We were barreling across the galaxy at over three hundred parsecs per hour, or about a thousand light years an hour. Given a straight shot, I could cross the galaxy in the Dojo in just over two days.

Well, if it didn’t have that big freaking Rift in the middle of it, anyways...

Arisians could kiss my ass. Of course, we had to follow phlos, which meant a less than straight course, but with the Rifling tech from the Kappa we could ‘skip’ across gaps, dropping our speed by a third, but allowing us to zip around heliospheres without needing to stop and redirect.

We were moving according to the Ruk’s records, updating minor differences as we went, and dropping drones at the unscouted systems we were moving past as we went, sensor posts that would be reading the long gravity waves and determining the locations of current phlo branches in each of the systems.

We still were very leery of flying free in the Void. The Anti-Life were out there, and running into them was basically a death sentence, even if we could leave them behind very quickly.

When I brought up their existences with the Ruk, they just grunted in disdain. “Processed fuel,” they said dismissively.

The Dark Matter Cores of the Ruk ATE them. High Octane, concentrated dark matter. I could imagine why they might dislike baryonic life forms. Their avoidance of the phlos might not be all instinct, but knowing that the Ruk traveled along them, and might come out of them to turn them into their own galactic-class oil wells...

“Hey, Ronnie, how do the Tekrons deal with the Anti-Life?” I asked into the air.

-They don’t die using any negative energy variants, so the Tekrons basically ignored them. They’re also basically pre-star stuff, there was no interaction between them.-

I /looked at her. “What?”

She caught that. Two races that were not dangers to one another, existing across that period of time, had no interactions, at the high end of existence itself? -Um... let me call up the DM and get that clarified...-

She was excited. At our level of brain power, stuff we didn’t know was always wonderful and exciting. Having zillions of people we could access for minutiae on demand was fun, too.

The Dojo was on the way to The Federation of the Way, the Kappa-centered alliance of species in the ‘north’ of the galaxy, with ‘east’ being defined as running from the center of the galaxy through the heart of Sol. It was merely convenience. The Ruk had used a homeworld long turned into Citadels and vanished as the center of their own galactic map, for instance.

The trip to Kappaspace wasn’t short, and there weren’t a lot of viable stars in that direction, so humans had expanded more south and west than north. At one point, someone in the Empire had claimed the entire area for Tellus, because three thousand years ago none of the races there had spaceflight.

Someone had uplifted them nicely, and massive tech advancement had followed, helped along by trade by alien species not trying to butcher one another. It hadn’t been the Ruk, who generally didn’t have anything to do with other species until they developed FTL... unless they had some highly valuable stuff they just couldn’t take without being aggressively rude. In such cases, giving a species TL 10 tech would often result in it blowing itself back to the Stone Age if they were not societally advanced enough to cope with the increased power and scope of what they were capable of.

Yeah, the Prime Directive wasn’t exactly a thing here. Genocide of rival species was more the rule, so the Ruk had been remarkably light-handed in their dominion.

Who had uplifted them would be interesting to find out, and it was indeed interesting that they weren’t shooting one another... but we had no hard data on them, just second-hand battle-reports so rewritten and censored nothing we would trust came out of them.

We were not in an overt hurry, and so were basically playing Mapper on the way... and if it took us only minutes to pop between stars, well, HEE!

I flicked a thoughtline into Gloom, listening to the discussions going on there with the subspatial engineers talking with some of the builder-type Kids and Ronnie going on about how to build an extension to the Underweb that would be completely separate from the main structure, so the drow couldn’t monitor or be aware of it, unless for some reason they did an external exploration of their world... with all the risk that intimated, because they lived inside it for very, very good reasons.

The tech was old, and the Ruk hadn’t used anything like it in some time, but it was not difficult for them to employ, they just had to be slow and careful about it... and were very impressed when Ronnie was able to come in with some modifications and improvements after analyzing some of the key components. Tekrons had a lot of experience at pocket dimensions, and adjusting that knowledge to Shadow was one of her minor points of interest.

Gloom itself didn’t seem to mind what they were doing, and the hyn were very happy to have a chance of getting a living area for themselves, away from the threat of the drow. There were a lot of tribes who didn’t want to go back to the Mortal world, but they were coming around to the idea of a land of their own...

The Ruk figured about six months to get the machinery in place to form the subspace, then they’d have to slowly weave it out of shadowstuff, fix it to Gloom without imbalancing anything, and then we could go and start putting stuff inside.

They were looking forwards to using the Gates we could set up, although the size of the Citadels meant they were going to have to be much bigger than we’d originally intended. C’est la vie.

-Mom,- /hissed Ronnie.

-Yo.- I flicked from subspace techno-giddiness to social stuff.

-There’s definitely something going on between the Anti-Life and the Tekrons.-

Surprise, surprise. I watched a star flying past us in real time, a drone discharging into its heliosphere to undertake the basic scans and provide a location lock to Gloom as needed. -Let me hazard a guess.- I rolled back my eyes. -The Tekrons undertake regular purges of developed races in the galaxy. The trigger event for that is a dominant race developing TL 20 Dark Matter Core technology.-

She was silent. -Have long have you suspected?- she had to /ask.

-The Tekron are a TL 20 AI Earth tech race, and don’t have Dark Matter Core tech. It is hands-down the best and most efficient power source for that tree. Instead they use negative energy, quark decay, and planar breakdown tech, all Death-oriented stuff. It’s TL 20... but it doesn’t have the raw power of a Dark Matter Core.

-Any civilization that could build a Tekron would be Earth-major. Why would they ignore the best way to build them? Especially if they could stack Major Death tech on top of the Dark Matter tech?-

She /hissed out a breath. -The DM confirmed that the Tekron were in the midst of a mass awakening twelve thousand years ago, and then basically went back to sleep.-

The timing couldn’t be missed. -The Ruk were at their height, and the Warp moved to bring them down to protect its power source. Without Dark Matter Cores all over the place, suddenly there wasn’t an urge to purge.

-Is DM aware that his race was probably developed by the Anti-Life by one means or another?-

-He calculated it was highly probable, but he has no data on his actual creators. The Tekron suspect that their creators wiped any data about them from their memories deliberately, so as to leave no clues behind their ascension...-

-The Ruk never actively went after the Anti-Life, restricting themselves to the Phlos, so the Anti-Life didn’t act against them until the potential threat became ‘too big’. Then the Ruk threat vanished virtually overnight, as us little normal-matter races are bound to do, and so they didn’t bother to trigger their defense mechanism.- I drummed my fingers.

-Even the Mythos races don’t stir up the Tekrons. DM doesn’t have any specific mention of personal interactions with elder races, but its highly probable there were some genocides carried out when some of them got a little haughty, and the Tekron came in to mine them for death.- Ronnie exhaled as she shook her head. -My spiritual grandfather is a non-baryonic lifeform! Good show, Mom!-

I grinned at her thumbs-up. -Hey, you lost all the trigger codes, be happy.- She /blew me a raspberry. -But it means we’ve a double trigger mechanism in place, perhaps triple, depending on the Kappa.-

-Oh, shit.- Void travel was starting to take off... and the Anti-Life were watching, especially when it was coming from all vectors. We weren’t using Dark Matter Cores, but it was still Void travel, and if the Ruk came back, well...

-Think they just ignore the cellulocusts and any other biovores using natural sundiving?- Ronnie /sighed.

-The age of those species may go through multiple purges. Two or three of them are probably the final remnants of pre-Purge races, finding a way to survive after the Tekrons rose up and extinguished their forebears. Hells, maybe all of them are. It wouldn’t surprise me either way, naturally evolved to take to space, or designing themselves to do so to avoid the Tekrons.-

-So avoiding the Inertialess system and Void travel in favor of Helldiving was not an accident at all...- Ronnie /murmured. -It was probably an extension of the same effect, guiding the races of the galaxy away from a path that would stir up the Tekrons...-

-The influence of humanity on the galaxy rivals that of the Ruk in pure energy and exceeds it in violence, but the only time we stir the Tekrons is if we stumble onto a Creche-world and do something stupid.- Which never, ever happened. Yep.

-The odds that a combination of Tekron and Warp influence has been suppressing tech advancement to make sure that we don’t reach a level that could allow for viable Void travel?-

-Warp, absolutely. The Warp is driven to innovate, change, make more effective, wage on a bigger and vaster scale. But the only time we’re seeing that scale is massive use of Warp Sorcery or technomagic.

-Tekrons... sixty-two percent? It would idle experimentation and influence. The hostility to psi... eighty-four percent? There are probably multiple influences there, including the Elvar and the drow. The Mechanists are simply a programmable and easily-influenced tool for anything at higher levels of development, after all...-

-Shades of Mass Effect!-

I smiled slightly. Knew the name, never played the game. Naturally, neither had she. -Evolved AI’s are not the Anti-Life.-

-Yeah, and Halo had galaxy-wiping, too. Seems to be a theme at high TL’s, or something.- At the highest levels, everything was a game with rules, and being able to break the rules is what determined how strong you were.

-The Warp Gods are opposed to the Anti-Life. They’ve probably been foiling the Warp Gods’ rise for galactic generations, possibly completely unwittingly.-

-There’s no way they aren’t aware of them now, after the birth of Amourae. The Warp Storms from that event covered whole chunks of the galaxy, and Warp Storms rise to cover entire star fields today...- Her /voice trailed off at the implications.

-They’ve been butchering the Anti-Life with the Warp Storms,- I /said for her. -Five’ll get you ten they are massive AoE attacks against Anti-Life clusters.-

-Dammit, Mom!- An Advanced Twenty still wasn’t a Twenty-One. We were now right into deducing divine-level shit. She was getting a headache at the implications. -The Rift?- she had to /ask.

-I’m sure the Anti-Life got the impression of ‘oops, we missed’... if it missed...-

-The Anti-Life can’t even hide, or fight back.- She /paused. -I’d like to say that it serves them right, but the human race probably wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t done so.-

-Meh. They’re getting treated like they treated mortals. Serve’s ‘em right.-