cutter, and destroyer-classes. Tractor beams were scooping up dead biofighters and tossing them at the nearest Gardener, who took them without batting a polyp.

Anatolia didn’t get out much, so she was standing out there with me on the deck of the Dojo, looking around and watching everything that was going on.

Her real combat experience was a fraction of that of a lot of the other Tens, let alone the Ten-plusses, but her Talent was so valuable that it didn’t mean that much. As a Twenty, she was qualified to play chess with gods now, and would now be putting all the copious Warlord experience into both her Melee and Rantha Levels, aiming to both break Twenty as an Eternal Warlord, and having the Stats to make a go of it when she got there.

We weren’t in a hurry. There was at least one galactic war to build up to first.

Watching plans coming to fruition was basically a Glory Award, while the first offensive action against a Xenoswarm in galactic history was setting off all the bells and whistles.

“They’re diverting courses,” she noted with the experienced eye of someone used to tracking the motion of every single piece on an impossibly complex board.

“Six Scouts up paralleling the main fleet.” Her eyes flickered that way, placed them, and nodded once.

“You expect them to come back looking.” Paranoia, such a healthy thing.

“By which time we should be billions of miles outside their flight path, since orbital drift is about two hundred and fifty miles a second here. Their Sundiving is a gravitational acceleration, not an instant jump, so they have to drop out of Jam, turn around, then accelerate back this way. All psi indicators are that they are basically in the equivalent of REM sleep, in fugue while they travel. The cerevores might be active inside with something, but they aren’t the overall hivemind. Their responses are going to be slow at best, and they might not notice until they get close to their destination...”

“Or the Anti-Life glide by and wonder where a sixth of their invasion swarm went to, if they realize it, or wake up the rest of it and find out.” She looked around, calculating variables with me. “Low probability.” She tilted her head. “Sticking fusion power cores into Gardeners. That was just crazy, Mom.”

“And they are just eating like crazy because of it. It’s just another form of sunlight. The Gardeners can even ramscoop to feed them.” I smirked. All them Ranks in all the branches of science gave rise to weird stuff. It was a good thing I had so many thoughtstreams to be chatting together and consolidating them all.

“You’re not really expecting to wipe out the Xenos Swarms, are you?” she calculated.

“Realistically, no. It would take a long time to scale up large enough to actually deal with their numbers, and that’s a lot of men and material to put into a fleet devoted to a single purpose. But then, we don’t really need to get a massive fleet. We just need to turn the Xenos into one.”

She looked at the hundreds of Gardeners feeding eagerly, and began to calculate again.

“They have so much biomass,” she murmured.

“Three fleets, three minor galaxies worth. Several gas giants worth of biomass, I reckon.”

“That is going to make a lot of very big Gardeners...” she murmured softly, her dark eyes glowing with the light of a winning strategy moving into place. “And if we can establish cordial relations with the other Gardeners...”

“They’ll turn themselves into a remarkably hungry xeno-eating fleet of their own... and then head off to Seed the empty galaxies. Hopefully.” I squinted at the great plants nom-nomming away, kilotons of growth per minute as the vivus broke down the bioships with great speed. “Nice having some who can talk about goodwill and cooperation, although I have the impression the older Gardeners are just going to ignore it all. They have too much prior experience to look back on to care.”

“So we’ll have to recruit the younger ones who want to grow. Imagine that.”

“Arranging for the deaths of the bigger ones isn’t that hard, either, now that we know the Anti-Life want them dead,” I noted calmly. “In such events, just warning them that they’ll die if they leave a system is pretty good, too. They won’t be able to do so without our help.”

“If we get the Gate Rings up, you think we can send them to the other galaxies?” she asked, leaping ahead of me.

“I imagine we just might. And unlike here, there’s no planets full of sentients to get mulched by them. There’s just Seeding, and lots of new stars... and maybe xenos to wrap up and kill, if they haven’t all been sent here.”

“Nice. Just have to get the Gate up and going.” I held up a finger. “Oh, and we have to get those galaxies scouted, too...” she appended hastily. After all, we didn’t have anything resembling a Map and targeting coordinates. While conceivably us two and Ronnie could pop across to a star inside those galaxies, none of us felt like truly trying to cross the galactic rim with power of that level, and the local Gloom’s shadows didn’t actually extend to the other galaxies, as far as we could tell. Making a Gate without some sort of anchor on the far side was likely to be pretty stupid... and if we had only one, that was still stupid.

She went looking in Markspace, and saw the teams in the newest, fastest, sneakiest Alias Mark V-class scout ships hurtling off into the dark of the void towards those source galaxies, intending to start a little trouble there. A smile curled up on her lips.

“Oh, and I heard there’s a big movement starting among the goblins. Like they are thinking of emigrating, and taking it to the enemy that cost them their great empire in another age. So, they kinda thought they’d take theirs in return...”