He glowered at them all from the holo, and despite it being a recording, all the Kappa swallowed.

“The Way Masters lied to you. They told you that developing psionic powers was impossible for your kind. This was no more impossible for you than it was for my people, the Ruk. However, it is true that you will not naturally develop such things, and the mutation to do so is not present in your genecode.

“However, all that think may learn psionic power, and if the Way Masters could artificially channel the power, so can you all.

“That power is there. If you do not come together to use it, and harness it as a people, then you are going to splinter, crack, and revert to the tribes of your bloodlines, losing all the greatness that got you into space, and started that Federation of yours.

“If you wish to rebuild yourselves, your people, and this time have a dream not based on a lie, you will have to grab hold of the opportunity to learn psionics, link up with your kind, and build a stronger, better world that is not based on the lies fed to you by creatures that want to extinguish all that lives.”

“We are waiting on the far side of the moon. We await the following from you...

“When you have established local governments in all sectors, we will give you the option of contacting an Enlightener who can Open you to psionics.

“When you have established a planetary government, we will begin trading with you for your agricultural surplus.

“When you have redeveloped your technology and come to us on the far side of the Moon, we will sit down with you and see what you want to accomplish.

“You have been dispersed across the planet, given shelters by the Gardener who brought you here, and there are crops ready and animals who can be herded and raised for food. You will find some agricultural machines stored in underground garages close by, and Fabbers to help you that can make TL 5 and less devices out of silicon and carbon and trace elements.

“You have been shown far, far more mercy than the Ruk have ever shown slave soldiers of our enemies.” His voice had all the grinding grim, and made the Kappa jump. “Earn your right to sit across a table from us, not as dupes of the Darkness in the Void.”

The hologram bleeped out, replaced by a generic holo of the world they had been left upon, as seen from space, with a nice dot on it indicating their current position.

Whether the Kappa could recreate their Great Society without the artificial enforcement from the Masters of the Way would be their great test as a people.

---------

I watched station after station begin to light up as the leaders among the Kappa began to talk with one another, and began to organize. Going from a TL 11+ culture down to a 5-6 would suck, but they had been bluntly told it was a test from the Ruk. Overcoming it meant standing before them proudly... failure meant being stuck on a reservation in space until something came along and crushed them.

Motivation is a wonderful thing.

-----------

“How are Olympia and Eden doing?”

There were naturally other planets out there that had taken those names first. One was a Subsector Seat Tellus-ward, and the other had been used half a dozen times on various pleasure planets throughout the Empire... places where pleasure was definitely all on the side of the powerful, not those who worked there.

-Hoping for a bunch more enlightening snacks to drop by!- Herc /laughed in the far distance, where he and Hebe were playing parents to a newly developing world. The two planets were already communicating, and had established links with their Hagblood parents. They were quite eager to meet Hulkamania, but understood they had some developing to do first.

-Developing their biostructure as quickly as possible to generate the necessary energy to start modifying their mantles,- /agreed Delilah, watching as a forest started to grow from a grassy plain, that also had not been there the day before. -Those fleets had a lot of mass to work with. It’s going to take Olympia here months to break it all down and allocate it properly. It’s still considering the line of evolution it wants to take, too.-

Bruce and Jen’s kids were all Larger Than Life Talents after what had been done to the two of them, so literally head and shoulders and more above the rest of us. Oddly enough, the change seemed to have toned down their aggressive instincts, which was probably a good thing for the rest of the galaxy. They were taking great pride in helping the world-minds develop, and having Hulkamania available to give pointers to his seeds definitely helped.

Still, it was a development project that would take years. Even psi-boosted ecologies couldn’t be developed overnight to the required scale. There were a lot of niches to fill, after all.

It did mean we had a protocol for developing Worldminds in place, something that a whole lot of beings would definitely not want to happen, and would be happy to reduce to tumbling asteroids.

We weren’t going to tell them, so it was all good. Hulkamania’s star system, once home to a few billion humans, was basically stricken from the star charts... and had the first full System Ward, removing the entire expanse of the heliosphere from contact with Warp. There was literally no way for the Warp to find it directly... the best they could do is a guess outside the heliosphere somewhere, which could be literally light years off, as there was no direct correlation between Warp and realspace. Places with sapient life had much greater ‘mass’ in the Warp.

That didn’t mean Hulkamania was resting on his laurels. He had a private White Ward around the planet as well, and was working on a planet-wide gating network, and getting the White Hole generators in place to charge it up as needed. He wanted to put in a real big generator in his core, until we pointed that if anything went wrong with it, it was going to blow him totally apart, whereas if the stuff on his mantle did, he’d basically just have a land scar. It made the tech more vulnerable... but he also had more room to work with out there.

He restricted the deep generators to Mass Compactors designed by the Ruk, who were in awe of the very idea of a sentient planet, and crazy-happy to work with one. He was effectively the biggest Citadel ever, and soon even had a native population of Vatted Ruk there under his protection and helping maintain all the increasingly complex systems all over himself. Given the ability of the Ruk to dwell underground, a couple billion of them just basically vanished into our oldest Worldmind, and you could barely see any indication they were around at all.

Hulkamania got along pretty well with the Gardeners, even with his ‘youth’, because he was just so bloody massive, and his presence throughout his ecosystem gave him an awareness of natural processes and forces that even the starplants didn’t have. They might or might not have seeded him originally... or even multiple times, over the eons... so there was a measure of connectivity there. He was also open for multiple ‘test lands’ of evolution here and there if they wanted to see some of the results of their seeding. If they were decent results, he’d replicate them quickly across his ecology.

He could develop some pretty dangerous warbeasts, given the exposure to xenos genetics and the like, but he was also very careful of the tainted psychic signatures of the things. That said, if you wanted a T-Rex equivalent to ride around, he had all the carnosaurs you could shake a whole bunch of sticks at.

Hulkaspace was the ‘home system’ for the youngest Gardeners. It was safe to grow there, they could learn how to modulate a Sun Gun and a System Ward, and there was plenty of friendly tiny people who could guide them to fertilizer. It was a perfect garden for the Gardeners.

All the humans in the system were Marked, as were any of the Vatted who made it to Six... almost an inevitability, given how seriously they took their jobs. With a living planet there to help with the perfect environment for having kids, it didn’t take too long before there were a bunch of little non-Vatted Ruk running around...

---------

In the meantime, the Federation of the Way was slowly and deliberately taken apart.

By the time the Gardeners were on the fourth system, the Anti-Life no longer dared to get within a light-week of any of the systems. The relentless power of the Gardeners, their very real hostility, planning, and ability to take revenge on the dark matter entities, was completely outside of any of their expectations.

The second world of the Gulgomph was gone, no survivors. The homeworld of the Xrik was wiped clean. The system shared between the Naruff and the Chirichiru was emptied of life. The Gassth were sharing a system with the Kappa, and it was swept away. The Kollos lost their most prized mining system completely.

The Federation tried valiantly to stop the assaults, but the Gardeners were implacable, fast, and incredibly deadly... and they were very well informed ahead of time of where to go and what to do, and possessed senses and experience acute enough to take care of the rest themselves.

The populations naturally were wondering what they had done to provoke the starplants, and panicking beyond even the ability of their masters to deal with.

We were unsurprised when those masters began booby-trapping the worlds to wipe them clean of life, Omega Sanctions that might take a feeding Gardener down with them when it was time.

It was unfortunate that the Anti-Life didn’t let their little puppet peoples evolve psionics. Divinations were perfectly good at sussing out what was happening, and then a few hundred square miles of sunlight focused on the locations of the dirty bombs, planet-crackers, and virus weapons was able to either clean them off or force preliminary detonations.

The planets of the Federation died... not because they wouldn’t surrender, but because their leaders and the creatures out in the void would not let them do so.

What remnants of their fleets survived found a distant star to gather at, from which they could only plot the survival of their species, and find some distant world where they could regrow.

That was about when space began to change color...

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

“Pretty small as far as Warp Storms go.”

It filled the void for light years, a leakage from the Warp into real space, swallowing entire systems with space and mind-twisting power.

It was something of an overreaction to an area that had slowly pushed away the influence of the Warp long ago, establishing a safe zone which, once the foundations of its power were literally eaten away, collapsed with startling speed, exposing it to the eyes and the wrath of the Gods of the Warp.

Oh, and all the Anti-Life that were still hanging around in this safe zone because of an immortal’s sense of timelessness, didn’t move along quite quickly enough.

Mah Fuzzy and I were toasting one another, me reaching Eighteen in Melee via Warlord, and watching a series of monitor results off to the side of our Marks, where some very esoteric monitoring systems attuned to para-gravity were measuring the coherent motion of masses of dark matter across the whole area of the former Federation.

It was falling in distinct little quantities as unlimited psionic and spatial power tore at the hapless masses of the Anti-Life, and ripped them back into component dark matter.

All the habitable planets in the area of the Federation were basically already lifeless, so there weren’t any innocent species being subjected to anything there.

I pointed at another monitor. “Warp Storm activity around the Rift. It’s closing by light years.”