“World-eaters don’t settle worlds. They live in their swarmfleets, and they move around the galaxy, looking for worlds with organic life, which they strip away, devour, and then head on to the next feeding trough. It’s an entire galaxy full of worlds waiting to be terraformed and settled that you aren’t taking away from anyone... and you only have to defend it against one type of enemy, who have some severe limitations on how fast they can deal with you.”

“You zo sure o dis?” Gorgrum looked suspicious.

“Yeah, their masters use them as janitors, cleaning out the solar systems of organic life. They were successful in some of the surrounding galaxies, and they started sending them here to do the same to the Milky Way.”

The holo zoomed in on the three major known Xenosym Swarmfleets. All three goblins narrowed their eyes at the courses coming from the surrounding galaxies.

“Let me be blunt about something. Are the goblins aware of the Anti-Life?” I put up a mathematical rendering of the gravitic profile of the dark matter creatures. Gorgrum grunted, the hobgoblin stared, and the Techrunt hissed. “These are the masters of the Tekrons, and the Xenosyms. They are also the puppet masters of the Way Masters of the Kappa.”

The goblins all blinked together, obviously not knowing all that. “Well nowz...” Gorgrum mumbled. “Wutz that got ta do wit uz?”

“The goblins are one of the few survivors from the Milky Way Galaxy from before the last Tekron purge.” They all stared at me again. “Yeah, got that right out of the Tekron records. Your people used to control a huge chunk of the galaxy. Weren’t no Ruk, no Elvar out there at the time. There were a lot of other races, and it was a pretty mean and brutal time.

“You guys found out how to do something that threatened the Anti-Life, and they activated the Tekrons, wiping out your people, your empire, your enemies, your allies, everything. The only ones who survived were the Runts, because they were the survivors, getting into deep cracks and places the Tekrons didn’t find.

“What civilization you came from was destroyed, your masters obliterated, your society wiped from existence, and you had to start over from runts and what remains of your racial memory.

“You, the Ruk, and the Elvar came back up out of the dregs the Tekron left of the galaxy, and began to rise anew. So, you’ve been fighting them for, like, ever, sure enough, but you were fighting long, long before either of them.”

They were staring at me in disbelief, and hunger, wishing it was true. “Where’d we come ferm, if dat’er tru?” Gorgrum growled deeply.

“Here.” They all blinked again as I flicked a finger, and a map of the galaxy zoomed in. “As far as the Tekron records we pulled can tell, you developed in that star cluster there.”

The hobgoblin finally spoke up. “That’s a nebula, not a star cluster...” His voice was much more precise than Gorgrum’s.

“A nebula made from the detonation of exactly six stars, across a region of approximately ten light years, and happening within six months of one another.” I turned my attention back to the Techrunt. “Because goblins know fire.”

His bulging yellow eyes were staring at me, and crazy burning ideas were percolating behind them.

“I’m guessing your ancestors nova’d the stars to kill any Anti-Life close by, and deny the death energy to invading Tekrons. It got repeated five more times, until the Tekrons couldn’t dare do the job as thoroughly as they wanted to do, for fear you’d blow more of them.”

“Hurr-hurr, we blew up stars!” Gorgrum bashed the other two lightly, sending the runt bouncing away. The little fellow glided his chair back deftly, probably didn’t even notice the casual abuse. “You wants us burnin’ stars t’kill these Unmattah things?”

“No, but the goblins are probably the only ones who can invent a way to burn Dark Matter readily.”

Techrunt’s eyes were near to popping, I swear.

“Let me be frank and say the Milky Way is a busy place. There’s a lot of races here, but the big powers at play are the Warp Gods lounging around in the Abyss, and the Anti-Life running from them between the stars.” The goblins frowned at me. “Warp storms that shroud sectors are the Warp Gods throwing fireballs at the Anti-Life.”

“Oooooooh...” they all said together, and looked at the map of the galaxy, and the Rift.

“There are no Warp Gods in our satellite galaxies, because there’s no organic life to feed them. I doubt you can use mana freely, but you might – might! – be able to use burst fire magic, if not continuous effects, because the Corruption coming off the Warp will be less.

“The only things you’ll be fighting are Xenosym Fleets, who you can see coming, and the Anti-Life, who you’ll just have to figure out how to see some other way.

“Other than that, that whole galaxy is yours to take.”

Was I worried about the goblins being able to take that galaxy, whelm uncounted quintillions, and come roaring back to take the Milky Way? No. One, it would take them virtually forever to take that galaxy, if they even could, and two, if they were going to do that, they weren’t the only ones who could figure out how to blow up stars.

And three, the Warp Gods should be gone by then, which means Creation would be around, and offer up some other diversions for them. Orcs, maybe, who loved raiding even more than goblins did. If they could get some mutations to 40k status... damn, weren’t there some in Hell that were at Troll-level toughness?...

But there was no doubt that only having to face one or two enemies was a huge, huge improvement over the current situation of getting stomped on and hunted down by Ruk and Elvar, and having to go head to head with damn Humans all the time.

“I kin take it back to the gobz and sees wutz they sez,” Gorgum growled, studying me. “You iz just trying to get ridz o’ us, eh, Angel-girl?”

“Well, killing you one by one wasn’t doing it, even if there some pretty kewl explosions involved!” The Techrunt actually hooted his enthusiasm, and his bigger buddies couldn’t deny that. That Firejumpah Pad going sideways had been pretty awesome. “So, yeah, giving you a whole galaxy of your own to play with doesn’t strike me as bad at all. Oh, and by the way, thanks.”

“Thankz?” the urgob asked in amazement.

“Your people are probably the reason the Milky Way Galaxy isn’t an endless network of cold, dead hunks of rock circling stale suns, because of what your people did to the Tekrons and Anti-Life until they smashed you back into the mud.” I gave them all two thumbs up. “You probably did it for all the wrong reasons, but you saved the life in this galaxy, including my species. Pretty impressive for a bunch of yellow-blooded pyromaniacs who blew up their own homeworlds, right?”

The Goblins looked like they had no idea how to process the fact that they had saved the galaxy, and were being shooed out of it at the same time.

“Maybe you’ll find some other survivors hiding in the cracks of the galaxy, and can show them how to get their revenge, just like you’re taking yours.”

I didn’t know how strong their racial memory was, or their ties to the Akasha, but the fact was that Gorgrum’s group of mangy, merry, and mega-pyro marauders was probably the most advanced group of Goblins in the galaxy. If they could touch the memories of that ancient fight, it would change the entire tenor of who and what they were fighting.

The Anti-Life had cost their race everything. It had been a long, slow climb back up, and they had none of their former glory. The degradation of magic had something to do with that, but mostly because other races had risen up to take their place.

But the entities responsible were still around, and Goblins were perfectly capable of carrying a grudge for generations, right down to their burning GDNA.

-----------

The Warp battleship was tumbling through the Void. Its atmosphere was nicely consumed by the flames coming out of its core, and the loving flamespikes, firehorns, plasma cutters, and other burning adornments set up all about it in loving tribute to Klaw nicely accentuated the many holes blown clear through it, the fact it was nearly sawed in half, and the primary drives had simply vanished in the eruption of the ship’s core.

Commodore Tiffany Rantha calmly signaled the drifting hulk repeatedly as it burned. “You might want to pick up before I lance that miserable excuse for a warship from stem to stern, idiots,” she said in a light tone, as if she was thinking of buying some candy.

“Corpse-worshiping whore!” was the explosive reply from her coms, coming in with a coding attempt to infiltrate their systems that was instantly quashed, fed back along the link, and something cursed and then screamed in the background as the Nimbus-charged Black ICE melted their brains. “Do you think to scare us by shelling us from afar! Come aboard and see how we die!”

“Says the brainless dolts who just bombed a helpless agriworld into smoking ruin from a safe distance. Riiiight. Well, I’m just here to pass on a message or three. Crumping that excuse for a ship of yours was just free business.”

“Message? What do I care for a message from one of the Emperor’s harlots?” was the instant reply.

“The first message is that the captain’s pinnace in the ship’s hangers is still intact, for the first group that gets to it. The second message is that a Solar Furnace is going to be on site in two hours to reduce the remains of your little Genotsid and its support fleet to recycled slag.

“The third message is that the Kappa Way Masters in the Federation of the Way are proxies for the Anti-Life.”

There was a moment of confused silence from the other end. “What?” came the eventual word, looking for more.

“You have one hour and fifty-nine minutes to get to that pinnace before the rest of the crew. If you pass on message three to your superiors, I believe you might even get a promotion out of this.”

The silence contained heavy disbelief. “You are just going to shoot us out of the void when we take off, mindwitch!”

“If you like, I can have that Solar Furnace here in twenty minutes instead.”

“MOVE YOU MONGREL CURS! CUT DOWN ANYONE WHO GETS IN OUR PATH!” came the half-metallic roar. Tiffany glanced over, and Signals Officer Benedict Sashano cut the connection.

“The Furnace will be here in five. They aren’t going to be happy. Are we going to pick them off?” Squire Kasperhoff asked, frowning. The Coronals didn’t make a habit of letting any Warped get away.

“What’s going to happen when this person gets away and conveys that message up his chain of command in the Abyss is more important than killing him immediately.” Tiffany’s cutely dimpled face and long pink hair plugged into the Bared Saber looked like poisonous lace at this moment, a fine bit of dusted fluff that would kill you if you touched it.

The Saber was responsible for the rending cut through the primary engines that had torn open the back half of the battleship and crippled it, preventing it from escaping. The rest of the Corunsun Fleet had been more than enough to deal with the marauding Warp ship, a vessel at least four thousand years old by its transponder signal and identification.

“The Anti-Life...” the Squire repeated softly. “We are using the Warp against the Anti-Life now?”

“The Anti-Life is using the Warp against us, so all’s fair,” Tiffany smiled slightly. The other races in the Way Federation were probably not going to be very happy about what was going to happen next...