It hadn’t been too awful long, but there were already a lot of Acanti gathered out there by the eighth world of the Chandilar system, an old and dead hunk of rock with several mining operations about it. It was mostly just a resupply station and layover point for extrasolar vessels that didn’t want to travel in-system, relaying some freight and anchoring a sensory line for the Shia’r Imperial Navy.

The Shi’ar were watching the starwhales very curiously, especially as the Acanti now seemed to have an official ambassadorial relationship through the Imperial Consort, and Corsair of the Starjammers was actually working as an envoy for the starwhales, of all people.

Both the Consort and Vulcan were on board the Starjammer, sent out to negotiate terms with the Acanti on whatever inscrutable matters they were requesting, the Shi’ar being both amused and rather dismissive of the idea the pacifistic space whales had anything meaningful to offer them.

Then one of the larger Acanti elders coughed up a ‘nugget’, which happened to be 529.4 tons of incredibly pure Void Thorium, a fantastically rare and valuable metal the Shi’ar called hyrindex, or ‘the doors to infinity’, since it was a core component of Shi’ar hyperdrives.

Thor himself was naturally quite tickled an Element we had named after him was so valuable, and Hercules could only mope because the strongest Elements tended to use the adamant theme...

I was also aware that the material Briggs’ Hammer and Sama’s Sword were made of was called Herculium, however, as was he. It was orichalcum that had absorbed the properties of uru, adamant, and shieldium...

Very suddenly, the Acanti were worth billions of credits. We’d set up all their accounts ahead of time, and Corsair gleefully acted as the broker to the auctioning of the metal.

The acanti now had capital to spend! And there was a hint of much, much more that they might have access to...

------

“The Xandarans are going to be complaining that I’m not heading right there with their ship,” Richard mused, helping attach some cables to the power core we were installing.

Installing INSIDE an Elder Acanti.

Xandaran replicators were astoundingly flexible, and the bioorganic tech of the Broods was almost transparent to Peter and Gwen, who were a little creeped out by how easily they understood it.

Acanti were not solid inside, with various empty chambers and conduits inside themselves for manipulating energy flows and concentrating particles and gases from the solar winds. With some time and a little effort, they could reconfigure their internal spaces, without boring through their flesh like the Brood did, easily creating areas that could be worked with.

This little cul-de-sac a couple hundred yards across was one of the ‘lungs’ of this ten-mile long elder, and we were installing a very strong energy core inside it, complete with a fueling mechanism that operated off the acanti’s own ability to wave-scoop local gasses and energy waves.

Hooking it up to its nervous system was also important, and furthermore making sure that link was not something that could be compromised.

That wouldn’t be as much of a problem as they originally thought, because the first delivery the Acanti took was literally tons of naturally mined corundum pieces, which were quickly dispersed among all of the pods.

Said pieces of jewels were then refined, empowered, delicately etched with some very precisely wielded stellar energies, Infused with Sublime energies straight off the Chord, and placed carefully into their brains with some spatial manipulation.

Periapts of Health a good foot across, rendering them absolutely immune to disease, especially the slaver viruses of the Brood. Notably, it also made them basically immune to nanite infections, and molmech infiltration into their technology systems.

The Anti-Poison Periapts and the Periapts of Wound Closure would follow, further immunizing them against the assault methods of the Brood.

The Acanti had immense natural ability to manipulate gravimetric fields, and so could gather in energy and floating mass, drag stuff around, and propel themselves at immense speeds. However, they’d never really had the ability to focus such things in an aggressive manner, at most able to act like pressor or tractor beams which any competent set of shields and stardrives could overcome. Their best defenses, in turn, were their ablative, energy-absorbing hides, which could easily handle objects moving at miles/second without any injury whatsoever, and simply absorbed vast amounts of energy for their own use.

With the Chord, they had learned how to harmonize and wield their Songs in some very new and different ways... but they still needed something to focus on.

They didn’t need massive and powerful guns, like the Starholder’s main cannon. They needed a potent, precise, and focused GUIDE to being a powerful cannon, which they could synch to and then amplify the total crap out of.

The Power Cores were there to provide the incredible amount of power they could leverage into the Sublime Chord. While they could manipulate vast amounts of power on their own, the Starholder’s White Hole Core had displayed the fact that technology could deliver immense amounts of energy when they needed it most, and such systems were minor things to put into place and harmonize with their own senses and abilities.

Ditto the shield emitters. A single powerful, low-area, but very redoubtable shield could be amplified by the Chord to any size the Acanti needed them to be, just requiring enough power to form a harmonic cascade with the original.

“We are making them some of the finest potential allies in space, in addition to ourselves. I think this is an incredibly valuable use of their time,” I replied, lifting the primary cable and putting it up against a nerve cluster. Wriggling nervetech deployed from the end and meshed into the crystalline nerves of this Acanti elder, linking up, synergizing, reading, acclimating, and beginning to exchange information.

There was a thrum in the power core behind us, and the telepathic Song changed a beat as the Acanti’s awareness spread into the fusion device behind us, rapidly beginning to modulate it with their deep awareness of natural energy flows, and feed its output into its Chord field.

Richard had another cable unreeling in his hands, miles of Compressed stuff that was being unspooled and sliding directly into the wall of the lungs, drawn along by a combination of muscle movement and TK towards the expensive ‘point defense’ cannons that had been installed on and sealed to the elder’s hide.

They were quite powerful for their size and range, going for quality instead of size... because the Acanti could give them all the size they needed.

Up top, we watched Jewel on coms, reeling in the fiber-cord that was drawing things along at speed through literally a kilometer of incredibly tough meat and hide, finally disgorging the end out of the redoubtable hide of the elder. She rapidly took the six-inch cable with its multiple feeds and began hooking it into the floating cannon there, which would be sealed to the hide with Sovereign Glue after it was all hooked up.

There were gods, humans, and even Shi’ar crawling over this elder up top, installing various devices onto its hide, waiting for the subdermal cables to be woven through its hide to link them into a greater system.

The number of people the Acanti allowed inside themselves was naturally much fewer.

“First shooter online,” Nova confirmed, as his Mentor synced with the software and ran through the diagnostics. Up above, the cannon moved, flexed like a tiny new finger by the Acanti elder, and charged up to shoot a very precisely focused shot of charged particles at a hunk of metal Jewel had heaved out there.

There was a subtle shift in the Sublime Chord, which I smirked at. “Do that when there aren’t so many watching Shi’ar eyes around, Elder,” I warned it, and the rising amplification went away patiently. Politics, and degrees of trust.

There was a breep on coms, and we both paused.

“We have skyshark activity nosing around the borders of the system,” Cindy’s voice broke in.

There were over a thousand Acanti here, and more were arriving every day... some with tidy little gifts worth tons of money for the Acanti Improvement Fund.

“Oh, wonderful! The new Acanti are looking for some activity. Give me some coordinates.”

“Not Kismet?” Nova asked, as I headed out the ‘breathing’ passage towards the void, through the Elder’s mouth.

“She’s helping lay the subdermal cables,” I reminded him. She was cutting open the incredibly tough hide of the Acanti so the cables could be laid in from above, then healing it back shut with cosmic energy, something nobody else here could do.

“Oh, right.” Plus, Kismet trailed golden light and could be seen for a zillion miles with void-dweller optics, even if light lag meant they couldn’t target her. My tiny little arcs of lightning, not so much in a void with no gasses there to glow...

------

Specs was having the time of its life.

Its Penetravision stacked onto both Red Eyes and the Mask of Clarity, and gave me a greater forward viewing sensory range than I’d ever had, along with multi-spectrum capacity it had never possessed. More juice was flowing through it without even trying then it had ever channeled, and it was growing and adapting as it did so.

Getting the mix of Isotopes it needed was simple, as the quantities were small, if very rare normally. To someone who Energize at IX and CL 50, not so much... and so I had two earrings growing quickly already. I should be able to give Jewel AND Cyclops a set of Ultra Specs before we hit Xandar.

Mmm, she hadn’t been Opened to Soul Magic yet. I’d have to do that, too, synch them with a Mask as I Tatted her...

Her use of and flexibility with the quasi-Nova Force was going to take a quantum shift forwards, as mine was. I would have to wire up her armor to her Ultra Specs so she could use her hands instead of her eyes, and put some projectors out there.

My own Bite had taken a big leap forwards in the amount of power it could handle with the Xandaran tech, and weapons built to handle loads of Nova power going through them. I was using basically Core 5++++, so, yeah, most Terran tech couldn’t handle it, especially something convenient and portable.

I’d be hitting Core 6 before we made it to Xandar, that was certain.

“Hitting coordinates.” Specs zeroed in on the drone dispatched out here as one of the primary areas Brood ships would be scouting. I swept on by it at a very substantial fraction of light speed, heading in the proper direction, and bandwidths of energy in the telepathic and subspace bands began to play in front of me as layered views arranged themselves in my Visual File. “I have source emissions,” I continued, relaying my findings through Kismet so as to have no delay in the information relay. “Closing on them.”

It was bloody nice being able to move this fast, and the fun thing about relativistic speeds is that temporal compression meant it didn’t take that long. Specs had full inertial dampening among the effects it could relay, while I could simply reassign my Beaubier momentum to normal and slow right down, with the neo-Nova... okay, call it Ultra Power just piling on to give me more control.

The Ultra Force was being used to obfuscate my gravimetric signature. Anything with mass traveling at a good chunk of c did weird things to gravity and could be sensed from some distance, so effectively the Ultra Force was my cloaking device as I came in under mutant Core power.

“Conveying visuals and tracking data,” I said, as I swept into the Brood fleet of bioships assembling out here in the nowhere of the Thronesystem’s Kuiper belt. I was completely passive, I was black in hue, I was immune to technology scanners, and the bioships here were as unintelligent as rocks under the slaver virus of the Broods.

They couldn’t see me, sense me, or scan me. Which was good, as there were a lot of them.