The Gardeners came smoothly into the system through the Shadow Gate, flowing out of nowhere through a Gate opened up in the chaos of the star’s south pole, and the sensor-confusing storm of magnetics and radiation there.

These were all the older, bigger fellows, who had ingested a whole lot of xeno biomass and gotten very big, indeed. After all, a typical Xenos swarmfleet was equivalent to the biomass of at least several worlds, and potentially much more. Some of the bigger motherships held entire oceans in dimensional compression...

It was time for a little vengeance on a foe that had been harrying them for literally millions of years, perhaps a billion or more. We didn’t know how old the Gardeners were, nor did they. It just wasn’t important to them... nor to the Anti-Life, after all. They were just the weed spreaders of the galaxy...

Weed spreaders of immense size, who could clean off whole planets... and there were bunches of them, not just one.

When an alien planet-eater a few thousand miles across looms in front of the sun of your favorite homeworld, well, things go all to shit really quickly.

The Gardeners blew through the system fast. The solarsail tech woven into them, distilled from Elvar tech, had massively increased their in-system speed to a full .6c. They were effectively All Engine when they went to Jamming speed now.

They were seriously looking to get as inertialess as possible, and trading refined materials for their own tugs they could latch onto and sundive between systems along the phlos at multiples of c. No more years-long hibernation between stars for them, even if they all didn’t have their own private fusion generators to keep themselves warm all the time...

The kappa forces and Federation of the Way ships in the system basically had no chance whatsoever. This was a full-out Gardener invasion, and they wouldn’t have had the muscle to deal with a normal Cluster, let alone when not a single one of the starplants was less than a thousand miles across.

When Flowerbush blotted out the sun and came down on the planet, welp, lots of screaming, lots of pollen, megatons falling on city shields, roots digging out megacities from underneath, uncounted tendrils and roots racing across the planet and eating anything and everything organic, including the natives, while emptying the seas, sucking in the atmosphere, and generally speaking depleting it of anything that resembled a primary world of the Kappa.

They were interstellar, but not intragalactic. Taking this world abruptly cost them almost ten percent of their population, especially when all their space assets were unceremoniously crunched and disposed of.

While that was happening, the plants were setting up their brand-new private arsenal of 108,000 Sun Gun modules. They didn’t need to be dual use, of course... the Gardeners only wanted them to be weapons.

There were four members of the Anti-Life gathering outside this system, the readings indicating that they were roiling with anger. It should have been totally impossible for Gardeners to reach this system, let alone take it out with the breathtaking speed they had; yet now they got to watch all their private lights in the system go utterly dark.

Naturally they sent out word of what had happened, and the valorous dupes of their suborned races whelmed to face the implacable plants that ate whole systems. They had naturally been working on some powerful weapons they hoped would work well against the highly adaptable and extremely hard to kill starplants, having no idea that the Cluster of Gardeners here was probably stronger than any two or three other Clusters combined.

The Gardeners had plenty of time to put their modules into place, while others swam between many, many locations in the system that had long been identified ahead of time, and eliminated them one after another.

The Federation would have to literally rebuild from nothing when the Gardeners were done. The habitable worlds were stripped to stone... they’d have to terraform it from scratch to make it viable, and their megacities had been crushed flat, cracked, and left in absolute rubble, only useful for recycling, not resettling. If massive amounts of materials were also gone from those ruins, measuring in at least the gigatons, well, they were pretty big plants, you know? Those waiting cargo haulers all lined up were pretty much invisible in the shadows of two starflowers, especially when they left by Gate... along with the Gardeners that had eaten the worlds.

Flowerbush was perfectly happy to let the other members of the pod get their vengeance. Its was going to be more subtle... and it wasn’t going to be about killing.

-----

They waited until the Fleet arrived to wipe everything, gathering obviously towards the center of the system so the Anti-Life watching from afar could track them, which would keep the incoming fleet on a straight course to the inner orbits. Naturally the Anti-Life couldn’t see quite well enough to see all those little building-sized modules equally placed around the warm orange star.

Ten minutes was all it took. Less than a thousand of the modules completely blew out and would have to be replaced after the sun went dark five times, for one minute each time, and with one minute in between each time.

The other Anti-Life had died on the other side of the galaxy. Word hadn’t quite reached these Anti-Life yet, but there was no hiding the death screams of four of them when they were ravaged by the Sun Gun, dragged inside the reforming heliosphere, and the newly christened Blackrock-class stealth ships of the Ruk opened up with their cannons and put the Singularity shells into their centers of mass. Four new small suns surrounded the system, but no members of the Federation survived to realize it, although their suborned minions had time to scream before they were annihilated.

------

Over the space of a stellar week, the Federation of the Way lost a major Kappa system, and the equivalent of two System Fleets. But the unknown thing that shocked the Federation was a loss of four of the Anti-Life. It naturally sent the others of that kind reeling, as they had no idea how it had been done.

Of course, soon after they learned that the same thing had been done on the other side of the galaxy, and the Gardeners were involved. That led to a triple-sized xenoswarm fleet converging on that fringe system out there to learn more.

The two worlds with thin biospheres were tangential targets. Unfortunately for the xenos, they were also deadly infectious, with a horrendously fast, psi-powered agent that invaded ship after ship, and was launched out to infect the entire fleet with devastating speed. Only those few ships that had been left to study the new small suns burning at the edges of the system escaped the horrifying deaths of the xenos. The massive swarms fell onto the waiting worlds in storms of lightning, massive psychic energies rippling through the mantles of the worlds.

------

Samson and Delilah, and Herc and Hebe, the B&R teams responsible for guiding the developments of the new worldminds, watched as continents worth of bioships began to get devoured by rampant new life.

More to the point, the worlds began to broadcast steadily and ominous the ‘feeding signal’ that the cerevores used to guide them to worlds ready to be harvested. Come, come here, there’s food here, there’s a good xenoswarm...

They didn’t know what was really going on, but they knew something had just eaten 99% of a truly massive xenovore swarmfleet, and now was calling for more. The great swarm flying below the plane of the galaxy actually began to move away from the system, which only seemed to make the signal more plaintive...

=============

I watched them waking up, and looking around.

All four major subspecies were present, mixed up, and wondering just what the Hell was going on.

They were in villages now, surrounded by buildings and domiciles that looked like they’d been grown from the soil. The sky was an unfamiliar color, as was the sun... and the stars looked nothing like they had before.

There were a few billion of them, scattered around the planet, deposited there personally by Flowerbush and its companions.

None of them had any Dark Matter in them. Any such that had been detected had summarily been reduced to nutrients, processed, and the Dark Matter ignited before they’d ever left Tuichaspace, the system the Gardeners had exterminated.

There was one manufactured building at the core of each gathering. Naturally this became the focus of attention.

Within that building was a holographic projector and some workstations tied to data centers and overhead satellites... and a waiting message.

King Rargyle’s face was known to them. He did grim pretty damn well, and despite their anger and railing at the image, when someone got brave enough to push the play button, the glitter of his crystalline eyes cowed them all.

“This message is to the species calling themselves the Kappa.

“Normally, we simply would have extinguished you.” The horror of his statement, after the ancient prestige of the Ruk and their aid against the Warp Fleet, brought gasps from those watching. “We were convinced otherwise, and remarkably enough, we found common interest with the Gardeners, the great starplants who brought you here.

“Yes, you owe your lives to the mercy of the planet-eaters. The reason for that is that you were dupes of the great enemy of all life in the galaxy, and we believe that you can earn your rights back.

“The sub-species you called the Moonbloods, or your Masters of the Way, were not truly Kappa at all. They were a genetically engineered race broadcasting a transpathic signal specifically designed to moderate emotions and encourage harmony among all members of the Kappa nearby. This ameliorated the natural conflicts between the four subspecies of your race, and united them in unthinking slavery to their wishes and demands, cloaked in their babbling philosophy.

“They have all been expunged from among you, as have any of your kind with their bloodline. That bloodline was easy to detect, because their power relied on Dark Matter infusion into your genetic code.”

The requisite information displayed on side holograms, and those Kappa schooled in the higher biological sciences gasped at the display.

“We discovered this during the conference we had on board my Citadel, the Unforgotten. In fact, every single member race of the Federation is so enslaved to the Darkness in the Void... the very same creatures that infiltrated and drove part of our people mad, and set them against the rest of us.

“They are the creatures responsible for the creation of the Tekrons, the unholy machines that have purged this galaxy of life multiple times.” Videos of the machines purging a world or six played around him. “They developed the Xenovores specifically to eat worlds to the bones so that no new life could arise.” Videos of hundreds of worlds swarmed by the biovores played around him. “And they formed the Compact of the Black, suborning N’Grthi and Mi-Go to serve them, doubtless using them to create your Way Masters and the other gene-slavers of your Federation.

“This world you are on is low in metals and Energized materials. It simply does not have the materials needed to get you to the interstellar stage. For that, you will need us, and you will need to cooperate.

“You are going to find that without the Way Masters, your natural racial divisiveness, the antipathy and racial biases that existed before them, is going to manifest once more. The solidarity and cooperation that was artificially enforced upon you is going to wear away very quickly, because your four subspecies are indeed naturally divided.”