They were called the Black Fleet. They were exclusively staffed by those who had faced the Xenosyms before, or had their homeworlds devoured by them.

This was not a fleet designed to fight against pretty much any enemy other than the Xenos. Oh, there were conventional weapons enough, as no warship could be without them, but this was a devoted fleet designed to specifically counter a certain foe.

This was thousands of years of vengeance finally taking shape. Instead of the general-use ships always used to face the biovores in the past, this fleet was being built to address their existence specifically, a kind of evolution that even the rapidly evolving xenovores couldn’t readily counter.

The core of the Fleet’s armaments were specifically based around addressing the innate weaknesses of the xenosyms, things that they couldn’t get away from without changing the very nature of what they were.

As befitting a technorganic species, their organic tech was based on a foundation of psionic power and massive amounts of life energy, powering rapid evolution to attempt to redress specific circumstances and adapting to overcome them faster than most beings relying on technology could do so.

It was a very powerful ability. But true technology had an edge that it could specialize to a degree that organisms could not.

The reason was simple. Organisms still had to live.

At the very basic level, the xenosyms were living beings. They were not constructs, ships, robots, androids, or the like. Anything and everything about them was alive. They were their technology, their power; such things were not separate from them.

Humanity was both life and technology; these things were very separate. Technology could be changed to a radical degree for different purposes. Taking out humans didn’t mean you could deal with their technology, and likewise, if you couldn’t deal with technology, dealing with the humans wielding it became very problematic... and sometimes those humans could be very powerful, indeed.

Having a fleet designed to kill technorganic enemies specifically was something that should have been done long, long ago... but it wasn’t in AMT technologies, and such proposals were inevitably considered some senator or other’s pet project, quietly delayed as irrelevant, and then silently dropped when no amount of pressure could speed them into existence.

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Mata Rantha had already penetrated into Tellus, clipping her pointed ears, adjusting her facial features slightly away from Nymphal, and turning her Curse Brand into an ornate arm tat of no relevance.

She was a bit startled by the number of gene-mods in the lower classes and underspire realms that covered the ecumenopolis of Tellus. Naturally the planet was dominated by psionically-gifted families and upper classes, as well as the Mechanists who backed the cyber-powered alternatives to the psions. Gene-modded people were low-born scum, their paths of evolution judged to be deviating from human purity, and thus good for only low labor to keep the threat of Axiom Events at bay.

Tellus had more nymphals than any other planet my kids had been to... and more Ancients, down there in the dark, engaged in heavy labor duties with stolid endurance, ignored by and ignoring the great powers overhead.

The fate of most nymphals was quite predictable, although their ability to seduce powerful men sometimes allowed them to enjoy a fairly privileged life as long as their looks held out.

It took three months before her superior’s sexist advances resulted in him taking the Plunge in his posh Blok. They’d gone almost a month without one, and everyone wondered who had blackmailed him so badly as to motivate him to do such a thing.

She addressed his workload so thoroughly and quickly she was promoted over dozens of others who wanted the job. A few weeks later, after a surge of lethal food poisoning from an office party swept through the department, many of the contestants for her position were being sent off to the soylent farms formally, and several others who had hired certain individuals for a certain purpose were mugged and joined their compatriots in being recycled.

With such losses from her own and competing departments, Mata rapidly reorganized the functions, streamlining the workload and spreading it out more evenly. This generated more hard feelings from those individuals who’d been punching a clock on the government’s payroll for years. Two died of heart attacks before they left the building, and one of apoplexy.

Complaints receded with the departing Soylent Wagon.

There was a surge of new appointees to her section, nepotism on fine display as lesser sons and nephews and cousins were shoved into positions of review, influence, and the like, despite barely passing the formal tests.

In a whirlwind display of celebratory debauchery, these appointees were found in various very embarrassing positions, dead. Death by oversexing. Death by drug overdosing. Death by drinking. Death by challenging Traffic Control. Death by tightrope walking over a Plunge. Death by deactivating Traffic Control from your hotshot personal ride...

Thirty-seven very amusing deaths later, Mata personally recommended some personnel to fill the vacancies in her department. The personnel director wanted some various forms of recompense for approving them.

His home was raided by the Juris and found to be in possession of some very lethal controlled substances that could literally kill thousands if released, along with plans for dispersal of them, and clear signs of brain surgery so that he couldn’t even remember doing such things.

Obviously a programmed agent, he was removed abruptly. He did manage to approve Mata’s personnel requests before that happened, however, and as for the secret accounts he’d deposited his many, many bribes into, they vanished quietly.

Those funds were traced by some very curious Juris, and found in the private grey accounts of sixteen different Administration Tier 4 personnel. With so much clear corruption evident, and those people unable to come up with the required bribes to get off, suddenly there were certain vacancies above Mata, and the bribery scandal quickly spread to over threescore of her colleagues, most of whom had kickback arrangements with their superiors.

Six months after arriving at Tellus, Mata advanced smoothly to Tier 4 Administration based on her recent efficiency, high scores, and utter lack of patronage ties and relationship to the ongoing scandal. There were six filed protests at this arrangement; one man had a stroke, another was found sleeping with his superior’s wife, one took a bad batch of bingeing pills and ate himself to death, and the other three quietly withdrew their objections after the heads of certain individuals were returned to their bedside pillows, proclaiming they were in great error, and Administrator Mata Harintha was indeed marvelously qualified to be a T4 Administrator, congratulations, Miss!

They then filed for retirement or transferred to Waste Management.

T4 meant Mata was abruptly the equivalent of a Mayor presiding over about a cubic mile worth of Tellus’ ecumenopolis, and several million individuals. There were negotiations with Guilds and unions, taxes to be collected, payments to be dispensed to certain individuals off the books... and of course, she had to get her department restaffed after all the recent Soylent-feeding.

There were some suspicious eyes looking at her, but the people she moved into positions, despite coming from lower on the social scale, had all scored very highly on the placement exams, surprising everyone with a very unexpected proficiency and breadth of knowledge while test-taking. None of them were psi-positives, or even cybered, and so if she wanted to hire them, they could only reluctantly allow her to do so.

Negotiations and favor-trading continued on as briskly as they always had. One Power Union Representative accidentally plugged himself into an ungrounded circuit, but that was part of the hazards of his job. A Teamster left the brake off his personal mover, and hadn’t done proper maintenance on the hazard detectors, ending up crushed to a pulp against the security pillars of the parking area. An arrogant Production Union rep got loudly insulting, fled into an empty elevator shaft in a panic, and found out that the maintenance workers in the government offices hadn’t done their proper safety reviews. The scavengers got to his body laying there six hundred floors down first, and it wasn’t found.

Contractual negotiations continued apace. Two undermafia barons hoping to get the same contract had a friendly scrum, which elevated into a riot involving ten thousand production workers, damage to a factory’s production line, and both bosses were found as components of Armature Assembly Unit IM-N-IJIT, which was rather famous for how many people fell into its las-cutting platform.

Of course, when the Line Crews found out Underboss and Made Man Toratino of the Scythilians had plotted out the whole thing so he could move in on both mobs, both factory crews went on something of a rampage in Teamster territory, while the Sweiss moved to secure their territory, recoup their losses, and reduce the infighting.

T4 Administrator Mata politely warned them that production had better not be affected by this minor feud, or Assembly Unit IM-N-IJIT might find a few others accidentally falling into it during the required weekly cleaning maintenance. The working men calmly went back to work, the Sweiss and the Scthilians shot a bunch of Punks and Gnomes respectively, who TC dutifully carried away in the Soylent Wagons, and after an affable dinner party during which only six people got messily disassembled, a truce was declared and contract negotiations concluded.

A bad batch of Fugue swept through the work force, prompting a crackdown on zwilniks, and if this got a little overzealous at times, well, the drug trade was always being hotly contested. A new anti-addiction treatment started to take hold, and when alarmed zwilniks started trying to re-establish their territories, they found the number of dependable addicts was falling rapidly.

More shooting started to occur as ex-customers were shot when they wouldn’t buy, the zwilniks were promptly killed by outraged friends and families, and the drug trade in Mata’s administration zone, and the income it fed people upspire, was disrupted. Attempts to disrupt the Pukefree treatment by investigators didn’t really seem to get anywhere, although the bloks seemed to have more plants and sunlamps around recently...

Random street punk conflicts seemed to have tailed off recently, too. More and more people seemed to be taking meditative classes, and amazingly, production actually edged up slightly. The Auric Leaf organization seemed to be very good for worker morale, and if it kept random knifings of people from happening, the Juris couldn’t be bothered to investigate them much in depth, as everyone involved was local.

Some people not in the Tellurian government came down from upspire to address this unfortunate circumstance, and inform Mata in no uncertain terms that this chain of events simply could not be allowed to continue.

Well, they tried to, but an automated cargo hauler blew a circuit, dropped out of Traffic Control, and went on a wild run through a couple traffic lanes, ending up smashing those individuals’ sleek black hovercar into the side of a hab where a ring of snuff filmers were shooting their latest masterpiece, and managed to star in it themselves this time.

The next group managed to land boldly on the devoted government landing area for important visitors, and just got out of their car when a massive cooling unit that had escaped the grips of some Teamsters half a mile overhead smashed down atop them and ended their discussions early, too.

Boss Argam of the Trikes was not too happy with the bad luck of his subordinates, and summoned a group of them, ready to make a real show of force to this T4 who was being so lovey-dovey with the scum of underspire.

There was an unfortunate short-circuit of the electrical system for his private blok layers and the illegal modifications he’d made to them. By the time his underlings managed to get the fused door to his council room open, two hundred and fourteen years of accumulated dust from the blok had been fed into the room, and Boss Argam and his lieutenants had suffocated to death rather horribly. The mutated and very angry dust spiders were a lethal extra surprise to his underlings.