Play and counterplay. Technology, counter-technology. Tricks and counters to them.

The sheer size of what we were facing, and the age of most of the races, meant they had a big, deep bucket of tricks, traps, and tech to draw upon to try and thwart us.

They probably didn’t realize that one of the reasons we were doing this was to draw some of those tricks out, so we wouldn’t be surprised by them when they hit our universe.

Ergovores and manavores, who could track and consume exotic energies and magic across cosmic distances. Whole races devoted to tracking, killing, and salvaging cosmic and profound beings. Entire solar systems designed as traps. Means to thwart cosmic awareness. Fields that disrupted the employment of cosmic energies, and weapons capable of killing non-finite Entities, let alone finite ones.

Those were the high-end things. Dizzying variations of cloaking systems and the sensors to detect those cloaks; types of travel along sub-space, dream-space, planar subdivision, mathematical translation, spatial tunneling, the works. A hundred exotic energies, some clearly of Aberrant origin, able to cheese through shields not specifically designed to counter them, yet totally helpless against shields that were. Endless varieties of lifeforms, from bacterial and viral hive-minds to system-devouring swarms, mortal-machine meldings of all types, up through the various mid-range adaptable predatory races of bipeds and other ‘uprights’, to ever-greater elder races, some with intrinsic space travel capabilities who wasted their final years before The End warring with one another like uncaring space gods...

It was all here, all preparing to enter our universe, and bring their billions of years of evolution there to contest with ours and prove which was the stronger.

We didn’t have that vast bucket of technology and powers genetic and otherwise, but what we did have was access to some of the highest tech levels in our universe, and some universe-class geniuses working full time on that stuff. Making powerful shields was a test of tech level and power sources. Adaptable shields was a revision of technology, and we were being exposed to some crazy and insane energy types and attack forms, that was certain.

But I was there, and with me some of the wildest sensory suites and divinatory scanners in existence. We also had some deep buckets to draw on for analyzing enemies, and we broke them down, parsed them, and figured out how to fight them.

So, that was another part of our jobs. Smacking the enemy at some Karnak points was only part of it. Learning what they had and how to deal with it before they breached into our space was all part of the challenge.

Yeah, it meant we were actually upgrading Skrull, Kree, and Shi’ar shield technology to greater adaptability then they’d ever had before. It basically reduced the competitive baseline back to speed of resonance and amount of power available... or the strength of the hull.

Full-tempered durasteel hulls of varying compositions were the state of the art for most ship hulls, with the most advanced ones capable of self-sealing. Materials tougher than that were hard to locate, even harder to make, and would be expensive as hell to turn into a starship hull, as opposed to more specific uses.

Adamantium, for instance, had several counterparts of near-equal hardness out in the stars. The finest alloy for Galador’s space knight armor could rival it. Xandar had a Matrix alloy of similar durability, and different materials were known to other races.

Still, sheathing six inches of adamantium inside the self-sealing hull of the Starholder was a bit beyond any but the most wasteful of the Imperial powers, but it made the Novaship suddenly the most goddamn durable thing in space. It could actually take on matter-rending, space-tearing, time-shearing hits that would have torn through any other vessel, and keep right on going.

The vibranium plating which bounced back a whole lot of those energy assaults on top of things were just icing on the cake. It was something which couldn’t be replicated on a massive scale... well, not outside our Alliance, anyways. Our Matter Manipulators had full schedules just working on our own ships, as it were.

The Fixer was on board the Starholder now, leading up a band of crazed engineers of thirty different species, trying out new things, adapting old things, feeding data to Stark and Reed-Sue and Barb and Briggs and Sama and the brain trusts, getting stuff back and seeing if they worked in the field in a wild ride of technology tests, re-tests, and upgrades done by super-geniuses skipping all sorts of boring, dry middle-grounds as they basically went from theory to prototype to calibrations to field trials in impossibly short spans of time.

The Starholder was only a mile long, small as capital ships went, but it was one of the busiest and most crazily over-engineered ships in space at this point.

---

All those things were going through ten of my thoughtstreams as I worked out a lot of math Euclidean and non, finite and profound. Alchemy that fused superscience, psionics, and magic was the hot button of the day, and trying to balance that stuff at the highest end of the mortal scale was a true test for even a supergenius.

Add in cosmic energies, and even the brains of I and all my Dupes would strain under the load.

It didn’t stop me from diving into this ‘dark spot’ of systems hidden from Cosmic Awareness, to the subtle level of me being not just unaware of what was there, but unaware that ANYTHING was amiss.

Happily, captured datafiles and a whole lot of navigational data cross-checking was the norm, because we expected this kind of impossible stuff to happen.

Something was indeed in these systems juuuuust outside the core of the Wave, and we wanted to know what. Rude surprises are rude, after all.

I was under full stealth and using the Beaubier mode for propulsion, my Core tamping down my gravimetric signature and basically keeping me less visible than a random rock moving through the void.

Specs was scanning on every wavelength and spectrum he could, looking for stuff, and that included visual through the whole E-M spectrum.

I was seeing nothing of interest, which just raised my hackles. Every single damn system in this area was flooded with Zoner races, most of them engaged in all-out production of ships, weapons, minions, or food supplies, but I was seeing no sign of space activity out here.

Very, very wrong. Then again, forward magnification assured me there were definitely things occluding the pale light of the dying star ahead. I just would have liked to figure out what before I got there.

There was a hiss across my mind, and I went from 99% of light speed to basically a full stop inside a hundred meters. Inertia protested wildly, but that’s what momentum-shearing was so wonderful for, going instantly from vibrating all in one direction to counter-balancing in all of them, shedding velocity nigh-instantly as it did so.

I would have been grokking stupid if I couldn’t recognize a hive-mind psi-band by now. Moreover, this was a familiar one.

I cycled the spells to blend into the hivemind and read it without being involved. I couldn’t see any locus, so I was basically just encountering a random thought from the inner system. If it carried this far, that meant a LOT of power behind it.

I resumed course, now assured of being telepathically invisible, an invisible attunement to the mind, not even blocking what was probably ‘psychic radar’ looking for non-native minds.

---

Light speed is slooooow in space, but I had to stay there to remain undetected. So it took me several hours to reach the inner sphere and actually hit the active edges of the hivemind.

I knew this form structure. The predation, the arrogance, the malice, the survivor mentality.

It was just that it was much more powerful than the one I was familiar with.

I touched the hivemind, and I ran along its edges... edges that extended to many places. Such as to other races and species that hadn’t joined the exodus effort, which it was capturing, implanting, and turning into new members of this race.

It was the Brood. It was gigantic. There were over a trillion of them, expanding wildly as races that didn’t join the effort became prey, and the other races here welcomed the extra forces for their push, fools that they were. All races were prey to the Brood, they only had allies of convenience. Those allies thought they could deal with the Brood, but what was going to happen when the Brood claimed all the lesser powers that fell in the fighting, and kept swelling their own numbers, even as those of others plummeted?

There was a Queen Empress here, her psychic power and status far beyond that of the Brood Queens of home. Tens of millions of bioships idled here about the sun, soaking in the dying starlight and making ready to breach the Crunch when it was time.

From within the hivemind, I could flit around and see the numbers of their forces, the types, and then tens of millions of bioships organic, technorganic, plant-like, symbiotic, fungoid, and otherwise, all waiting here. I could sense the different strains of the Brood, and knew over a hundred thousand species had gone extinct, extinguished to create more Brood.

The Brood really were from the Negative Zone. The chance they could not communicate across its boundary was slim to none. A tendril had already managed to cross the Crunch once, millennia ago, and there was no reason to believe they could not speak across it, a far less difficult endeavor.

The Brood were the primary conduits for intelligence on the forces of our universe!

The Brood back home didn’t know I had Cosmic Awareness, and didn’t have the power to truly block it except directly around their Queens. Their ‘empire’ between the Shi’ar and Milky Way galaxies was the largest of their colonies, for colonies they had to be, but it was far from their only one. Nests of Brood were scattered across a hundred-plus galaxies, taking prey, making more Brood, occasionally getting butchered en masse for what they were... and supplying intelligence to this colossal hive-mind here.

What planets and species, where they were, how advanced they were, strengths, weaknesses... they’d have it all for all the areas they were in, had passed through, or could gain the data on.

The N-Zoners didn’t even know the truth, probably just thinking the Brood had managed to infiltrate some bioships in there and gained the intel, not knowing there were a billion-plus Brood spread across the stars on our side.

I had what I needed. I turned around and skedaddled from the system on a different course than I’d used coming in, in case something somehow managed to track me, although I had a bevy of X’s that said that should have been next to impossible.

I was outside the system entirely and its Kuiper Belt before I brought Markspace up and synched in.

-This is Dynamo in the Negative Zone with an Omega Sanction. Extinguish the Brood. They are from the Negative Zone, and are the primary suppliers of intelligence to the Annihilation Wave. A trillion Brood and tens of millions of bioships will be coming in with the Wave. Their presence in our universe needs to be gone immediately.-

-------

The news went across the Crunch, and across the stars.

The Brood were not the only species that dwelled in countless galaxies. The Acanti, too, roved the stars and voids freely, and there was no galaxy in the whole universe that did not have a native population, unless they had been hunted down there.

Many, many of those Acanti had made the trip to Venus and the Milky Way, paid their respects to the Starsinger of their race, been Marked, and returned home, sometimes with Xandaran enclaves riding them to new homes in distant places as the diaspora of the reincarnated Xandarans continued.

From those Acanti and their riders, the news spread to powers in distant places that had never heard of Kree or Skrull or Shi’ar or Badoon, let alone Terrans, or even Xandar.

But they knew the Brood, they knew the Acanti, and they knew of Galactus and his Herald. The news did not truly surprise them at all, and coming in on the heels of the warnings of the Silver Surfer, war exploded across the stars.

The Brood were caught unprepared for the sudden reveal. In some cases, they even sat on interstellar governing bodies, after all. They were simply blindsided as the formerly passive Acanti went after them with everything, and both opportunists and betrayed species pounced on them in the wake of the hungry space whales.

Technology to detect their hiveminds was transferred across the cosmos, and the Brood were hunted across the stars, hounded by the Song of the Acanti, tracked wherever they fled, and extinguished wherever they were found.