Ten minutes after I returned to the future, leaving behind only four Dupes and a Clone (which admittedly was not a small thing at all) literally only a minute after I left, Primus and Callie also phased in, time flexing and returning them here without caring for any shifting in the past between us.

Such is wrought the work of Doom!, I mused.

They looked pretty much identical to how they’d left, except if you were looking closely, you’d see the fine signs of a dozen decades of life... and practice using their powers.

I made a show of looking around them. “No kids at all?” I asked archly.

“We left a planar focus there. Since it is a different alternity now, it should not be bound by the restrictions on this one,” Callie said softly as they stepped off the machine. I snapped my fingers, and it turned to inert dust behind them. “They should be able to visit us by dimension-shifting!” she smiled.

“How’d the boys turn out?” I asked them, and it was Primus who chuckled this time.

“After so many daughters, it was quite interesting to see how different the boys were. Of course, all their sisters made great shows of complaining how we were spoiling them and everything...”

“Where’d you end up hiding out? Your mansion?” I had to ask.

“No, that was known to certain people. We just bought a horse ranch in Montana and raised champion Morgans. It was actually quite relaxing!” Primus nodded slightly.

“With Powered kids?” I asked archly.

They shared a look as we all headed for the way out of the building. “Well, that was quite a surprise on our part,” Primus admitted. “Neither of them were Powered...”

I just looked at Callie, then back at him. “Okay, the mutant half-Kree Inhuman Golden Child Eternal had TWO non-Powered children?” I had to ask skeptically.

“One is a Source, and the other is a Void Brother,” Callie said softly, mixed worry and pride in her voice.

I blinked, and then inhaled and exhaled loudly. “Oh. Well, that’s a rather terrifying combination.”

“Andrew is basically sitting on the destiny of the planet. Moe has been leading the family to threats against it since he was twelve,” Primus said grimly, well aware of how much responsibility that was.

“And you are two of those threats.”

Both of their eyes flashed. “Yes,” Callie admitted calmly at my deduction. “The Clone I left behind is not, however.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t have the boys first,” I winced, as we exited the building and began rising towards the stars above the Blue Area, towards the Earth beyond, and the Freedom’s Lady in orbit around it. “So, they can probably visit us, but you probably shouldn’t visit?”

“That is what Moe said. He said that we are both planar and temporal vortices, since we were not in the correct place for either. It is possible that we could end up destroying the entire timeline by having children outside our own.”

I winced again. “Ouch.”

“Since our having the children created the entire timeline, they can’t leave, as they are the foundation of it. We may actually never see them again in person,” Primus sighed.

“Ehhh.” I rolled my eyes at both of them. “What are the odds of that happening?” I had to say.

They looked at one another thoughtfully, and then smiled despite themselves. “In this job?” Callie asked, laughing softly.

“Right. Let’s go liberate some more slaves, picking up where you left off a hundred and twenty years ago...”

========

The Badoon were slavers. Races which could not be enslaved by them were generally just wiped out, for whatever reasons, as being useless. If they could be, they’d actually leave survivors behind so they could come back in the future and gather up more slaves.

That was why the total disappearances of the variant subraces of humanity were suspicious. They hadn’t been all slaughtered and disposed of. They’d been captured and sent somewhere to be enslaved by the Badoon.

It turned out that genetically engineered slaves able to survive in hostile environments were quite valuable, and the existence of the exo-human subraces was what had spurred the initial invasion in the first place. The plain human slaves were nowhere near as valuable as their offshoots.

The Mercurians, adapted to live in environments that could melt lead, were naturally highly valuable for working on close-solar planets, both as energy harvesters and miners there. Not requiring expensive bodysuits saved a lot of time and effort on the part of the Badoon, and they were already fairly well-trained and easy to adapt to the task.

The Jovians were adapted for the 5x gravity of Jupiter, which meant easily working high-gravity worlds the Badoon couldn’t even walk on without anti-grav and power armor. As they were already miners, shipping them off to such places and simply keeping a stranglehold on their food and water supply, as well as explosive slave collars, implants, and the like, meant they made extremely good labor in those high-risk places full of Mass, Gravity, Earth, and similar Isotopes so prized in making durable items.

The Pluvians were basically at the opposite end from the Mercurians, their crystalline bodies adapted for extremely cold environments and near-vacuum conditions. They were also extremely well-educated. While they could be used for mining comets and similar things in conditions hostile to normal life, their education made them perfect for maintaining the large computer networks the Badoon had ensconced on iceworlds to mitigate their heating demands.

The exo-human races were so good at their tasks they’d rapidly become rather prized slaves, and some of them had been dispersed across the Badoon Empire, bought and sold like any other asset by the Badoon.

That made the job of getting them back both easier and harder. Easier, because we didn’t need a massive fleet to gather them all up at once, given how spread out they were. Harder, because we had to go all over the place to bring them back.

There were also millions of Primos humans who’d been snatched up by the Badoon, but they weren’t treated as well unless they were race traitors or trusties. Freeing them actually wasn’t as hard, because they weren’t watched as closely or clamped down on as hard. Getting rid of lethal slave brands or implants was required, but one Portal could easily evacuate thousands at a time once the local power structure was dismantled.

Unfortunately for the Badoon, their slaves were not stupid, including the human ones. While they couldn’t rebel right off because of the brands and implants, they had no troubles figuring out the Badoon technology and starting to use it for themselves.

There were also a lot of ex-military among the slaves who were quite eager to staff up the Badoon ships and exact some vengeance for their homeworld as they zipped around rescuing humans.

In the end, the numbers meant we split up the rescue missions. The Guardians, including the newly recruited Firelord, Thor’s son Magni, and Simon Williams, went around rescuing the exo-races, and the Primes and I liberated the baseline humans.

Cosmic Awareness and Marks allowed for instantaneous communication and coordination across the galaxy, which meant every Portal I opened was always to an area where the refugees and survivors were ready to be accepted. If the people happened to loot the Badoon worlds they were leaving clean as they departed, that was not outside the plan at all.

Primus and Prima had little problem being cosmic-class nuisances and scalpels, hitting the Badoon where they were weakest and wreaking havoc as a nice distraction while I evacuated whole populations... and obliterated a lot of expensive infrastructure as I did so. Prize crews seized Badoon ships and sailed them off back to Earth after loading them up with all the good stuff they could, too.

It was not a quick process, as humans were spread across dozens of worlds and multiple locations on those worlds. On the other hand, a whole lot of Badoon died over the course of days, weeks, and months.

Naturally, it didn’t take any great brains to figure out where we were bringing everyone, and the Badoon Empire was indeed so much larger that even a perfunctory response was still capable of getting past the rebuilding Earth defenses.

Those perfunctory kneejerk responses never quite got off the ground, by means of getting obliterated as they tried to gather. All three of us hit the first one as it was getting together, and Primus stayed around to deal with the reinforcements that were coming in as Callie and I took off to continue the mission.

When they chose an alternate marshaling point, Primus paid that place a visit, too. With my Cosmic Awareness guiding him, he had no problem reaping the Badoon. He informed me while I was doing so that the main use of his up time while raising his boys had been visiting Badoon space and making sure their Empire was getting slowly beaten down by all the enemies they’d made over the millennia. Being able to do this openly now was just building upon some existing experience in Badoon-killing.

Then, of course, there were my Dupes and Clone.

Having five more of me around did absolute wonders for Earth’s ability to recover from this catastrophe. We all spent a lot of time making fabbers, getting the future tech up and running with maximum speed as we did so. All we needed was enough raw materials and we could get support systems up and going in no time.

Cosmic Sublime Chord Stone Shaping could rebuild entire cities, since glass and even durasteel would submit to a IX Valence acting on them. Among other things, that really helped the refugee situation, as getting shelters once the power was restored wasn’t too hard. Soon enough a Markspace network was rising, helping in the coordination, mostly managed by the scores of simulacra helping manage the fastest rebuilding of a war-torn world ever.

More to the point, I’d be leaving all of my Dupes behind when I returned to my time, my Clone becoming the Prime when I left, and thus advancing into the Exemplar state my Dupes couldn’t imitate.

They were all Golden Children, with Matter Manipulation as a result, and had all Sersi’s experience at it, since shared memories and everything. The Eternals of this Earth were long dead, the Badoon having destroyed the Celestial machinery that resurrected them and then simply killing them off as they had the rest of Earth’s heroes back then.

I swooped around and gathered up the still-lost negabands that were out there, found the Sunstone, Ka-Stone, and some other toys stashed in Badoon vaults, and stayed around long enough to grow Ultraspecs for all my Dupes, who could then use them to start a variant Ultra Corps. Major Victory (Vance Astro) entered discussions with Firelord to enter a major alliance with the Xandaran remnants, and so rebuild the Nova Corps, which would definitely shake up the future galaxy, especially if all such were also armed with Ultraspecs.

There was little doubt that this wasn’t going to be a nice and friendly venture out into the stars. The Badoon had made themselves a lifetime enemy of our world, and it was going to cost them badly in the coming years. All of my Dupes were the more aggressive sorts (Builder, Leader, Warlord, Fatale) and took up the job of rebuilding Earth here and bringing it out to the stars in a commanding position enthusiastically.

Major Victory was a little non-plussed at how quickly my Dupes effectively took over, until I reminded him that he was from the 20th century, too, and if he didn’t want to keep doing special ops for Earth, he could take up a teaching position right now and start teaching the people the Core Disciplines.

He obligingly did both, teaching in his down time and slapping on his Ultraspecs when he grabbed Liberty for special ops. My Dupes were plenty happy to make him the face of Earth rebuilding, a symbol of the old heroes fallen long ago and now returned. Simon Williams and a son of Thor being around did incredible things for morale, too.

This future would be in good hands and getting things back on track for humanity.