The Badoon exited hyperspace inside the Moon’s orbit, notably being deployed around LaGrange so they could capture it easily. They were naturally working on a surprise basis, as Earth didn’t have any interstellar presence to speak of, and certainly not any extrasolar intelligence.

They definitely weren’t expecting time travelers from a thousand years in the future, who also happened to be plane-shifters. Wouldn’t that just muck up all the Divinations, even if the pair of them were basically immune to such, just like me?

It generally took at least a second after exiting hyperspace for the drive shields to come down, and defensive shields to come up... if you were trying to get them up fast. If you were just leisurely surrounding half of a barbarian world and instantly showcasing the massive numbers of your fleet, that was something else.

On the other hand, our side wasn’t taking the chance, and just opened fire from their optimized locations, many of them right in the middle of the Badoon fleet.

The HUD updates on positions were computer-fast, and the railgun-launches were near lightspeed as they went off. The Badoon ships didn’t even get their alarms off in time before the launchers were empty, and their automatic shields didn’t get up in time.

A third of their fleet immediately painted the void with erupting antimatter fireballs, and another quarter were at least winged or crippled.

The Terran Defense Fleet de-cloaked basically on top of and among the Badoon ships, and went right to howling work at literally point-blank range. Aware they wouldn’t get past the superior shields normally, they instead breached the shields by literally coming into ramming range before unloading on the Badoon ships.

The ships that had Xandaran munitions, on the other hand, had no trouble blowing those shields apart and slamming anti-matter into the Badoon.

In that one second, I covered about 160,000 miles of space, and smashed my way through fourteen Badoon troop transports.

I also Sang a Note in the Sublime Chord. A Note, enhanced with the Voice of Thunder I borrowed off Composite. That Note had all the force of an atomic blast, compared to the song of an average human, and its result was similarly enhanced in range and power.

Little tiny Shards became great wedges of force the equivalent of main cannon blasts, and shot out into the void as if alive, seeking out their targets with no-miss magic. Deflection fields, sudden cloaks, chaff; none of it mattered to no-miss Shards, and coruscant blasts scattered through the fleet as my first salvo blew through four different flotillas of Badoon fighter craft and tore them apart.

The fact they were scattered over hundreds of miles of space was irrelevant. The magnifiers of Cosmic Sublime Chord power were just too damn high.

Tatalia led the way for her husband, smashing her way through four destroyers and cutters and hurling the golden Spear that came into her hand out to punch through the hull of the dreadnought where the Badoon commander was ensconced. Hercules simply leapt in through the hole, and began to wreak bloody havoc within.

Thor was closing in on the super-carrier that was the heart of the fleet, leading a wave of Shielded Nova Centurions who were powering through desperate point defenses. The squadrons of fighters filling the void with shots as they met the Badoon ships weren’t inferior to them in the slightest.

The Badoon sunward flank got a very unwelcome surprise when the Xandarans decloaked and lit them up with ten shots; ten Badoon capital ships were instantly ripped apart. Shielded Centurions hit the sky to deal with the escort craft that turned to address the new threat, while the Xandaran vessels moved with unseemly speed across the sky and basically ignored the wild barrage of shots coming at them.

The bombardment of Earth began, and ran headlong into Primus, Prima, and their kids, as well as the crazed defenses of the killsats, point defenses, and force fields that rose spontaneously over the primary targets. I saw Magneto warding an area with rending pulses of magnetism, but the defenses of the missiles and their numbers and speed meant he could only shield a relatively small area, for all his power.

Hells, Graviton was trying to create singularities to suck in the warheads, but couldn’t do so fast enough or with enough power to block more than a tithe of them, either. When the space-tearing cannon fire began to erupt around him, his fear was plain to see as he realized he really was outmatched.

Callie read it, too, and ordered him into close combat, where the cannons couldn’t target him, and he could create custom singularities to suck in Badoon ships, or at the very least mangle them greatly. With so much anti-gravity and gravimetric manipulation going on around him, he had to focus on a single target to really be able to exert his strength, making him almost useless for planetary defense.

Master of the World’s Plodex force field technology was on display as fusion warheads blossomed all around the planet. Not every location could be shielded, and I could do nothing but wince as hundreds of thousands of square miles of land became cratered hellholes, everything living within destroyed.

The Master was one of those individuals that Briggs had words with back in the sixties, as I recalled. Briggs naturally didn’t give a damn that he was forty thousand years old. It was play with the team, or just die. As I understood it, this defense of the main cities was exactly his responsibility in case of mass alien attack back home, too. If he didn’t get to rule the world, well, too bad. He’d been co-opted, one evolved Neanderthal out-voted by an Ancient there... and by Briggs’ greatest student here.

Canada’s Alpha Flight had never met him back home, of course. The two Plodex on the planet were already taken care of: one dead, and the other running Russia’s subsea defenses.

I winced as the concentrated bombardment of New York City overwhelmed the shields and reduced the entire metropolitan area to a fused wasteland. Well, they really wanted to get rid of the superhumans there... although all the heroic types were well out of the area if Primus could get them to leave, for that very reason.

If not, they were now dead. There wasn’t anything left alive in that area. Statistically speaking, your best defense was to be absolutely nowhere near a military base, missile launcher, or major city.

If people ignored Primus’ warnings and thought all this was a hoax, welp, time to wake up and enjoy the hospitality of a galactic empire.

Primus and Prima were flitting around at near light speed, detonating tons of missiles. Callie was adding in energy beams and the like, Primus his Primal Blast. Their kids who had enough speed and toughness to do the same were helping out, but these weren’t slow missiles at all. Since there were force fields down there protecting the cities, they made great targets the infuriated and suddenly desperate Badoon were happy to unload on.

I saw Natasha Romanova hit a switch in a buried base, and across the galaxy, death began to bloom.

An atmosphere converted to fluorine for a duration of one minute. It literally burned away everything on the planet, including the Badoon living there.

Mass virus release, going after everything organic, dissolving it all to sludge before immolating it all in spontaneous combustion from oxygen saturation.

Mass magnetic warpage. Trace elements of metal in the bodies of everything ripped them apart, even as buildings built of steel twisted and came down.

Planetary defense satellite systems were subverted, aimed at power generators around the planet, and mercilessly turned on the Badoon’s own defenses and population centers, ships in orbit, stations, everything.

An asteroid the size of Manhattan island accelerated to half-light speed and abruptly Portaled into position above a major fortified Badoon world. The planet did not survive the impact, nor its three moons or anything else in orbit. The impact was visible throughout the solar system.

A Singularity Bomb, drilled down into the planet’s core, was let go. The planet imploded as half its mass was sent away before the Singularity collapsed, and pretty much nothing survived the thousands of miles falling into the hollow void beneath it as the planet shattered and collapsed.

A White Hole explosion, erupting out of nowhere, washing across the planet, and scouring half of it clean of atmosphere and life. The other half didn’t survive much longer.

A Class 10 earthquake, destroying the planet’s mantle and turning it into a volcanic hellhole in literally minutes.

A wave of luck-bending chaos magic swirling across a planet, and all the safety mechanisms on their munitions failed at the same time. The fortress world’s surface was blown apart by uncounted nuclear, fusion, and antimatter explosions.

And it went on...

All the planets belonged to the factions who had attacked us.

The capstone was Nova, the daughter who had inherited the Comet and some of Primus’ power sets. Fully engorged on power from the planet’s sun, she went on a rampage around the Badoon’s home system of Capella, which was a mere forty-some light years from Sol. She was literally radiating the full power of a sun from herself as she flew around, and ten thousand miles of space around her was a zone of death.

It was like watching a newborn star running around the sky at half the speed of light, bathing the homeworld of the Badoon in killing sunlight as the massive amounts of ships going to and from the homeworld were annihilated. Gravity and space were roiling too much to jump away, and the Badoon had precious little time to respond as they were wiped from the stars.

The Badoon matriarchs on the planet below could only stare up at the new sun dancing across the skies in shock as Nova cleared the system of all the male-owned ships, incidentally scouring clean most of the other planets and the bases on them, along with all orbital assets.

Then, she turned her gaze on the planet below, where billions of eggs of the Badoon lay in their chambers, ready to hatch, and she waited.

------

Every five minutes the Badoon assault continued, another of their planets died. It took eighty-five minutes for the surviving ranking commander to get the fleet to pull back and head urgently out of the system as hyperspace communications screamed in terror at them.

Nova had precisely targeted the top fifteen egg chambers, reducing them to glowing craters. A billion Badoon eggs were now stray atoms, and only the news of the Badoon pulling away from Sol prevented her from counting all the way down the top one hundred.

The sun Nova was emitting snuffed out, and she exited the system calmly, only molten metal drifting among the melted planetoids left to get in her way.

---

Definitely the strongest of Primus’ daughters. The sheer amount of energy she’d put out was beyond me. Obviously her powers stacked on one another, while those I had Mimicked from Comet were parallel, and half-strength at that.

My additional Cosmic Chord firepower had helped skew the battle predictions. I had blown apart the Badoon fighter cover, freeing ours to go after the capital ships with enthusiasm. The ships I picked on didn’t have the multi-tier deflector shields, so popping a new Badoon ship every six to twelve seconds had been a thing, but there had simply been a lot of them.

Now there was a lot of scrap tumbling between the Earth and the Moon, and going to be falling to the planet in flaming wrecks unless stopped.

Earth’s defenses had been mauled. New York City, Washington DC, Beijing, Shanghai, Moscow, Kiev, Paris, London, LA, SF, Tokyo, Seoul... thirty-four major cities had been pummeled down and obliterated, despite their force fields.

However, if they hadn’t been such fine targets, the devastation to the planet would have easily been ten times worse.

Losses of men and ships in the fight was over seventy percent. Planetary deaths exceeded a billion, and were only rising in the aftermath of the conflict.

Eighty-five minutes.

The Badoon had lost over a hundred billion of their people, and seventeen planets, with the only reason their homeworld hadn’t been reduced to ash our own forbearance. Wiping out their egg chambers and over half their female population would have definitely put a crimp into their plans... but also pissed off every Badoon faction, and brought them all here to wipe humanity out.

Primus naturally would not let them actually do that, having several hidey-worlds out there to vacate millions of people to if need be... just like the Xandarans and the Zen-Whoberis. But it hadn’t been necessary.