Life spirals were big molecules. Subverting a few hundred atoms in one was such a small fraction of it, and dark matter reacted almost not at all with normal matter, so it was not hard to miss it.

Also gave them a viable source of psionic power that was nothing like that of normal psions, thus the totally alien vibe to these Giger-imagined wannabes... and the continuous passive power that energized them.

A Warp Storm coming in would likely wipe their Dark Matter connections, which would be a death sentence to the Xenos caught in one. Yeah, they’d hate the Warp, and the Dark Matter would have a deleterious effect on any local manafield. Anti-Magic often tapped into the side of Dark Matter, after all...

“Got another pod ready?” I asked, and a few seconds later another section of the massive Gardener bulged up.

I pulled up my Blacklight pistol and shot the floating pod.

It had been severed, not killed. The darklight drove into the living cells of the pod and spread throughout every cell at literally the speed of lightning. Where it passed, the energies of life turned at right angles to themselves, and went away.

The cells withered and went motionless so fast they couldn’t even decay properly, but it was as dead and inert as could be, every organic connection inside inert and silent.

I finger-flicked a Vivic Sharding into it, and the unwhite flames hit the pod and erupted over it like it was soaked with gasoline. “See how fast you can digest that,” I told Flower.

A tendril which could have tossed around a decent-sized bus emerged from an innocuous bud nearby, grabbed the pod, and tossed it smoothly into the gaping orifice of another pod thrice the size of the first one that opened out of nowhere. There was a plop of psi-powered organic acids getting to work, the sac sealed back up, and the tendril smoothly withdrew into Flower’s main body.

Flower let me watch as the combination of vivic and digestive actions went to it. They wooshed through the mass of the inert digestive fluids inside and the xenos getting broken down there.

Psionic lights swirled around it again, pspectrum analysis proceeded forthwith, and we watched as the vivus swept through, and no Dark Matter was left behind. Indeed, we could ‘hear’ it popping as it went away.

Digesting proceeded very quickly thereafter, just like Hulkamania had done.

“Does this mean vivus is a weapon against the Life Dark?” Flower asked eagerly, as it quickly devoured and assimilated the expunged pod and its contents once vivus broke everything down. “The Life Spirals are completely breaking down under its touch, and not reforming at all.”

I shook my head. “On a micro scale, if they are interacting with normal matter, sure. But just by itself, vivus probably won’t do anything. Dark Matter is like proto-Creation, Vivus recycles Creation. I imagine if vivus interacted with Dark Matter, it would do something like generate a new star or something... and that would take a LOT of vivus to do. Without free access to the manafield, that’s impossible to come up with.”

“Is it? In short bursts?” Flower waved its fronds behind me, and I turned to look at the bluish sun shining there behind us. “The light mana coming off the star is pure enough. If it could carry the vivus?”

I caught what he was planning. A full Blooming Sunflower, the Gardener equivalent of a Sunbeam. Cover a few square million miles of space with refractors, concentrate them on one point, and pretty much anything would die. If they were laden with vivic fire...

“Any idea how you are gonna get an Anti-Life inside a heliosphere to make that effective?” I asked idly.

Flower turned in another direction, and my eyes wandered over to the hundred-foot sphere of the fusion power core pumping energy into it, above and beyond. Some creatures would probably be very unhappy learning about the crystal-focused weaponry the Gardeners were forming in their bodies with this artificial power source... and shield emitters, among other things.

Technically, they could store a lot of that sunlight, emit it, and the power core could recharge their stores. But it meant they could carry out an attack or three outside the heliosphere.

I thought about that. “You’d need to swallow the thing in light. That means you’d need to be near its size to do that successfully, or you’d need several of you focus-firing in tandem,” I analyzed. “So, you’d need to be a lot bigger, Flower.”

“That is our goal regardless,” Flower reminded me.

“So it is.” Eating a couple of comets had certainly helped, but there were hundreds of them, I’d spent months getting them all here, and dividing all the water and mass up hadn’t allowed any of them to grow to actual Elder size.

They’d need to eat a Xeno fleet or two for that to happen, and had come to an agreement for Flower to get the lion’s share of biomass and build towards that status.

“Question for you. Been talking to Hulkamania over its Sunbeamer Defense?”

“It has many similarities to our Sunflower Bloom, save that it uses even more of the Sun’s power,” Flower complimented the idea.

“Being a planet, and separated from the Beaming equipment, Hulkamania can’t aim it at anything smaller than a planet, due to delays in communication and coordination, processing time, and so forth. Could one of your elders do so?”

Flower bowed its petals, considering that. “The gravitics and energy output, magnetics, different velocities... it is on immense scale... it would involve growing far more logic processors than is normal... but yes, the similarities would make it possible.”

“Could you focus it enough to be lethal outside a heliosphere?”

The multi-colored blooms began to bob in excitement. “You speak of trying to snipe the Life-Dark if they sit outside a system?”

“I do. They hate you, and I’m pretty sure if they know your kind are somewhere, they might try to park outside the heliosphere while they bring in xenos to try to do something about you.

“You would have to fire the Sunbeam very accurately, very precisely, very focused, and repeatedly in a short amount of time.

“Also, I believe you could deploy the modules for focusing the Sunbeam far more quickly than anything this side of a force equal to a Sector Fleet, with your understanding of stellar dynamics.”

Flower’s main body was pulsing under me, calculations going on through its immense, spread-out brain. The possibilities of teamwork unlocked by working with small lives instead of killing them were simply too immense...

“With a devoted Gate, we could move a Sunbeam from system to system, if there are enough modules for the new location, and speed the calibration of them along swiftly...”

“Your Sunbloom would be enough to power up a Gate pretty quickly, especially if that was the only purpose of the ship carrying it. You’d need some devoted scouts to find any Anti-Life nearby, Marked to relay current coordinates, and a lot of luck hoping they wouldn’t move long enough for the Sunbeams to get there. Classic sniping motif on a solar scale.”

Flowerbush was silent for a few long minutes. At last, it rustled, “We could kill the Life-Dark that killed our progenitors?” it asked quietly.

“That depends if they stuck around that system, but we could sure try...”

---------

-Go ahead, King Rargyle,- I /said, responding to the King’s acknowledgement that he had time to talk.

-As suspected, all seven races of the Federation are compromised. There was a primary gender, subspecies, progenitor, or similar arrangement in all of the races,- the Ruk King /informed me. He was in the midst of hosting a conference with the Federation’s multiple races to discuss trade terms.

The Federation was subversively pressing on the topic of the Way, but Rargyle had mentioned in passing that someone or someones seemed to be using some sort of telempathic forces and biochemical mood-altering, and it was irritating the systems in his people’s suits, and could they please stop before he found out who and expressed his displeasure.

The subtle attempts had stopped, and the Federation had stuck to business, not daring to underestimate the Ruk again.

----

The Unforgotten’s transportation of the Federation Fleet basically got them into the system within hours of the Warp Fleet. They naturally went winging out ahead of the Ruk Citadel as it broke out of FTL, and the Ruk trundled along behind, not bothering to show that they could get moving very fast in a straight line if they cared to. TL 20 Mass Drives weren’t for show.

The Warp fleet was not prepared for a massive assault from the rear at the same time it ran into the full defenses of a populated system. It was even less prepared when it vectored off to escape the encirclement, and found itself running straight into the Volcano Cannons +5 of a battle-tested Ruk Citadel. The very first broadside the Unforgotten unleashed crippled the Sunbreaker’s battleship, the Dying Suns, and pursuing Federation ships pounced on it to finish it off.

With the death of the battleship, only four ships were actually capable of forcing open a Warp Portal by themselves to escape the system, and they became the casual targets of the Ruk’s guns, bombarded unmercifully as they tried to run. Limping away as the lesser ships of the Fleet had to run the gamut of the Unforgotten’s guns, many of whom didn’t make it, the Ruk let the incensed and jubilant Federation ships clean them up.

Only one heavy cruiser and the ships clinging to its heels made it back into the Warp and got away. The rest of the ravaged fleet split up wildly to try and hide in the system, and the Federation ships went singing on the hunt while the Ruk looked on sagely.

With such a great start to their relationship, opening the first round of trade talks was not far behind, as the Federation could not ask for more than an endorsement of the elder statesmen of the galaxy as a trading partner, leading to the current situation.

King Rargyle was more than willing to exploit the situation for the benefit of the Ruk. The whole trade conference was just a cover to get members of the races and their important figures aboard where they could be scanned by some of the finest sensor systems in the galaxy.

---

-Break down the bad news for me,- I /sighed to him.

He /nodded back. -The Way Masters of the Kappa emit a continuous telepathic signal keyed to their species, but with some adjustability to other species. It, hmm, mellows the Kappa around them, helping them work together without friction, and they naturally revere the Way Masters.

-The Golgumph are an amphibious race, and their elders seem to be secreting a mildly addictive and mood-altering residue from their skin. It appears to reinforce a subtle psychic subservience to them, which is more demonstrated in those who share a genetic lineage with them, which is probably spreading through their population.

-The Xrik are insectile. There is an addition to the genomes of the Queens, and has spread to the race itself. You could say the entire original race has been killed off and replaced by this one born from mutated queens. They run theirs by pure hivemind-level telepathy, the lesser ones are basically obedient drones to the wills of the Queens.

-The Kolios are bipedal sentients who venerate their priestly caste, who have a pheromone-centered basis of control. The genetics of the caste is slowly spreading through the species, concentrated naturally enough on the ruling classes they are interbreeding with.

-The Chirichiru are avian in ancestry, and their speakers have psionic-powered voices of startling purity. They accomplish control by means of a psionic modulation to their voices, which seem to be irresistible to members of their own species.

-The Naruff are biomorphers, and seem to have been led to ingest beings bearing the requisite genomes. The older ones seem to be more in tune with the wills outside, and so are followed the most closely.

-The Gassth are reptilian pack hunters, and their Speakers have psychoactive elements to their scale patterns. The members sharing genes have increased susceptibility to visible elements, and we found them going into trances staring at exposed power circuits, flame sculptures, and the like.-

The Ruk had seen all kinds of things in their history. Mind control wasn’t unknown, and certainly back when magic was active, was probably quite pervasive in some species. In the psionic area, the Anti-Life had somehow managed to come up with this sort of stuff...

The Compact of the Black was pretty good at this stuff, I had to admit...