They knew something odd was going on when the light of the star went out for a minute, of course. Twice, thrice...

But it didn’t mean they moved, or even altered course. They reached out with sensors and divs, trying to ascertain what was happening... and of course, what had happened had occurred ten hours before; there was nothing to sense, save a wobble in the heliosphere back then.

The Xenos Fleet coming in only slowed down on its direct plunge for the star, which changed nothing...

The light got very bright, and energetically bad things happened.

-----

When the Gardeners arrived at their locations some hours later, there were no intact xenos ships left whatsoever. The toughest of them had been reduced to crystallized shells, their atmospheres had become plasma, and they had died fast enough that their internal ruptures vented any pocket dimensions they had out into the Sunbeam, and whatever was within blew apart too.

However, what ignited in space, cooled down in space. The void was full of the raw materials of life, albeit now in very non-living forms. The Gardeners could deal with any level of radiation and Energized Materials with aplomb, and great starflowers swept through the whole Xenovore fleet’s remnants in a devouring wall, wiping clean any trace of them from the void, and finding plenty of new mass for themselves.

They took it all.

------

“Now what are you doing?” the Sunhawk asked me, as he watched a few Gardeners swirl around the two habitable worlds, and then sail away across the void to join their fellows.

“They are Seeding, of course. They’ve been gorging themselves on Xenovores for years. Hulkamania gave them some genespores, which they are mixing with random Elements and seeding onto those worlds.”

He looked a little strange. “The Xenovores are going to come in and strip both worlds clean...” His eyes widened. “And they are going to eat Hulkamania’s seeds!”

“Powered by Gardener genetics.” I looked out at the two worlds in satisfaction. “We’re not growing a Worldmind... we’re growing two! With a hunger for xenovores...”

“And they are only a thousand light years away...” the Elvar Commodore hissed.

“Perfect range to lure in another fleet or two before they realize something is wrong and stop coming, right?”

He could only hiss in appreciation. I was all the ruthless, I was...

--------

I had also just made Seventeen in Melee on a Warlord basis for pulling all this off.

Briggs had kept on his conquering ways, sometimes with a silken hand, sometimes with an iron fist. Sometimes they just didn’t want to be under an Ancient, and he strangled them to death with non-cooperation and limiting them to their own world, making trade impossible and driving them towards ruin. Hagbloods on the planets generally turned the attitude of the people around fairly quickly after removing those on top desperately trying to remain king of their own small hills, and a lot of planetary governors didn’t survive being deposed like that.

The whole Kublai subsector fell almost overnight to him when the various kids on the worlds finally got fed up with the recalcitrant and went after them. Not being afraid to not be the last to resort to violence was kind of a trademark, after all.

If peace worked, awesome; hugs, kisses, rewards all around. If you being in power meant everyone else getting the shaft, welp, bye.

They had said goodbye to a lot of skilled, powerful, and ambitious people over the last decade.

The Corunsun name and fleet had demonstrated extraordinary solidarity and coordination. It was also constantly bringing into existence new ships that were the envy of every remaining navy in the Sector. The Celestial Tribute was more than enough to challenge any single ship in the Imperial Fleet here, and more and more ships were being built, pacifying space, holding it, and dealing with anyone who wanted to stop the inexorable march of the Duke Corunsun.

Innovation was sweeping the subsectors under his control. New jobs were coming out, new talents were required, recruitment was going on, and unprecedented levels of training were happening as the Mekker monopolies were slowly shattered, opened up, subverted, or simply bypassed as irrelevant and passé now. Guild after guild of Mekkers was subdued and reorganized to return to its rote maintenance, support, and production origins, while its archives of technology were opened and looted time after time.

The kids found a lot of things as they did that. They shot a lot of Mekkers, and they shot a lot of wealthy and powerful people that, contrary to those people’s opinions, they could definitely live without.

Source after Source with dreams of what they wanted to do were put into place, and a lot of Nulls ready to help do those things backed them up.

Of the six Khagan subsectors, only the main Khagan subsector and Ogedai subsector were not under Briggs’ control now. Khagan was where the Throneworld of Rimcrown was, and the main core of Imperial influence. Ogedai was a mess of Warp incursions, random alien invasions, petty lordlings having it out, drow stirring the pot, at least one Tekron getting excitable at one point, and had been that way for the past century. The shooting showed no sign of stopping, and the Imperial Crusade to retake it had been stalling from the level of Warp opposition and corrupted planets joining in.

Briggs made sure to keep that Crusade fully supplied from his obligations, and slowly introduced upgraded tech to it, much to the discomfort of the Mekkers and delight of the Imperial Marines and Fleet there. If there were young Hagbloods roving off in there with some remarkably adept Planetary Guard units from random planets under his jurisdiction, well, everyone had to get Levels somehow.

Random Marquis-ranked kids who had been energetically disposing of raiders and pirates for years were also starting to snipe around the edges of the place for some extra Karma.

Post-Ten kids were all over the place. True to Source Presence, they ended up getting the attention without even trying, and if all the Hags were renowned for their competency, they didn’t really get famous the way the Sources did. The Ranthas were very competent, but the Sources got fans...

The kids, being wholly practical about the matter, promptly leveraged their skill into making the Sources even more famous. Fighting a Source’s influence was generally kind of stupid. Get it going in the right direction and riding it was much more productive for all concerned.

If there were rocks in the way of the river, well, Nulls worked hard, and removing obstructions was quite a happy pastime.

All those rivers and streams of Made Fate were pouring into and along Briggs’, carrying him along and raising his Influence to incredible levels.

He’d made Eighteen in both Melee/Warlording and Race, sticking to his Melee Levels and Race, and not going off on a tangent. He was smart enough to keep the key tech skills he needed without a problem, but he had tons of sons who could handle heavy thinking, as the Briggs were basically acclaimed as the best engineers and Psmiths in the whole Sector, and probably the galaxy at this point.

Ronnie could find the secrets and design the stuff, but the Briggs Boys were the masters at putting them all together... especially Power Armor. A whole crunky lot of them inherited his Natural Smith (and his inability to sing) and were perfectly happy to supplement it with Engineering Ranks, while others were Natural Engineers perfectly willing to supplement with Smithing Ranks.

The Thunder Companies considered getting a Briggs-made personal Weapon Focus or Psychic Weapon as essential as their Armor. Getting one to serve as Company Armorer was a goal of every Company Captain, especially when they were perfectly happy to go out on the field to find some entertainment. They didn’t stay overlong, as they’d be butting heads with the officers when their Levels rose high enough, but there was usually another one willing to serve as a replacement when that happened.

Null/Source relationships had problems when the Null was higher Level, and I’d deliberately been staying Deep and buying up all the Support Levels, while Mah Fuzzy had equally deliberately gone for some height. With him being higher Level, his Source Path could now completely accommodate what I was doing for him, and I could actually benefit from, and even marginally feel, the stuff that would further what he wanted to do.

I wouldn’t be the sort to take advantage of that, no no. I gave his River of Fate some scary hard depth, as did my girls and all our Nulls, while the Sources gave it volume and breadth. He was a rising force, and if he was still small compared to the behemoth that was the rest of the Empire, he was only getting stronger.

Cracking Obedai would get him to Nineteen. If he could take Rimcrown, he’d make Twenty, and we’d be balls-on to take on Imperial Authority when the Rift abruptly closed whenever. A lot of fanatical Imperials were probably going to die for that to happen, including a lot of Imperial Legionnaires. Many of the formal Legions and their companies were already watching Briggs’ rise as the Duke Corunsun with great trepidation, and for signs of corruption and Warp influence and all the fun stuff.

The attempts to infiltrate our organization never stopped, and the kids enjoyed making up accidents for them, one after another. The Warp never stopped, but every noble family, intelligence organization, government, mercantile concern, psionic organization, and the like were always sending agent after agent to get recruited and hopefully rise up within us.

Trying to sneak in even psi-conditioned and memory-implanted people didn’t tend to work out too well. Those kind of people were all too obvious in Markspace, and either they turned, or they were wiped. Having Natural Shrinks with Sense Motive checks in the stratosphere to bypass all that psi-conditioning was basically a nightmare for infiltrators and spies...

On the flip side, the presence of nymphals and Ancients were definitely warning signs to a lot of powers, and on more than a few worlds, people showing traces of either were purged bloodily. Given the kids could alter their appearances, this didn’t affect them directly... but oh, did it get them pissed.

The people who issued those orders, and the forces that carried them out, tended to get dead in some very violent and graphic ways, and shortly thereafter, the planetary revolution was generally on in a very nasty way in the halls of power. The kids had no sympathy for reactionist xenophobic racists whatsoever, regardless of their justifications or excuses, and the level of violence they were willing to deal those people was fully equal to everything they had ordered and undertaken.

They didn’t seem to enjoy being on the other side of genocide, almost unanimously.

There were always those trying to take advantage of such internal conflict, of course, and killing them was the other half of the job. It was a good thing the kids were such karma fiends, because there was never an end to the assholes at the top, or the total scum at the bottom.

Had we lost some of those fights? Yeah. There were plenty of those people perfectly willing to kill millions or billions if they couldn’t be the ones on top, and they took the steps to do so. Virus bombs, reactor leaks, Warp Events, Dead Walking Events, orbital bombardment onto cities with sabotaged shields, drow invited in to enslave all they could and kill the rest, sold en masse to Elder Races for unmentionable purposes... there were all sorts of people.

This was a grimdark future, and no way was it clean. There was work, and there was war, and the amount of both never stopped.

To our credit, we never let them get away with it, and they and their allies always ended up dead, but the death tolls still mounted.

It was grimdark. Death was the only way forward for most of these people, as fighting until you died, even if it was for the wrong cause, was basically the only way to keep living. If you gave up, your enemies generally killed you anyways, so why do so?...