“Truly creatures that can carry out galactic purges,” he murmured, a light entering his eyes that had not been there a moment before.

I nodded to myself. He hadn’t truly believed, but now he was starting to see the scale the Anti-Life worked on so leisurely. If this Purge worked, there would never need to be another.

We were ants, and now we were going to bite the elephant in the best manner possible, or whatever the Elvar equivalent was.

“When does this happen?”

I flicked up a countdown timer tied to the advance of the Xenos Swarm coming in. “We want all the Xenos inside the heliopause, and they are stretched out over fifteen light minutes. Happily, they are maintaining a fairly straight line, and compressing as they head in.”

“Are there any, ah, witnesses?” he asked, glancing at the three external blobs quickly.

The tac display shrank, blowing out to a great distance. “No mass readings of active powers within half a light year. We should be good to go.” It zoomed back in to the tactical read.

He smiled in anticipation. “You know, the knowledge that humans can build such a weapon is going to upset a great number of entities in the galaxy.”

“Including among your people, yes,” I agreed. “But, since we aren’t dancing stars around, it is, in the end, an ambush weapon, and it is slow. We are restricted to light speed, after all.”

He did the math at a glance. “Twelve hours lag between shooting and impact. Even inner planets are looking at ten minute and more delays,” he noted aloud, certain I knew the same. “This is really only suitable for shooting at things that cannot dodge, cannot shoot from a distance, and are close to the sun. Great power, but great weaknesses.”

“Correct.”

“So... why the White Ward? You are not leaving it here?”

“Ah, we were wondering if the Elvar, meaning you, might not want to buy one. Naturally we had to see if it was viable.”

He stiffened despite himself. “You would... sell one of these to us?”

“Yes. The Ruk would be first, but they already bought a double system and are putting it to use. You’d be the first to purchase a hybrid system, apart from the Gardeners themselves.”

“The Gardeners?” He blinked in surprise. “Why would they want one?”

“Because they want to go around the galaxy shooting Anti-Life?” I replied calmly. “It turns out the Anti-Life have been snuffing Gardener Clusters whenever they run into them, because the Gardeners seed new worlds to harvest on their migratory paths, and some of them give rise to sapients who can develop into threats. The very definition of a weed species.” I nodded at the Gardeners. “Other Clusters of them have proven less than willing to work with us, but that is fine. They are watching these developments, and things are happening.”

“The Xenosym would find it difficult to enter any system with a Sun Gun,” he realized quickly. “They could be swatted away like flies...”

“Yes. Perhaps they don’t realize the implications, perhaps they don’t care. But they are aware of the Anti-Life, and knowledge of what they are and have been planning has gone out on the etherwaves to their kind.” I frowned slightly. “Have you ever fought the Zygom?”

“The biovore fungi? They have an ill reputation...”

“It’s quite well-deserved. Their Mu-ships have traces of dark matter in them.”

He hissed despite himself. “The Anti-Life? Again?”

“Perhaps not direct servants, but certainly aware of them... and they are direct foes of the Gardeners. If they are direct servants, then they were bred specifically to take on the Gardeners, and failed, since they also leave spores behind when they eat worlds.” I wrinkled my nose slightly. “There’s rumors among the elder races that there are great Mu-Spores floating out in the void the size of planets, the elder titans of the race. They may have a love/hate relationship with the Anti-Life, we don’t know.

“Their rivalry with the Gardeners, we are absolutely sure of.”

“So, at the last being used against them.” The Sunhawk shook his mane of golden hair, bright under his plumed helm. “The workings of the elder races have always been strange, and their hatreds long and equally as alien...”

Then he realized something, and snapped his head around to me. “You Marked them!”

I smiled slightly, and nodded once again. “Yes.”

“They are... we cannot see them in the Markspace...” He immediately peered around for sign of them.

“Those who can contact them end up in almost constant tangential contact with them. So, you need a second thoughtstream to stand up to them. They are excessively powerful as they ramp up in size and power.” I pointed up.

He looked up in Markspace, to those three massively dangerous Lights glowing up there... and suddenly realized what those rippling lights beneath them were.

It was said that at one time, the gods of the Elvar had Avatars walking among them. He wondered if that was anything like the sensation he was feeling now, looking up at those massively scaled Intellects above them... and he could vaguely see and sense the other equally dangerous and hard points of light connected to them.

A God, a Titan, and a World-Mind walked into a bar, where a Mundivore was serving drinks...

The Sunhawk smiled to himself.

The Elder Races weren’t the only ones with unfathomable intelligences on their sides...

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

The star went dim.

All the glowing brightness contracted to a single point, streaming together and launching itself out into the void in a beam of electromagnetic fury powered by a mid-grade star.

On the exact opposite side of the star, the reaction force to balance this beam went streaming out in the exact opposite direction, heading out randomly into the void, there to dissipate in eternity... or possibly seen as a distant flash in the sky by some entity countless time/years away. It would be pretty bright, after all.

The focus lasted for exactly one minute, and then the darkness blossomed with light, and wild energies played over the Sun Gun modules, refocusing, redirecting, and re-empowering.

Sixty seconds after it stopped, the star went dark again.

There was precious little sign of it firing. Random objects in the path of the beam would be instantly blown into plasma and evaporate, but from the side, there was barely a ripple or hint of what was happening.

From the targets, of course, nothing would be seen until it hit them. It WAS the light they would be seeing.

Twice, thrice, four times the Sun Gun fired, and the ZPM’s were flaring red all over the diagram. That was a lot of energy they’d just delivered, and thousands of them had just burned out from the stress.

No matter. They were a lot easier to fix up now than when they’d first been invented. Basically, they were just temporary replacements for White Hole Generators, which had the same or greater output, and didn’t run out of juice. Lots higher tech requirements to keep going, however.

Now, it was just a matter of waiting, as the Tactical Display slowly extended four lines out through the solar system, modulated beams of terrifying intensity and focus aimed by a combination of millions of impossible eyes and psi-linked tech.

The Gardeners were already gathering the modules up, scooping them up with alacrity and coordination more swiftly than they’d deployed them. The cargo vessels that would hold them were soon covered in great plants calmly pumping the modules through themselves, arranging them in the holds of the ships smoothly and continuously as they were dropped off.

There were a lot of repairs to be done to them that the Gardeners just couldn’t do, and without using the Spider-Gate, they couldn’t bring the modules directly along with themselves anyways.

Well before the four shots reached their targets, the modules had all been collected, and were stacked up in half a dozen mammoth cargo vessels. Those ships engaged their Harmonic Drives, got out of the mass shadows as rapidly as possible, and flashed into Tachyon Drive, Jamming out of the system for the repair facility.

------

The two Anti-Life furthest away from the Xenos fleet were the first targets. The entire operating force of the star, focused into an area maybe fifteen thousand miles across, smashed through the heliopause, the electromagnetic forces dragged along as it bulged out, all that radiant light and heat compressed into that small area smashing into the startled dark matter entity sitting there.

Normal and non-baryonic matter didn’t interact together all too well, but that much sheer energy blew through its connective matter like a razor wind, shearing off uncounted tons of it and starting a whole mess of energy reactions that looked like countless atomic explosions erupting over an invisible, undulating surface larger than a standard planet.

The psychic registers posted out there all heard the scream as the heliopause bulged out and over it for that raging moment... and then pulled back.

All the writhing, burning Dark Matter came back with it.

-Confirmation!- King Rargyle Rittercrun of the Unforgotten declared grimly.

-All yours, Your Majesty,- I /replied promptly. The sensors were already in place, dumping lots of information into Markspace, and the eggheads of three races on Hulkamania were already diving into it. The next use of the Sun Gun against the Anti-Life was going to see some tweaking...

Some powerful Weapons chopped down in front of rail gun cannons. Riftcut Portals opened less than a light second from the writhing, burning mass of the Anti-Life light-minutes in the distance. Dark Matter warheads shot through just outside its mass shadow, and plunged into the mass of it.

They linked up together, forming a diamond pattern as they hurtled towards the dimming fires of the invisible entity ahead of them railing at the inner wall of the heliopause.

Perhaps it felt them coming? Regardless, it didn’t have half a second to make a decision, and they would have been barely visible, less than gnats.

They blew out, and the black hole of a dark matter singularity opened up inside the Anti-Life.

The psi-receptors were turned off, and every psion in local space was standing in a Graysphere as its death-wail warped space with its intensity. Countless tons of dark matter, the mass of entire great worlds, was sucked into the false and true gravity hole irresistibly.

The singularity effect collapsed, and the Anti-Life went off like a newborn star.

It had the mass of one, and all the calculations were in place. In an instant, a new sun was shining in the light of the system.

It was a light the other targets of that shot would not see in time to prevent it happening to them, and even the death wail was not going to get there in time.