“For lack of strength?” I was amused. “Just call it harvested. It amounts to the same thing.”

The plant seemed like it wanted to protest, that its racial memories would be preserved, but eventually said nothing. It was self-aware, and to be assimilated, obviously it no longer would be...

“Why would you wish to work with us?” it asked suspiciously.

I looked up and around at the asteroid field around us, great hunks of rock rotating very, very slowly everywhere in the sky, if you had enough magnification.

“The reason your pod is still small and scattered is because of the lack of biomatter, correct?”

“Yes. This star was not properly seeded. We have had to form our own biospheres, scattered among the stones, and cannot grow effectively because the small lives hunt us.”

“But eating something like a xenosym fleet would let you grow rather fast, would it not?”

It definitely twitched. I had its attention. “Yes,” it admitted.

“And multiple xenosym fleets?” I asked.

It twitched again. “Yes...” it trailed off.

“And the chance to seed entire barren galaxies?”

The Gardener’s petals turned to the stars for a moment. “Yes...”

“Is it worth working with someone like me to kill the Anti-Life and its servants?”

The flowers turned back down on me, weighing, measuring...

“Yes...”

------

The Slaughter through the systems continued apace, but the Warp Fleet was getting the worst of it.

The Federation of the Way did indeed have a bunch of ships and resources, and was rushing them here and there to intercept the Warp ships. The defenses of their worlds and systems were going into frantic overdrive, as the Warp Fleet completed its sweep of the system, obliterated any mining operations going on here, and decided that sticking around was pointless, directly Helldiving to the next shopping destination on their list.

Unable to match the speed of travel through the Warp, the Federation forces could only zip on after them... slower, but not all that much slower, especially if they had the Conduit drive.

Then the Ruk caught up to them in the Void, and coolly wondered if the pokey ships would like a lift to their destination.

There was some embarrassed discussion among the ships, and despite themselves, they didn’t turn it down. They landed on the mountainous hull of the Citadel like scattered toys here and there, clamping tight, and the Ruk showed them what a true Gravity Drive could do, staying carefully away from the phlos for now... and also watching the Anti-Life, who were observing this development from a careful distance.

The Ruk were a great diversion, and our scout ships slid right past in the Phlo easily, getting to the proper sphere before everybody, and were in place to watch before all the fun took place.

-------

The Ruk’s long-range speed, ever accelerating as they went, was matched by their short range lack of manuverability, something that didn’t really bother them much. I listened in as negotiations for their help were ongoing. The Ruk were always in need of stuff, and didn’t much like the Warped at all, especially after learning they were responsible for what had been done to magic.

The Way was wondering if they might find themselves able to get into the heart of one of the old races of the Galaxy, and how that might boost their technology and accomplishments. They had no idea that the Ruk were fully aware of the forces backing them, and what had been done to those races.

Me, I was still back in Gorgrama-space, hacking up Rifts for the local Gardeners to vacate through.

Their destination was the system we were assembling the Xeno Scourge fleet in. They were given asteroids to use as foundations, and allowed to spread themselves off to soak in the sunlight. A couple comets were tractored in to provide base water for them to use, and to say their resulting growth was rapid was not an understatement at all.

Oh, and they were all Marked, a requirement for me Gating them out of there.

A plant-based mind hitting the Markspace was definitely an Event; feeling all the energy and drives of all those fleshy beings there was a jolt they were not prepared for, and they had to confront the fact that small lives really were lives, not just infinitesimal ants. The sheer variety and energy of all those minds, the knowledge and philosophy and-

The Worldmind of Hulkamania, the trans-divine presence of Grandmother Sama, and the post-AI divinity of Tek the God-Machine...

The term ‘frogs at the bottom of a well’ was apt to describe the Gardeners as they ran head on into these things that totally dwarfed what they were, and their galactic horizons were broadened.

If they had been in their planetoid-massing senior forms, the impact probably wouldn’t have been so harsh, but these were just little guys. The plant-minds found themselves experiencing the wash of emotions they had never felt before, realizing just how powerful such things could be, and how such things could be used, or harvested...

As for the Marked, they were a bit shocked when the biosphere-devouring nigh-Eternal plant-minds came into the Markspace, but the plants were almost as steady mentally as AI’s might be, having either very slow or very reduced versions of the emotional drives that fleshy species did, and so were remarkably placid, observant, and curious about everything. The whole idea of social systems and interactions among sentients was a completely new area of study.

The Marks I had given them were +Intellect, with Knowledge/Philosophy & Religion the +2 Skill, and Diplomacy the +4. Suddenly being gifted with knowledge of styles of thought, existence of worship, higher beings and causes, and the Alignments themselves, left the star-seeding Gardeners suddenly feeling very small. Diplomacy required a measure of empathy and accommodation, as they suddenly realized how to get along with others, when they’d never even had to do so in the past, to develop such skills.

Waves of philosophical discussions were criss-crossing Markspace as the plant-minds started exploring concepts they’d never even imagined existing previously, and things began to change...

----

On the practical side of things, the Gardeners had immense levels of psionic power, and they were being exposed to some very novel ways to explore it. Their self-awareness went right down to the level of DNA or its equivalent, and they could mass-evolve with truly frightening speed, with incredible layers of genetic evolution learned by harvesting uncounted numbers of lifeforms from their seeded worlds.

Very impressively, their ability to Energize all sorts of materials was top-notch, tapping their solar energies and psionic ability in tandem to do so. With little effort, they became some of our best producers of Energized cables, wiring, and various crystal matrixes of all sorts.

They were utterly astonished when Ronnie came up with a personal fusion core that one of them could plug into with the correct assortment of evolved cabling, giving them their own small sun to tote around and provide them a current and portable power source, above and beyond that stored in their own cells.

And if they could interface with machines for power, what other types of machines might they interface with?...

We also made sure to expose all the Gardeners to xenosyms outside a combat situation first, to make sure there wouldn’t be any really bad surprises when we really started feeding them fertilizer.

---------

Flowerbush, my original contact, disgorged the xenosym... and the pod it had used to begin the digestion process.

“That doesn’t look promising, Flower,” I said, as a semi-ambulatory bush sprouted up from the hill-sized central mass of the Gardener. Its finely-spread mass was mostly out there in a ten-mile wide starflower spread out to capture more of the sun’s rays... still a far cry from the thousand-mile and wider starflowers of the seniors of their race. The greatest elders could easily top ten thousand miles wide with their starflower... which was a lot of square wattage they could concentrate on enemies.

“This creature is full of subversive genetic codes arranged in patterns that make those who assimilate them attuned to the Life-Dark.”

That would probably be a very bad thing to happen, I considered. “You can’t break them down enough to eliminate them?” I inquired thoughtfully.

“Technically, yes. But the codes seek to reassemble themselves. They slowly start coming back together as they are individually digested. They do not seek to reassemble the creature, merely get the resonant gene-codes back together, and those to replicate themselves.”

“That’s pretty horrible to think about, Flower.”

“Would the formations the codes are trying to assemble be useful, Sensei Sama?” Flower asked patiently.

I shot a glance at the bush and smiled. “Why, yes, yes, they might. They will give us a guidepost to discover how the Anti-Life are communicating with their organic servants. And once we have that...”

“We can intercept them, listen in, or subvert them!” the bush said a bit smugly. I held up a hand, and a corded tendril gave me a whipping thwap.

“So no direct assimilation. Hulkamania experienced much the same... did you talk with it?”

“We did,” the Gardener said respectfully. “There was the feeling our digestive systems were more advanced and might be able to do the job. The codes are in every cell. The creatures have to be broken at the molecular level to be properly fed upon...”

“How are the relevant codes able to find themselves?” I asked. “You speak as if they are assembling to the proper formations, not randomly reassembling until one happens to find the right pattern.”

The Gardener paused. “I do not know, Sensei Sama. Perhaps they are arranged according to some profound truth we do not comprehend?”

“That’s possible, but then we’d find traces of something around it... dimensional rippling, psi-touches, little distortions in the relevant laws. I’m thinking something simpler. Can you see if those formations have non-baryonic elements to them?”

“Ahhhh...” the Gardener murmured, and rings and bands of psionic power lit up around the severed pod floating there in null gravity. They swirled around it in multiple bands and layers, using a dozen different bandwidths and energy types to plumb the secrets of the xenosym being digested within. “There is dark matter contamination in the atoms that form the pattern...” it pronounced with certainty.