It was the single largest artificial construct in the universe.

Oh, sure, a Dyson Sphere might have been ‘bigger’. But a Dyson Sphere only required the mass of a gas giant or two to make, and the universe was dotted with numbers of them, made by them type II civilizations who wanted to prove they were uber, generally before they went extinct for one reason or another. Like, showing off and exhausting their resources in doing so.

There was only one Taa II, the home of Galactus.

The great worldship of Galactus was an AU in radius, not that it was particularly circular and so maximally efficient. No, there were bends and twists and turns in its making, for some profound reasons, perhaps to accommodate the leashed pulsars within it that provided its primary power, or the dozens of captive stars that provided secondary power.

The mass of multiple solar systems had gone into making this edifice among the galaxies, an actual vehicle over six hundred million miles in length, with a cross section close to a million miles across, were one capable of circumlocuting the entire length of the hull.

For what purpose it had been truly been built, likely not even Galactus knew. He had spent a billion years putting it together, time stolen in between his hunts for sustenance, and even with all His power, it had taken eons to come to fruition.

And now, some uppity primitives from a backwater world in a small galaxy of no consequence had petitioned Him for the chance to use it, and after contemplating their purpose, Galactus had permitted them to do so!

Thus Barb the Builder had come to have her feet kicked up, sipping at some Damn Fine Coffee as she looked out over the ship-building bay on Taa II, a production facility that took up more cubic area than Sol.

From no production facilities at all, the cosmic machinery of Taa II had turned the entire space into a streamlined, super-efficient producer of probably the most advanced non-cosmic starships in the entire cosmos. Given the size, scale, and speed of the facilities, dropping one of the ships every minute was about right. They were then parked in hangars spread around the ship, forty-mile-long wedges of destruction and ten-mile circles of life-saving cheese, all waiting to be unleashed upon the invaders.

The hangars were still mostly empty. Taa II had plenty of room.

Barb was continually monitoring the processes, especially the raw material inputs. Dead stars were the preferred material, as they tended to have a lot of exotic Elements that were useful, including uru in sizable amounts, but solar systems with no life were being quietly emptied of their mass and spirited here by Uncle Ben from all over the cosmos, not picking on any one galaxy as planetoids and dead or dying stars were dumped into the furnaces of Taa II and turned into the greatest fleet ever assembled in this universe.

The sheer existence of this fleet would terrify any existing force in the universe, and light a massive hunger in others to possess its power, control it, and literally be able to rule the universe with it.

Commanding the power of Taa II would have been akin to doing the same thing. That was another part of her job.

Galactus was upgrading the defenses of his homeworld!

You’re making Warworlds? That’s cute. Taa II had cannons in place bigger than your entire Warworlds. Every time they fired, they would be the equivalent of a nova going off in your face, true Nova Cannons.

Galactus naturally had no time to oversee the upgrading of His home, always chasing his next meal. So, it had devolved to Barb the Builder to do it for Him.

Barb, the Cosmic Builder!

Being granted the Power Cosmic for the purpose of running the home of Galactus had been quite the unexpected moment. She knew He had only done it after she had set up this production facility, using His cosmic technology with a speed and aplomb that He Himself could not have done. She was basically maintaining the whole process, running it solo, making new models and changes on the fly without any problem... and helping with the massive amount of engineering problems out there via Markspace, too.

The machinery here could make pre-production modules with breath-taking speed, even faster than the best Xandaran tech. Tasking a few cubic miles to making that kind of stuff to help out the Pentad Alliance was of no interest to Galactus, as long as she wasn’t giving His technology away or impeding what He wanted done, something she was always careful to confirm with Him before doing.

In return, Xandaran reincarnates were also staffing the waiting ships in repayment.

Sure, the machine intelligences here could have handled the whole job, but even Galactus knew that having living intelligences around only helped matters in the end, if they were properly trained and motivated. Working for Galactus was one HELL of a motivator, as was saving the universe. The simple fact that their people had been chosen as worthy of working for Galactus for this purpose was both humbling and awe-inspiring for all the Xandarans, and they went to it with a will and a way.

They weren’t the only ones. They were being complemented with beings chosen and selected by the Enigma-Force, who was quite the expert on picking out noble souls.

Everyone knew that the greatest danger here was that some other power-hungry sorts would take control of the fleet, and force an intervention by Taa II itself to stop them. So, one of the primary things she had to do was prevent that from happening.

Hence, the Enigma Force.

The power systems of the fleet relied on an interplay of two unique bands of energy that were absolutely tied to Galactus, and when she asked Him for another Entity to secure that decision, He had brought in the Enigma Force as His guarantor.

Simply put, without the approval of both Galactus and the Enigma Force, the power systems of the ships would simply shut down. Nothing below Eternity Itself could override that command. Steal a ship? With a thought, it was dead in space, and you had just irritated the Devourer of Worlds.

She’d seen several dozen cosmic Entities in the distance with the Cosmic Awareness that came with her status, a nigh-absolute sense of what everything was made up of that trumped most forms of concealment within an AU. She could also sense where certain Elements could be found almost anywhere in the universe, which was very handy if she needed to go get something rare enough and hard enough to make to be worth the trip.

Barb was pretty sure Galactus was trying to set her up with Norrin Radd, as His Herald was perpetually lonely, even if he enjoyed zipping around the universe. Barb was happy to keep him company, but the Surfer was a wanderer and an explorer, not a builder, and even if they both enjoyed one another’s viewpoints and company, it made them fast friends, not soulmates.

She wasn’t sure why Galactus went with the golden skin and hair, a more metallic version of Dynamo’s bronze, but whatever. It wasn’t like she couldn’t change the hue of it if needed.

In the meantime, her head was filled with formulas, equations, spreadsheets, data inputs, and very importantly, plans for some heady new stuff.

The Power Cosmic also nicely solved her own ‘partial soul ‘cause Duplicate’ problem. She had happily advanced to Twenty-One and taken Create Legendary Wondrous Item and Create Legendary Machine with a Level of Theurge of Creation.

She was making Big Impressive Stuff, and she was going to be making Bigger Impressive Stuff as time went on.

One of the things she was doing was making detectors for Celestial-born Eternals and Deviants.

The Celestials had a habit of turning the native species of a world into giant lab experiments and leaving Eternals to watch over them, then tinkering with the natives above and beyond that, seeing if they could adapt to overcome the modifications the Celestials input into the Deviants they left behind.

In the case of the Skrulls, Badoon, and the Kree, they had failed, and not only had the Deviants extinguished the core race, they had killed off their overwatching Eternals, too.

The genetic markers, now that such were pointed out and there were points of comparison available, were far easier to detect than Celestial Seeds. Billions of probes were heading out into the galaxies, as well as sifting through databases from galaxies across the cosmos, looking for the meddling of Celestials, organizing the data, and giving Galactus more places to zero in on where the Celestials had been.

More to the point, Celestials were by necessity a linear race. Their enormous personal power made it impossible for them to successfully time travel, as it required simply too much energy for finite beings as massively powerful as them to do so. That meant their tracks in time were something that could be followed.

Over His very long lifetime, Galactus had naturally met all of the existing Celestials at some time or another, which meant points in space-time whose owners could be followed as they traveled around the cosmos, with sufficiently advanced technology. It wasn’t even watching them, it was following their trails, and their Cosmic Awareness wasn’t going to help the Celestials see technology at that level, let alone when obfuscated by Galactus.

Barb had already found nine likely worlds with Seeds for Galactus, and the work was only continuing. Getting ahead of Galactus’ feeding curve was a Good Thing, by almost any measure...

She was pretty sure that she could design a sensory apparatus that could detect a Seed anywhere in the Cosmos, and equally certain that the Celestials would move to destroy it and Taa II if she did. She wasn’t worried at all about that happening, of course. Taa II was far too powerful to be threatened by even a host of Celestials. Nothing less powerful than a Molecule Man or Beyonder was actually a threat to Galactus’ home if it was resisting their efforts.

After all, they had tons of exposure to cosmic-class killer technology by now. Far be it from her not to ask Galactus if He might not want to defend Taa II with some of it...

Just approach the job the right way. There were billions of years of history to use against the Celestials, it was just a matter of tracking them. Eezy-peezy, on the face of things.

She’d seen all the production data for the Negative Zone, and it truly was impressive. Unfortunately for them, having a population of trillions and multiple star systems to work with still didn’t put them into the league of a cosmic power having a billion years to work at something. Taa II was just too bloody big.

How Galactus’ fleet was used and manned was going to be the key point, and none of them thought the ships were invincible. Even with all the data coming out of the fights with Dynamo and the like, there was so much weird science in those cultures millions of years old over there that nobody felt safe about anything. Just trying to make general-use shields effective against all the stuff was proving to be one of the biggest headaches they had to deal with.

Still, the Zoners did not know the Galactus Fleet was here at all. Just like the Zoners, however, it was going to be split into many different fleets to take them on all across the universe. After all, at least a hundred galaxies were directly under threat at this point, not just the relatively small quartet of the Shi’ar, Andromeda, Magellanic Cloud, and Milky Way galaxies.

Barb reached out with her Cosmic Awareness to go over the work of Uncle Ben on the other active project: the many Ringworlds that were being assembled at a speed only the Molecule Man could attain.

Uncle Ben was becoming a master of replication, and if he didn’t do all the math behind some of the things that he was making, his intuitive understanding of forces and materials was only increasing with time and usage of his power.

There had been protests from Entities as high as Master Order and Lord Chaos when he had apprenticed himself to Galactus. The self-appointed maintainers of Cosmic Balance had wanted to indoctrinate Uncle Ben in their own ways and manner, something Uncle Ben had adamantly refused.

Take away His hunger, and at His core, Galactus could actually be called a Good Being in a horrible job. Ease that burden, find workarounds, and Galactus, well, Galactus had a heart.

Master Order and Lord Chaos did not. They only had their jobs. They were Alignments Incarnated, only united in keeping a balance between them, instead of competing.

And so the Ringworlds were going up, the objects that could ease the endless guilt that gnawed at the heart of Galactus, and a tiny, tiny little dream that Galactus might be able to make amends, to replace something of what He had taken, began to bloom.

It was a Great and Good thing, and something worthy of the Molecule Man to pursue. There was a great deal to do, of course, but that only gave them something to fill up the long years ahead of them.

Build, build, build. Barb whistled while she worked, and the job-flows continued...