I didn’t bother getting closer than a thousand miles to anything, because I had no need to. My forward magnification could hit the millions, it seemed, and I could see the entire configuration of this biofleet assembling, painting it into my Visual File and leaving it to Kismet to relay to everyone who needed to see it, particularly the Acanti.

There were a lot of Brood out here...

“Brood are opportunists. They’ll be trying to hit any isolated Shi’ar assets out here. Alert them to a major incursion and to up their security, but request they not take any major fleet action at this time.” The full force of the System Fleet would rip through the Brood here, and even if they continued building, if the Imperial Navy came with more fleets to reinforce, the Brood were screwed, even with some of the bigger Acanti carriers and their queens here.

-The Acanti are very excited!- Kismet /relayed back to me eagerly while I circled the Brood position. At least four slaved Acanti over fifty miles long, with one approaching a hundred. This was truly a major gathering of the Brood, but they didn’t seem to know what had happened in the Starsinger system yet...?

Oh, too damn bad for them, then. They had probably followed some of the independent Acanti pods here, or were informed of them by opportunists selling the information.

“We’re going to move on this fleet in twelve hours. You get every damn thing set you can before then, and then the Acanti are going to do something they’ve never done in their history before, and the Brood are going to be the proud recipients of it.”

The Acanti were going to go on the offensive. It was going to be a first in galactic memory.

I would be useful back there, getting the key Acanti Elders set up, but there were others who could do the same. Others who could monitor this whole fleet and move about undetected, not so much.

I reached out to my Dupes, and they downloaded me five more spells.

Background of the Universe, a spell to turn long-range telepathy into basically the white noise of the cosmos, hiding Mark usage for me in particular. Masslessness, a way to complete neutralize any gravimetric signature whatsoever. Psychic Scope, basically the ability to see psychic activity, particularly telepathy, as readily as radio waves, which not incidentally turned this entire swarm fleet into the psychic equivalent of a huge light bulb. Hyperfugue, a way to use different thoughtstreams to perceive time at different rates to both remain incredibly aware and avoid boredom at the same time when traveling near c or past it, especially during extended journeys. Touch the Swarm, a way to telepathically infiltrate hiveminds, allowing one to understand and receive hivemind communications, eavesdropping most shamelessly on such things, but explicitly not able to contribute and thus betray oneself.

Intruding upon a hivemind and potentially taking command was a higher-Valence spell...

They had me Paragon Surge for Darkforce Masking, which overlaid energy emissions with the Darkforce and completely removed any visible or obvious energy signatures from such discharges. I could blow the shit out of anything, and both my attacks and a nuclear explosion that resulted from them would be as inky black as night.

Most importantly, I could now be as stealthily concealed as all get out.

Daaaamn, I had some clever Dupes. I wonder where they got all them smarts from?

“Okay, partial change of plans. I need some munitions. While everyone is tooling up, I’m going to mine the heck out of these Brood ships. Someone get parsing all this nice, lovable targeting data I have here, and let me know who and what I’m going to blow up first, while I zip on back and pick up a whole lot of boom.”

I probably had enough firepower to take out the smaller skysharks and starsquids, and maybe the youngest Acanti slaves straight off... but maybe not, and anyways, it wasn’t really what I was here to do.

Peggy, multi-tasking organizational whiz that she was, happily added the sabotage and destruction of appropriate targets to her managing the upgrades of the Acanti, and even politely asked the Shi’ar Imperial Navy if they minded parting with some directional charges for blowing the brains out of Brood slaveships.

Having a prince of the Imperial family nearby helped. By the time I made it back there, a small cargo container had already been painted up in stealth nano for me to haul back where I’d come from, and it was loaded to the gills with pyrotechnic goodness I only had to plant in the appropriate locations.

I smiled wickedly, totally rid myself of my gravimetric signature, exploited invisibility, and put up Touch the Swarm so I could listen in to all the fun things the swarms of the Brood were saying to one another... and send that information right off.

From upgrading Acanti to planting demolition charges of highly compressed anti-matter, my day stayed no less busy.

---------

In those twelve hours, something like another thousand Acanti joined us. There was no record of such numbers of free Acanti being seen in one place in over a thousand years... or ever since the Brood had started hunting them, actually.

The largest elder arriving was over fifty miles long, a huge target and prize for the Brood. He was also the last one to get hastily upgraded with two power cores, as all the newcomers started urgently practicing their songs and the Sublime Chord as they began to move out and away to get into position... and not incidentally stumbled across Brood scouts attempting to track them, making practice targets and vivic lunch out of them.

When the new Acanti confirmed that the whole vivic lunching worked, well, didn’t that just sort of crystallize the whalesong.

The Shi’ar didn’t interfere, although they did set fast destroyers to observe what was going to happen as the pods of starwhales moved out, with a speed and fluidity of purpose and movement that astonished the Imperial Navy when they saw it. They came from hunting avians, and the fact that the starwhales could act predatory and move in that manner shocked the heck out of them.

---

Space was three-dimensional, and the needed timing made the attack four-dimensional in nature. The first place they hit was the hyperspace nodes out here.

The Brood didn’t sense them coming in, as cloaking fields were Sung up into great waves of gentle Nothing-To-See-Here. As the late arriving Brood fleets squirted themselves back down into reality via the power of their enslaved Acanti carriers, the starwhales hit them hard, and kept right on going.

The Brood had no idea what was happening, and actually were totally paralyzed by indecision and astonishment when the Acanti assault slammed into their flanks and began to shred them with appalling speed.

Those fancy high-quality point-defense lasers became whalesong-powered megacannons powered by the Sublime Chords of Singers literally miles long. The havoc of that level of firepower was unbelievable, first testing it out by shredding the fringe of the Brood fleet, making a few harmonic adjustments, and then driving right into the teeth of everything.

The incoming Brood were wiped out, and the smallest and youngest of the Acanti were left behind to get everything nudged into position for clean-up.

------

The main attack came from nine directions, with the Starholder leading the original pod and aiming for the largest Acanti.

Richard hit the button, and 214 medium to small-sized Acanti and larger skysharks suddenly had holes in their heads, or holes where their heads used to be. I’d been VERY busy zipping around and getting all those things into place. It was a good thing the bioships were all so big. Hard to notice a small bomb set in place on square miles of hide with nobody around even looking for the invisible person, nyuk nyuk.

It was funny seeing them go off all down the lines of the Brood that were frantically trying to get into position... and then the first shot from the Starholder’s main cannon came in, fantastically boosted, and bored a hole right through the head of the biggest of the enslaved Acanti.

One of the queens was snuffed out, as I’d already Infused the shot on my last trip back. The havoc that resulted in the hivemind architecture was incredible, and wasn’t helped by the fact that the Acanti’s Singing was powering through the whole thing and really making it hard for the queens to command their drones on other ships.

The point-defense lasers, so incredibly boosted, cycled through very rapidly, as they were designed to do, and pods of Acanti with power cores doing nothing but pumping out supplemental juice poured that energy into the Chord and amplified it all.

The void was Singing with the Wrath of the Acanti, and the Brood was crumbling under the shock and the power of the hit.

They tried to disperse, they really did, fleeing for the gaps between the fleets... which only opened them up to broadsides from three or more angles.

Peggy was totally on point, and totally ruthless. The Acanti were watching and learning as she played the Brood, and instead of making a single push in a weak direction, the queens panicked and took off in every direction, trying to save themselves.

None of them did. The Starsinger’s pod was on the hunt for the big ones, the Starholder was sharing all the juice, and the despoiled bodies of their lobotomized elders were being put down.

Kismet found me as we took off after one queen abandoning ship, making quite sure the queen didn’t make it to hyperspace and get away in time.

---

It was the largest known slaughter of the Brood in recent galactic history. The Shi’ar were gawking at all the dead Brood, slain by the collected firepower of the gathered, pacifistic, benevolent, and peaceful starwhales.

Who were now eating them.

The pustule-cities of the Brood populating the bodies of the larger acanti slaveships were destroyed, one after another. Aware of the value of the wreckage, the Acanti promptly started selling the stuff for salvage, negotiating for more equipment for themselves... or nosing through the technology themselves for things of value we had informed them of.

Things like more power cores, exotic Isotopes, and other items of interest. Brood biotech worked on them, after all, and with adjustments, could be made to serve the Acanti, instead of to enslave them.

There were many attempts made to infect them during the fighting. None were successful in the slightest. Those who did not have functioning Periapts were kept in the back, while those who did took the shots and burned them away, or incredibly powerful and fluid forcefields blocked such attempts and the creatures who tried to carry them home.

------

“I can say without reservation that the Xanadarn peoples are definitely interested in starting a closer relationship with the Acanti at this time,” Xandaran ambassador Viratus Gilitos told Corsair hurriedly, watching the disturbing scene of thousands of Acanti devouring the burning corpses of uncounted numbers of zombie bioships, and even devouring their own dead enslaved kin.

And they were growing bigger. Much, much bigger!

Corsair smiled cheerfully. “Xandaran technology and trustworthiness is known throughout the galaxies. The Acanti will be pleased to do business with you, too, Ambassador. This isn’t the grand show, however.”

“Indeed?” The Xandaran considered the sight before them, which was already setting waves across the galaxy. Even now, another pod of Acanti arrived from elsewhere, sliding out of hyperspace, and without pause moved in to join the feast.

There were scores of them harvesting the unwhite flames blazing on just one of the dead great elders!

“There’s another stop the Starholder is going to make on the way back to Xandar. But they’ll get there soon enough.”