“Bulls-eye,” breathed out Norbert Ebersol, and Tony Stark sighed as he took his hand off the lever. Barb’s blue eyes glinted like cold chips of ice.

Behind them, the power cores and conductors began to fracture and split apart, the energies of an entire star having gone through them. Not designed to persist after this one shot, they were going to rupture and explode in the most violent way possible.

“We’re out of here.” Barb hit the button for them, and energies swirled over them, carrying them away.

---

The Starholder had the full view on holo as the teleported Terrans walked onto the bridge. They didn’t look any more excited than the Nova Corps members there did, including both Richard and Jessica Ryder and Tony’s own wife Pepper, his new baby daughter Morgan, nor the Xandaran Queen Adora, seated in the captain’s chair for the moment.

The Sunbeam had harnessed the entire output of the Trantan Sun for exactly thirty seconds. Something reusable would have required far more modulating stations arranged around the entire star, something they hadn’t had time to do. Several dimensional folding stations and pocket universes mirroring the energy out a single Portal had sufficed to do the job for that one shot.

The Sunbeam had easily encompassed the entire Black Disciples naval forces assaulting Xandar, as well as the Shards of Xandar themselves.

What were those still-burning atomic fires, the leaking poisoned energies of these devotees of death, against the pure fury of an entire star sweeping across them? Their shields had lasted merely seconds, and their hulls and ships even less so.

Matter basically went straight to energy, atoms were ripped apart and were driven along the tireless beam of super-nova force. It would take many light years for that beam to lose its killing power, but space was large, and it had not been aimed at any neighboring stars. Perhaps in millions of years, some distant world in an unseen galaxy might see a nova-flash light up the sky...

Behind it, literally nothing was left. Anything material had been reduced to free-floating atoms and was heading for interstellar space, and that included everything that had been left of Xandar.

“Gentlemen, that was the most terrifying and redoubtable defense that has ever been recorded in Xandaran history,” the Queen informed the sober Terran geniuses quietly. “We have lost the last of our homeworld, but in doing so, it struck a blow that galaxies will remember.”

“It was our honor to help, Your Majesty,” Tony said respectfully, his face still long. “I am sorry we could not do more.”

Ebersol was also quiet. The nastiest surprises he could come up with, with the most beautiful technology he could possibly work on, had, in the end, been unable to deal with the attack. It was a terrifying and sobering moment for the Fixer, a problem he had not been able to fix. Mutual destruction had been the very best thing they could achieve, bringing in all of the enemy closer to loot and so be wiped away by the Sun Gun.

Barb stayed silent, considering what else they could have possibly built, and just shrugging it off. Without someone doing mass matter transmutation full-time, a full-bore Reality Warper, it was moot.

“Time and Fate were against us, a pair that even Xandar could not defy. But Xandar did not lose this fight. Our Worldmind and the Nova Force still live, as do our people. If we face such a fight again, we will be prepared once more... and this time, not in haste, Master Stark, Master Ebersol, Lady Barb.”

“Your Majesty, it would be my utter pleasure to make sure that comes to pass,” Tony promised firmly.

“Perhaps we should begin in the Sol System and this world of Venus you have prepared for us, then. But first,” Queen Adora pointed ahead, “let us wipe the very memory of this scum from our home system!”

The Starholder surged ahead with a flaring of White Hole power. Around it, thousands of Acanti swam alongside, most of them bearing the gleam of Xandaran technology upon their hides.

It took them a remarkably short time to wipe the whole system clean of wreckage and almost any trace that the great pirate fleet of Black Disciples headed by Nebula had ever been there.

Of the arcologies of Xandar, there was nothing left to retrieve.

------

Cautious scavenger ships came into the system days later, jumpy at the complete lack of communication and ship traffic.

The system was clean, the wreckage and debris of combat removed with a thoroughness that had them gasping with dismay at the loss of salvage to be had.

No fleet of death. No shining arcologies standing elegant in the light of the Trantan sun, nor even any sign of the last floating fragments of noble Xandar...

There was only a single sculpted Nova Star monument, crimson and gleaming, the symbol of Xandar floating in the void where once the world of Xandar had orbited its sun. Impaled on three of the miles-long prongs of that sculpted eight-point red star were the respective shattered hulls of a Skrull, Luphomite, and Dark Disciple ship, floating cold and silent in the void.

------

“Hey, it’s the Goddess of Passing Hyperspatial Disasters, Poor Scum.”

“Hey, it’s the Terran of I Love Xandaran Tech Baggy Eyes,” I replied deftly by way of greeting, holding up from passing by in flight and turning to the man in the special blue and red uniform in the Xandaran Pattern. The red acknowledged his special status as the newly minted Master Armorer of the Nova Corps.

The Fixer wasn’t one to sign onto any military, even one running at a tech level like this. His colors were green, and his designation was Master Engineer. His superiors were Stark and Queen Adora, and that was all. The Nova Warbots had been his design, and the havoc they had wreaked had justified the trust shown in designing them and letting the dead from the Worldmind drive them.

Barb the Builder was on LaGrange Station, working with Wrench and the Xandaran Fleet in setting up ship production facilities in Solspace, and continuing the upgrades and defenses of LaGrange.

Stark was looking over the solar furnaces in orbit around Venus and the megatons in materials floating there waiting their turn to be melted down, separated, and Energized into the desired Isotopes, as appropriate. More solar furnaces were being constructed first, in addition to the production lines to make more production lines rolling off the assemblers and fabricators.

A smaller Acanti, only a hundred miles long, glided up to the end of the line and began spitting up compressed balls of metals and ceramics that had once been starships, or maybe Brood tumor-cities. Gravity control moved them precisely into lines of floating scrap now hundreds of miles long, feeding into the burning hell of the furnaces to be smelted and readied for use in Xandaran technology.

“I’ve been in space. I’ve seen the Kree and the Skrull, their ships and their fleets. But I never had to try and stand against a full fleet that a galactic empire could throw against me...”

“The Shi’ar could do something similar. And you know what? Given five years, the Magus that I took out could have done the same thing, maybe sooner.”

“I’ve been told that you have Cosmic Awareness?” he asked me directly.

“Yeah.”

He waited for me to play it up more, and I said nothing. “That bad, huh?”

“Yeah. After all, we’re just dealing with the powers of three local galaxies, and not even big ones.”

He digested that, and winced. “Are any of the big ones looking our way?” he had to ask.

“No. They’ve got other problems, calcification and age top among them. Fighting intergalactic wars is a strain on the older ones, although they’ll still do it if it will be a short, victorious war. The Great Race has a habit of doing that, pocket empires all over the place.”

“Mythos stuff.” The races of Mythos were all over the place, but didn’t seem to have territories in the local stars. Further out, yeah, there were whole galaxies basically subjugated to the likes of the Mi-Go, Great Race, and the like.

“They flit about everywhere. There’s a Mi-Go base out on Pluto I should really go get rid of, but I’m trying to figure out a way to do it that won’t draw a much more intense response.”

“The Acanti?” Stark proposed instantly.

“The Acanti will do anything I ask them, so I don’t like doing it.” I rubbed my Mask, and sighed. “But yeah, that’s best way overall. Just have them slide by and swat them. The Mi-Go have dissected more than a few of them, so I understand the Acanti have been casually crushing them as pests wherever they go.”

“From the records I’ve looked at, the High Guard treats them the same way?” Tony had to remind me.

“Pretty much. We’re waiting for the kneejerk planet-wipe reaction to arrive, but the Mi-Go seem to be a bit out of sorts over the sheer amount of personal power some humans have, so there’s been some delay in a proper reaction, which is for one of their spore-ships to drop a custom virus on the planet.

“Eh. Maybe the Celestial Seed kept them at bay, and they are slow to realize the Celestials aren’t here. Maybe having active gods around...” I shrugged.

“Ah, the benefits of having active pagan divinities around.” He eyed his ‘production line’ as the scanners roved over the nearest deposits of scrap. “Some good stuff here, and a lot of raw materials. I understand you and Grimm Materials still put out a lot of the true exotic Isotopes?”

“A ‘lot’ is highly subjective. But, yes, in terms of what comes from Terra, we put out a lot. I understand they love the Electro cables, too.”

“Dillon does a good job with them,” he admitted grudgingly. “They just made a six-Sigma refiner for Dillon, and that format we lifted off the Shi’ar has been a godsend in his ability to set up more cable. I understand Ebersol devised a production system for e-silicon wafer chips to the same standard?”

I nodded. “The programming is the only thing holding it back at this point, but the Worldmind has been contributing sample code for us to work with. The Nova Force isn’t exactly ideal for that kind of work, and can’t effectively Energize anything. You probably noticed none of their Isotope Recombiners are above Tier Three, except for Gravity/Mass. That’s still incredible, but making the Fours and Fives requires devoted tech they have to put in place, and the stuff isn’t optimized.”

“But they have so much juice to play with that it didn’t matter?” Tony hazarded.

“Correct, but they usually found workarounds in parallel tech trees, too.”

“There was a lot of parallel development in their records, even if it went nowhere or was nonproductive. They loved just learning stuff to know stuff,” Stark sighed in appreciation.

“There’s a superminiaturized vacuum tube technology that looks promising for various reasons that I’m looking into. The production demands and tolerances are stiffer, but they can handle more juice than chips, especially at the superconductor level. It’s also a tech tree Xandar didn’t go that far down, given their Living Computers, but there hasn’t been a significant tech discovery in Xandar for almost four thousand years. They’ve basically maxed out most of what they could comprehend as a people.”

“Oh. That’s a thing?” Tony blinked.