The ripples across the Elvar spread slowly but thoroughly, and the quiet actions by the Sunhawk did more to start the ball rolling than all the impressive speeches.

His strikes and raids became much more surgical and pointed. I didn’t have a problem with him punching at stuff that was punching at the Elvar, but I did have problems with anyone retaliating without discrimination because it was ‘easy’.

There were naturally Elvar opposed to any form of cooperation with humans, and perfectly ready to shoot many things and kill a lot of humans to enforce their beliefs.

My kids had no problem culling them from the Elvar herd, either. Undiscriminating racial loyalty justifying all things was just an excuse for the Warp to have fun. If xenophobes wanted to shoot one another, that was fine... it thinned their numbers, while those of us on the side cooperating could show that there was another way.

------

Much time passes...

“What is this?” Sunhawk asked from the outer bridge balcony of Dust Between Stars. He looked at the small yellow sun, sitting out here on the fringe of nowhere, in a system with six worlds, one easily habitable, another with some hardship. The force field kept the air a comfortable temperature, any hostile rads away, and the view was awesome, of course.

His divs were fully capable of reading the 108,000 stations in place about the sun, and the whole crew was nervous seeing what was orbiting between those stations.

Gardeners. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Gardeners...

That the ship hadn’t been burned out of the stars by thousands of square miles of crystalline eyes focusing on them was already impressive.

“This is two things we’ve spent a long time on,” I replied. I had Gated right onto the balcony there, making him wince slightly at the precision and threat it represented. I could pop there and proceed to butcher the bridge in no time at all, if I was of a mind to.

But all he had to do was look through the Door at me, and he could tell I simply wasn’t the kind of person to do that. He’d have to give me a very good reason to take him out, and xenophobia was one of those fear effects I was not susceptible to.

“This is an experiment we’ve been working on for almost a decade now, working with the Gardeners there. We made the systems functional earlier elsewhere, but we had to implement them separately. With the help of the Gardeners, we’ve managed to combine them into one.”

He stared at the flowering, colorful forms of the immense plant creatures. They had always predated the Elvar, and his people had always treated them with the healthy respect they were due. Establishing cordial relations with them had simply been beyond their abilities. The nigh-immortal plants simply saw no reason to mess with smaller lifeforms that were just dancing motes and moving fertilizer.

“Leaving aside the sheer impossibility of dealing with the Gardeners,” he had to sigh, smiling slightly at the audacity, and the fact it had actually worked, “what manner of science have you come up with? Our most ancient records talk about harvesting stars and moving them... have you managed to emulate them?”

“While that is potentially something we can do in the future... no. There are plans in the works for how to go about it, and the Ruk have the resources to pull it off... but otherwise, no. Dragging stars around is, in the end, not very productive. It’s easier to move planets.”

I didn’t miss the way his eyes twitched at that idea, but his people lived on Starhomes, which were basically small traveling continents, so the idea wasn’t that farfetched.

“The purpose of all this? For a science experiment, it’s quite grand.”

That was true. Wrapping a star in a shell of 108,000 perfectly placed Zero-Point Modules with solar siphons to help the process along was a thing you didn’t do for giggles. We had started scaling up nicely, however, and the ZPM’s didn’t need to be active all the time, just for those surge demands.

“Well, this system is about to be invaded by an arm of the Second Xenos Swarmfleet.” My Band interfaced with his ship, did a handshake faster than his systems could actually register, and suddenly his tactical display was up in front of us. He drew a long face, rolled his eyes at my cheekiness in suborning his systems, and made a mental note to chide whatever psion was supposed to be stopping such things.

There was also the fact that there was a lot of tactical information there that wasn’t coming off his ship’s divs. I blew it up for him helpfully, and his eyes narrowed at the long stream of organic ships flooding into the system in an unholy stream. In real space, they were spread out across a million miles of void, gravity and space folding around them as they hit the sun’s heliosphere and came out of their Sundiving and down to normal Jam.

On the tactical display, just a thin line of planet-eating doom coming in.

“The planets here have biomass; they are basically scavengers bulking up for a run at a populated system?” he hazarded. Knowing they were actually bioweapons of the Anti-Life and not just rapacious aliens forced a change of viewpoint on even the Elvar, and so their anti-xenos tactics and efforts had increased significantly. “Or... are they here for the Gardeners?” he suddenly realized.

The Tactical HUD suddenly drew back, and he stared at the Second Fleet less than a thousand light years ‘below’ them, crossing under the galaxy not far away.

“Yes. A N’grthi ship actually spotted Gardeners in this system about two months ago. The biomass on the planets is kind of thin, but they would have gotten to it eventually. The move happened very soon afterwards...”

“Further corroboration that the Compact of the Black is working with the Anti-Life and the Xenos,” Sunhawk nodded.

I flicked up another reading, and his golden eyes narrowed further.

There were three Anti-Life hovering at the edge of the system’s heliosphere. Given they were the size of gas giants, that was plenty ominous...

“Given their size and mass, why aren’t they breaching the heliosphere and just coming in to do the job themselves?” he had to ask.

“We’re not sure, but it seems a solar magnetic field has a massive restraining effect on their dark matter bodies. They might be able to get in, but not get out, from the combination of solar radiation, magnetics, and mass, and would be stuck in the system until the star collapses. Certainly it’s not dangerous from a normal standpoint,” I said.

He looked at the three nebulous blobs of dark matter, the incoming line of Xenovores, and was suddenly thoughtful as he stared at the sun and the flitting forms of the massive gardeners. “What were the two purposes for this experiment?”

“The first is a White Ward for the entire solar system.” I liked his confusion. “Ah, a White Ward severs the system from the Warp. We had it working on a planetary scale, managed to upgrade it to the solar. From the perspective of the Warp, the system has simply ceased to exist.”

His shock was apparent. “If... the Warp is no longer contiguous, does that mean-?”

“No, the mana is still corrupted. We could potentially purge an area of it with enough vivus, but we’d have to keep doing so, as it would simply spread in from outside. While the Warp wouldn’t be able to tell anything, the corruption and degradation of body and soul would still occur. All it does is make studying magic in small, tightly purified areas more viable.”

He exhaled a long breath, amazed despite himself. “That is still an extraordinary accomplishment. Severing an entire system from the view of the Warp...” His eyes sparkled suddenly. “What were you intending to do with this system?”

“Nothing. It is unfortunately too close to the swarmfleet below us, and even if something happens here, it will be set upon repeatedly and purged by one means or another. It’s just bait.”

“Bait. That means a trap. Traps need to be sprung, which means weapons deployed...” He looked at the sun meaningfully.

“The entire output of the sun,” I acknowledged immediately. “A Sun Gun. Electromagnetics, radiant energy, neutrinos... everything but gravity itself, which we could technically do, but it would have adverse affects on planetary orbits, and should be unnecessary.”

“You... are going to shoot the xenos with the entire output of the star.” He was impressed despite himself.

“Well, not just them.”

The look in his eyes was heartening as he realized the real reason for this show. “You are seeing if this is a viable weapon against the Anti-Life!”

“It’s not just sniping them,” I half-agreed mildly, and his growing smile froze. “They stay beyond the heliopause. What happens when that heliopause reaches out and grabs them?”

His breath hissed out. “You snatch them inside the heliosphere and trap them here... to later eliminate at your leisure?” he had to ask.

“Yes.” Now my voice had grown glacially cold. “The Ruk use Dark Matter power cores as their favored source, and are now on the road to reclaiming the ability to actually make them once more. But it should come as no surprise that munitions using Dark Matter are easier to make than furnaces are.” I had slitted eyes as I stared at the Anti-Life. “I have my doubts that the Sun Gun can kill them, but it will surely weaken them. If we can trap them, fine, that’s a bonus.”

“And you have those munitions here...” he breathed out, and I absently flicked up several quiet points of light, sitting out there beyond planetary orbits just off the way to the Anti-Life’s positions.

“We don’t want them getting word out, so best to not take chances, yes?”

“You have set a fine trap,” he had to admit. “Do you think something like this has been done before?”

“I don’t know. Did our predecessors even know it was the Anti-Life behind it all? I have my doubts, or they never would have built the Gatherers just to face off against the Tekron.”

“The Tekron...” The Elvar Commodore trailed off in thought. “How successful have your efforts against them been?”

“That little bit of work is also due to be tested in a couple of days. Things are just sort of coming together. We know where pretty much all the Creche Worlds are in this galaxy. The neighboring ones...” I could only sigh. Backups to whatever was here, and likely working in concert with the xenovores to keep the galaxies sterile.

“You made it known earlier that you were also taking direct action against the Xenovores. How successful have your efforts been?” he asked, golden eyes turning to those three threads snaking beneath the galaxy, safely out of the reach of Warp Storms.

I waved at the Sun. “We started with 576 Gardeners. We now have 1209. Oh, and they started out massing less than a frigate each.”

Sunhawk looked at me, looked at the display, and then at the Sun in the distance, and the forms spanning thousands of miles working around it.

“You have been killing them for the Gardeners to feast upon...” he murmured.

“Their leader, Flowerbush, right there,” I pointed to a Gardener over ten thousand miles across, flitting with casual ease and speed among the solar modules, “has informed me that there are traces of over half a million distinct genetic lines in the remains of the Xenovores.”

The Sunhawk stared at those lines, and then glanced here, there, and there, to the galaxies behind them, where they had come from.

Half a million worlds, devoured by just one swarm...

It was worse than the Apotheosis of Amourae...