The key to attacking the Wombworld was surprise, of course. While the ‘world' had living agents crawling over it intermittently, using its surface as a marshalling station and storage point for miscellaneous materials useful to the Compact races who served the Anti-Life, the wombmind itself was largely dreaming, looking at the world through more than one set of dimensions, and certain that it would detect any threat to itself long before any such force could get close.

At that time, terrible bio-wombs would cycle into play, and the great living bioships of the Xenovores would be disgorged in endless numbers.

It had the mass of a moon to work with, more than sufficient to birth hundreds of thousands of such vessels. There was no way any invading force of any conceivable mortal force could whelm enough power to take it over, and that was ignoring the not-insubstantial defenses worked into its outer shell, as good as any Imperial planetary defense field, only guided by a planetary-level intelligence.

There was no system traffic to speak of. There was precious little reason for anything to come here, for the most part. Cold and dead was the way the Anti-Life liked it, and the less mortal life was messing around out here, the better the dark matter entities liked it.

Vivic fire shields a few hundred meters across were not invisible, but the eyes had to be looking in that direction. On a planetary scale, they simple weren’t that noticeable, especially if your approach vector was precisely coming in from a brighter star or two behind you.

The shield ships maintaining those sails preceded ten different Clusters of Gardeners converging on the Wombworld from all directions. The Gardeners had lined themselves up into long, narrow, strung-out lines, exactly in the shadow of those eyes. Tractor beams and adamant cables towed them along, and gravity manipulation and grasping tendril-roots enhanced with terrible psychic force bound the plants together in a harmonious whole as they all headed in-system.

“Kids, blind them,” I ordered softly.

It wasn’t a long trip, because it wasn’t a big system; only four light-hours to the heliopause, allowing the Anti-Life to get relatively close to their minions and communicate more easily. The nature of the sun’s magnetic field seemed to be relatively ambivalent to the existence of the Anti-Life, so communication waves coming from afar seemed to permeate with remarkable clarity compared to other systems.

But it was a planetary intelligence, and staying precisely aware of all the ants moving on its surface, not all of whom were Xenos, was not something a dreaming bio-horror that considered kaiju at about the same scale we would mites would bestir itself for.

That was especially true when some of those individuals were post-Ten Hagbloods pulled from building up organizations in the Empire and wanting to find worthwhile stuff to do. They were rocking 40+ Nulls and Sources, and about as visible to that slumbering worldmind as grains of sand.

Sure, there were lesser brood- and hiveminds that were aware of individual xenos moving about here and there, or cerevores riding xenos and undertaking what personal tasks were used to occupy their potentially endless time out here.

They weren’t equipped to deal with anti-Aberrant equipped Hagbloods kitted out for Stealth work, who just so happened to have been scouting out this abomination of devoured planets for over six months now.

As the lines of Gardeners slowly accelerated to .10c, unable to move faster for the gravity distortion that would warn the Wombworld, the kids calmly and precisely neutralized any visual spotters looking in the precise ten directions the Clusters were coming in from. This ranged from putting optical deflectors in front of ten-foot-wide fixed optical clusters in precisely the right location, to quietly nullifying bio-constructs whose only purpose in existence was to ceaselessly scan the skies for intruders.

Mundane use of magnetics, radio waves, and gravity monitoring were all on the table, but the biggest thing the worldmind relied on was timesight, sensitivity to energy, and psychic awareness pulsing out from it in slow, steady waves, reaching out to languidly touch the minds and dreams of anything living in the system.

Any sapient creature existing where one should not would be noticed instantly; the only typical defenses would be psychic defenses that would trigger awareness of the expenditure of psychic energies. Even if they couldn’t be nailed down, just the awareness that unknown creatures were expending psionic power nearby would raise alarms immediately.

There were bioships around the system, but like the Wombworld, they were basically passive sensor stations, placed to cover the place in the same psychic emanations.

They weren’t powerful enough to overcome the deflecting power of the Gardeners to such things, as complex biostructures inside the starflowers replicated the power of cloaking fields, and their thousands-miles-long forms drank up all the broadcast energies meant to sense them smoothly.

Their courses did not take them near any mass shadows or objects to be highlighted against, and so the great serpentine tails of the starflowers, darker than space and drinking in all betraying radiations, wove through the void towards their target.

All around the Wombworld, certain observers went quiet or slipped into fugue, swept into the dreams of the Wombworld with custom poisons infiltrating them, while others were silently covered in Nulls or Suns, and ceased to exist whatsoever.

Coordinating through Markspace, our approaches remained coordinated and simultaneous to within one kilometer, converging on the Wombworld smoothly.

------

There was an entire Xenovore Swarmfleet parked in orbit around the Wombworld, hundreds of ships, but like the Wombworld itself, it was basically in hibernation. After all, they were living things, and constantly burned energy to maintain that status. Like most Mythos things, they could endure endless amounts of hibernation.

Individually, they were nothing to grown Gardeners, except for their status as moving munchies.

It was a long forty hours on approach, but there were a whole lot of kids on those ships, and our need to sleep had gone away some time ago. Everyone had maxed Concentration Ranks, basically a prerequisite when you had brains working constantly on as many things as we did, so staying on focus and point was not hard.

---

The Human, Elvar, and Ruk along for the ride were all Tens as well, if not all Deep. There were even two grim Kappa along for this, caught between terror of the things that had devoured their homeworld... and the Xenovores that did the same thing to other worlds, and who their Masters had been the puppets of.

They had been freed from unknown slavery by the very people that had destroyed all they had accomplished. It created a lot of ambivalence among the survivors, who realized that we hadn’t had to preserve them at all... and seeing the great races of the galaxy together in a common cause that transcended the alien purpose beyond their own Federation stoked the dreams they still had of a greater way.

The fact they could manifest mindclaws, and the rare members among them mindblades, had also changed a great many things in their society.

So had the Markspace, even when it was restricted just among themselves, and they realized they truly didn’t need the Way Masters to see how the other subspecies of Kappa thought and were driven, and could get along, complementing one another.

Learning the other Races of the Federation had been saved, or as close to it as possible, had been a turning point in their trust of what we were doing, at least for some of them. Whether it would apply to their whole society was something else, but the Way Masters had conditioned them for group thinking, with weal being somewhat secondary to that purpose. We’d see if the higher calling could stick among them, as opposed to just the benefit of the group.

Now they were watching how the young races could truly help the older ones, against a foe of all of us.

“Countdown timer on.” We were six-some light seconds out, coming in at .1c meant one minute. The timer went on. The fleet around the moon was holding pretty steady at about twenty thousand miles out; the mass shadow of the planet was thirty thousand miles, but we had solutions for all that.

Coming in at hard velocity was great, and dumping Jam speed down to tactical was indeed a thing... but what do you do when the line of Gardeners behind you is still incoming, and is over a hundred thousand miles long?

The ten different Clusters converged in behind the psychic blocker, drinking in the sensory passives, and the white shine of the vivus closing in wasn’t really standing out or visible until it was under a second away... and the ships all released the Gardeners and veered off.

The starplants hit the mass shadow... and kept right on going as those behind drove forwards against the mass shadow. The resistance piled up immensely, of course, but the long lances of the Gardeners plunged down to within a thousand miles of the Wombworld before the kinetic drain was overcome, and the long line of Gardeners broke apart like scattering leaves... most of them plummeting towards the planet below, while those behind were falling over the suddenly waking-up xenosym fleet desperately trying to get itself into motion.

Psychic static filled the stars with horrible silence and heavy weight as the first Gardeners, pillars of life at least hundreds of miles long each, slammed into the surface of the Wombworld at pre-targeted locations.

The chitin shell of the Wombworld was seething with enough psychic force to rival neutronium in durability. However, there was no way any form of planetary body could have a completely sealed shell like that. Hot and cold expansion meant that the shell was actually in conjoined sections, with massive ravine-like seals between them that opened and closed.

Also, there had to be ways to spew out the xenovore bio-ships from within. Those sphincter-like holes were scattered all over the surface of the Wombworld, but they’d all been scouted out, and the Gardeners sought them out with the patient predatory nature of weeds forcing themselves through cracks in plascrete.

They slammed into those sphincters with enough mass and their own psychically-enhanced ramming spikes to punch through the weaker defenses... and extruded immediately into the biomass beyond.

Rootmasses the size of cities grew like living lightning, reaching out, ripping, tearing, grabbing... and above all, beginning to feed. Spores bred to feed on xenovore tissue ignored the massive acidic bodies and phrenic lightning playing over everything; the first wave of starflowers planted themselves in the mass of the Wombworld, and spread their petals above, taking in all the energy from the sun there to help drive the process further.

The defenses of the planet were opening up, but were largely fruitless... not because of lack of targets, but because those targets had swallowed the sky.

Thousand-mile plants had swallowed the bioships, wrapped them in great tendrils, and crushed and torn them open, invading them with endless hungry roots. The Gardeners fell on the xenosym fleet like great deathly shrouds, wrapping them up even as they plunged towards the Wombworld below, the largest and oldest of the Gardeners filling the skies as they carried the last of the fleet down to the surface.

Their impacts on the Wombworld pretty much flattened most of the structures on the surface, and rocked most of the body of the thing. The sealed sphincters were punched through, and megatons of hungry plants drove themselves into the interior of the world, seeking their prey.

Thousand-mile roots drilled through the biomass; the Wombworld pscreamed with all the force it could muster... and there was only silence. Blooming starflowers had completely encircled the world in continent-sized blossoms, and the Wombworld’s desperate struggles drew no attention whatsoever.

With the terrible, placid, relentless patience and hunger of the Green, the Gardeners began to feed, and to grow.