The kids being smart like they were, and the Tens below them also realizing the implications, they obliterated the Beacons as close together as they could. On the Map, I watched the Beacons in the galaxy wink out, one after another... and in typical over-compensation, people were looking to make sure there weren’t any back-ups, online or no.

In most cases, they found some that definitely weren’t made public. Given the time limit, most of them required immediate nuking or orbital bombardment to get rid of them in time... and a ground assault to get inside the shield generators that seemed to rise out of nowhere to protect them.

Oh, yeah, this was going to be bad.

The God of the Machine had to intervene in multiple cases, specifically helping power relays burn out or circuit boards fry to drop those Shields.

But He couldn’t be everywhere, and had to rank them in order of activity.

The most vulnerable area turned out to be the Noble Sector.

There were plenty of ancient families out there who didn’t want to submit to the Corunsuns... and some of them were perfectly willing to hold aces up their sleeves, and among them were working Beacons they could use on their own to communicate secretly.

The Great DM borrowed the calculating ability of our world-minds, dumped in the configurations, applied profound analysis, and oh, yes, those damn things were basically single-circuit psionic resonance conductors, the whole design harmonized perfectly with constructs in the heart of the Crystal Throne, and capable of conducting unimaginable amounts of energy.

The Emperor felt the Beacons vanish by the thousands every second, and promptly initiated His killplan, probably cursing that He hadn’t caught us unaware.

I didn’t know how many dead psions He had reanimated, but the numbers brought to work their lives away in the Crystal Throne over the millennia, herded in from across the Empire and so giving Him psychic ties to worlds and bloodlines hundreds of generations apart from Tellus, had to be in the hundreds of millions.

Animated, and entombed beneath the Crystal Throne, and now psychic undead slaved to the Emperor...

The Beacons that had not been destroyed Pulsed once.

The Topped Ultrablast that went out was planet-wide. It tore into the minds and souls of every living thing on those worlds for sixty points of damage, literally blowing out the synapses of pretty much every non-combat native under Seven on the entire planet at the same instant.

Then it pulsed again, and thick waves of negative energy blew out over those worlds, even as corpses were falling everywhere. A Dead Walking Event rumbled across the entire galaxy as thousands of exposed worlds died instantly, and even before the Warp could take this huge influx of doomed souls, they were caught, bound to their corpses, and Animated into the service of the Emperor in the Imperial Palace.

Were there survivors of the blast? Certainly. Plenty of remarkably tough or high-Level beings survived the blast. On average, they numbered about .00001% of the populations who died instantly.

The blasts were also powerful enough to reach into orbital space. World-rings and orbital stations were Blasted, and while some of the officers and the elite could survive, they, like their compatriots on the ground, were massively wounded, at the same time as all their comrades who had died were rising as undead.

And if they died, they’d be coming back as undead, too...

-------

I could only close my eyes and sigh, matching the actions of Briggs ten thousand light years away, and hundreds of thousands of the kids.

Marked, Coronals, and Umbrans who we could contact on the afflicted worlds were being evacuated at maximum speed. Even having vivus and being Ghost Knights didn’t mean they could survive entire worlds being turned against them. Officers were desperately trying to kill their undead crews while trying to detonate their ships or stations... some succeeded, many did not.

The Emperor had just made Himself at least a quadrillion new undead, and instantly seized thousands of worlds and systems, all without moving from the Imperial Palace. He hadn’t actually gotten that many ships, as naturally most such were not in orbit and so beyond range... but it hardly mattered, when He had seized the worlds and the souls of those they were supposed to be defending.

It was the single largest massacre in galactic history, and far greater than the First Warp Invasion, or even the Machine Rebellion.

Most of the Corunsun worlds had escaped by the skin of their teeth, and even some of the neutral worlds managed to act quickly enough.

The schemers and hold-outs... the Emperor took them all back into His fold, now eternally loyal to His wishes.

It didn’t give us much choice at all, of course. The White Fleet split up, aiming to get as many of the heavily defended worlds Whitelighted before the undead could get full control of the defenses, and then we’d start wiping the lesser worlds.

But there were only a hundred ships, and thousands of worlds and systems. We’d end up having to break the orbital defenses with brute force to replicate the effect on any main worlds, which would slow the process down, while the undead would be on a major war footage the whole time...

I had another thought.

-Running through the Elvar. This is not something I asked in the past, but I need to know now. The Emperor is obviously capable of opening Portals into Gloom, since He invaded Gloomheart. Which of these worlds has a Portal to Gloom?-

The Elvar were already starting to focus a LOT of attention into making more Sunburst Bombs. This request went into some old, old datastores, before the Apotheosis, and came back with Pretty Much All of Them.

He’d be opening up those Portals and flooding endless armies into Gloom, which could then explore and seize more Portals, beat up the drow, make more undead out of the natives, and start exploring the new layout of the place with their pure numbers.

While the size of the Portals restricted the pure threat they could represent from an assault basis, you only needed one to toss a Negative Energy Bomb or flood a world with a million spectres and wipe it clean.

-I want the Gloom Portals on every single world, and hopefully in many of the systems we control, broken Right Now. I strongly advise the Elvar do the same, especially the ones on your Starhomes. The Emperor is going to be looking for those psionically, and can probably locate them swiftly and take action.

-I imagine the first of those Portals are already being opened, communication links being established between the undead, and the Mapping of Gloom has begun. He is going to be combining munitions, troops, and ship movements by consolidating them on Gloom, and he is going to be looking for Portals to inhabited worlds to Convert them suddenly and abruptly.

-Move it, everyone!-

----------

The amount of brainpower that got to work was staggering. We were up against a mercilessly intelligent being who had thousands of years to prepare, deep reserves and contingency plans that were all coming into effect, and he was playing them masterfully.

His only weakness was that He hadn’t gotten all the ships He intended to, and that His conversion hadn’t hit the whole galaxy at the same time. Given the timing gaps in the Beacons, it took two pulses per world, or about twelve seconds, to kill and re-animate one world, and He could do multiple worlds at one time... ten or so.

His conversion had only taken four hours before He ran out of targets, so somewhere under twelve thousand worlds had been wiped.

There were only a hundred White Fleet configuration ships who could Whitelight a world. The high-end Elements needed for a Sunburst Bomb meant each one of them took a month to manufacture, and our reserves did not match up to our needs at all.

Under best case scenarios, it was going to take years to kill all those worlds... if we did it ourselves.

=======

A Deadship zipped into Delta Aquarius space, as dark and silent as it could be. It wasn’t aiming for the world of the living drifting serenely there, but the bright and glittery forms revolving around the cool blue star there, digesting their last meals of a Xenosym fleet.

Moving in Jam almost as fast as a Harmonic Drive inside the system, it closed on the nearest of the Gardeners adjusting, feeding, and some preparing to split as they absorbed a continent’s worth of biomatter in the botanical equivalent of deep satisfaction.

Specially configured Blacklight Beamers aimed, and fired at the starflowers.

Life-slaughtering radiation speared out and played over the thousand-mile spread of the plant, turning life at right angles to itself, instantly spreading through all the living biomatter with lethal purpose, and in a matter of seconds staining the whole Gardener dead black.

Done right, even plant-based creatures could be made undead, and the Emperor was watching through the eyes of the captain of the ship as the Gardener was Converted. His Will gathered, ready to reach out and seize the will of the undead plant, stamp it with His command, and make for himself a world-eating slave and new nightmare for His enemies.

There was a poof of white, here, thereeverywhereatonce, igniting like a thousand flash bulbs going off. It was a soft, misty unwhite to living eyes, but to the undead, it burned and flared with hot, hostile hunger.

With a woosh, the vivic fire blew across the Gardener, devoured the Blacklight, and if anything, the renewed colors of the starflower were even more vibrant and crystalline than before.

This of course took place several million miles away, which meant there was a delay in light reaching the undead. The undead captain’s thoughts were still going out, the pilot’s withered hand moving towards the inertialess drive, when all those flower petals aligned perfectly, and a million square miles of sunlight converged on the Deathship.

The heat, of course, was beyond description, a million degrees of incineration that could tear apart even the most obdurate matter. But that much light in one place even had kinetic force, and worse, was carrying traces of the vivic fire burning through the mass of the Gardener. It shredded the necroderm plating on the Deathship’s hulls as it blew the whole length of the ship in less than three seconds, turning it into a bright white flash in the void.

----------

I received the report from the Gardener apologizing for not noticing the Deathship sooner and picking it off before the Vivic Wards woven through its structure could be activated and betray the fact they had them.

We could only wave it off. We had definitely wanted to surprise Him with the fact that no, He couldn’t Blacklight our Gardeners, either, and indeed, the Gardeners could be used to wipe worlds, too.

It was out in the open now, no reason to restrict ourselves.

Gardeners resting between bouts of munchies were Gated into fallen systems in clusters, set up within a few million miles of the stars, and from literally an AU away, began to burn down necrofied worlds. They first popped the orbital stations and rings, and any ships, with a million square miles of sunlight condensed down and aimed from a hundred million miles away obliterating anything in its path as they played it up and down the faces of the worlds, and ignited firestorms and vivic explosions across the dying planets.

They were looking forwards to re-Seeding them when they were done, too.