I could pick out targets and forces with breathtaking ease, figure out ship placements, eye the local defenses, determine patrol and trade routes, scope out alliances, bases, and deployments, and soon enough I had a more detailed picture of the Shi’ar, Milky Way, and Andromeda galactic areas of operation than any other force alive had. The buried war room in the Blue Area was a hundred meters across just to be able to provide enough information for casual live-time viewing.
Added to my scattershot updates on both my own initiative and at requests were those of the Acanti pods, dispersing across the galaxies and monitoring everything, while the slowly expanding Xandaran Fleet was also deploying widely and setting up passive sensor buoys everywhere to monitor stuff and provide constant information feeds. Not only was the Sol System locked down amazingly tight, soon enough we were monitoring neighboring systems, and then quickly expanding into those held by our enemies, which in the Milky Way primarily meant the Badoon.
It was the Badoon that the High Guard, including myself, and our Ultra Force went after, the Specs that were issued making up for our people’s lower-graded Cores, and Vampire’s Veils making sure there were no electronic records of who was behind the ambushes.
Badoon outposts, trade ships, tribute ships, slave carriers, patrol vessels, and isolated bases started to encounter major troubles, destroyed in devastating ambushes and raids that often simply wiped them off the map, even the rubble and wreckage vanishing as it was sucked into waiting Acanti and carted off for processing.
Information started getting relayed to those the Badoon were cheating, intending to invade, slowly infiltrating, double-dealing, double-crossing, and the like. Said information had the effect of immediately starting a number of conflicts with other species who weren’t afraid to stick up for themselves, and suddenly the Badoon found themselves engaged in system-level or wider wars on twenty different fronts.
It got worse when we went in and destroyed the key control elements of some of their enslaved worlds, and whole populations suddenly rose up and were ready to fight them.
The Badoon’s burgeoning empire, which had been rising and started to coalesce into something that might last an interminable amount of time, was rapidly shattered among its weakest points, rival warlords blustering at one another for support as they were unable to counter-attack whoever was doing this to them.
The Acanti were sometimes seen scavenging after such conflicts, but they had rapidly become a more common sight, watching from the edge of fights between rival powers and rapidly moving in to devour the ships and holdings left free-floating in the wake of such conflicts, carting them off to who knew where for their own purposes.
---
The Acanti war on the Brood sprawled across five galaxies, drawing in ever more of the Acanti to join the new community of them rising in Markspace, tempting them in with accelerated growth and defenses against those that would prey upon them, and delivering such with the promises and power of their Starsinger behind them.
The Starsong of the Acanti was soon one of the most feared things to be heard in Broodspace. The Acanti had no need to hold worlds or territories, and so could strike and fade or gather and disperse as quickly and smoothly as was needed to accomplish any particular mission. They were fast enough to raid and withdraw, and powerful enough in groups to pound and crush.
And all those Acanti who dared to fight the Brood were totally immune to their slaver viruses, too.
In very little time, the Song of the Acanti, or the sensor feed of a pod of them arriving in the distance, became akin to noting an entire hunting pack of sharks had arrived on the doorstep, an object of terror to the Brood in their enslaved bioships who were about to become burning lunch in the stars.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out so many events were related, especially with the Acanti cleaning up after so many fights. Of course, the Acanti were cleaning up after many fights that had nothing to do with this, and were rapidly turning into one of the larger salvaged materials dealers in the local galactic clusters because of it, much to the annoyance of many other established scavengers.
That the Terrans had somehow gotten the Acanti upgraded, and that the Xandarans had started armoring them up, had naturally leaked out to interested parties. Xandar was dealing with the Sol System, so the three elements together were definitely extremely suspicious... although Terra itself was largely discounted as being responsible, and so it was all basically attributed to the Xandarans and Acanti acting together, which was a terrifying enough thought on its own.
It was plain to everyone that the Xandaran position in Sol was along the lines of a trade outpost, and they could easily count the numbers of Xandarans there. The increasing Terran presence in space was naturally a given with such contact, and had been steadily increasing for a decade, but we weren’t naturally jump-capable yet, only with borrowed ships.
Well, not including the High Guard.
Trying to rage against Xandar or the Acanti didn’t exactly work for most beings, as Acanti without Xandaran mods took no hostile actions against anyone except Brood or perhaps Mi-go, and the ones with mods generally just scavenged more actively against non-Brood, still not initiating fights. Actual Xandaran ships were involved in many of the attacks, and the coms traffic from the Skrulls after realizing they may have turned the Nova Corps into a whole fleet of guerilla commandos at that tech level was interesting to listen to.
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The Kree were happy to hear all this, of course...
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“Your Majesties, Royals,” I greeted the six people in the meeting chamber. “It is an honor to meet you all.”
It was my first time in Attilan. The Inhumans were reclusive on a world basis, with little of them being known outside of Russia, and they had not independently joined the United Nations. Within Russia, they were just another part of the population, Inhumans found everywhere in the government and industry in various functions. Even the Alpha Primitives who helped maintain the city of Attilan could easily find jobs outside in Russia if they so desired.
The Inhuman gene was known, codified, could be identified readily in normal humans, and the Terrigenesis process which unlocked it was available to any human with the ancestry. There were tens of thousands of formerly-dormant Inhumans across the world who had chosen to embrace their heritage, and unsurprisingly, often developed in ways not found in the tighter gene pool of Attilan itself, closer to the standard X-gene Mutant level of randomness.
There were actually seven members of the Attilan Royal family, but Maximus, called Mad Max by many, was the head of Exotech Production and Research. It made him one of the most powerful men in Russia, working along with the Black Bear heading up construction of the facilities to produce Terra’s first home-made starships. He regularly hopped between LaGrange and Svartzak, and I checked a lot of math for him.
So, I had been requested to visit Attilan by the Royal Family, which specifically meant their silent king Black Bolt, the man with the atomic bomb for a voice.
In deference to their need for some autonomy, most of the Royal Family was not Marked, and any Inhumans who accepted a Mark generally left Attilan quickly. While still subordinate to the Great Bear, the Attilan Inhumans had their pride and their traditions, and many of the elite ‘nobles’ of Attilan still privately disdained and feared the ‘primitive’ who had dominated them so easily.
“Dynamo of the High Guard, thank you for coming,” said Medusa, the ravishing scarlet-tressed Queen of Attilan, her billowing mass of animated hair moving with a life of its own. Her tresses were as strong as steel, as sensitive as silk threads, and as quick as whips, making her a very dangerous close-range fighter... and she could also detach them and control them from afar, a fact very few people actually knew.
She spoke on behalf of her husband, whose voice was so powerful that a whisper was like a thousand-pound bomb going off, and whose full scream equaled an atomic shockwave.
That wasn’t a problem with me, of course, especially with Comet’s Energy Absorption handy. More Thunder energy was just a meal for the Pocket.
Looking on were the other local members of the family. The most important of them was Baron Triton, the Lord of Lake Baikal. He was the amphibious and scaled member of the family, and was charged with overseeing the largest freshwater lake in the world, its fisheries, and its ecology. As a result of his governance, the lake had remained pristine and picturesque, one of the cleanest in the world, and his name was lauded throughout Russia, and indeed outside of it, as a master of freshwater management.
He was also Attilan’s ambassador to Atlantis, but as they did not have bordering territories, that was more an honorable title instead of a responsibility.
Gorgon was the head of Attilan’s military. He looked much like a satyr of legend, and was a known carouser. His hooves could discharge devastating force pulses, making him one of the most dangerous kickers in the world.
Karnak was the king’s intelligence analyst and advisor, his enlarged cranium giving him the ability to instantly sense weak points and stresses in anything he looked upon. He was also a famed fundamentalist martial artist and probably the single greatest living adherent of the Crystal Breaker Style. Dragon Masters looking to shore up the weaknesses in their styles regularly visited him to get themselves thrashed.
He was trying to hide his frown as he looked at me, because he couldn’t sense any such thing about me. His ability to sense weaknesses was a form of time-sight, a psychic ability, not a calculated skill, and an Astral Ward fended it off easily. I’d asked Sama how she dealt with him, and she just said that occasionally she let him see past her Beyond Fate and Chance, and after his eyes bled enough, she put it back up.
I imagined the recursive loops where her weaknesses were tremendous dangers to him would kind of hurt...
The last member of the Royal Family was Crystal, who was their Elementalist witch-type, capable of controlling the classic four Elemental states, and so their most versatile and potentially dangerous member. If she hadn’t been so isolated in Attilan, she likely would have become one of the most powerful matter-manipulators in the world.
They were all regarding me with some interest, being the latecomer that I was who had suddenly been promoted all the way up to the High Guard, and who was directly responsible only to the Golden Hag and Great Bear themselves. That was equal to Primus, which made me a Person of Interest, and not someone to treat casually.
“Your request was made in flowery diplomatic language,” I smiled in amusement, making light of it. “You did not actually mention why you wanted to meet with me, Your Majesties. I assume you know how busy the High Guard are,” and I myself was providing oversight for three raids by Ultra Corpsmen, Acanti, and Xandarans right now, the nearest of them dozens of parsecs away, “but Primus mandated that I go meet you. How may I be of service to you?”
Medusa looked to her husband, who just nodded. “We have been told that you possess Cosmic Awareness. Is this fact true, Dynamo?” she asked me politely.
“It is,” I acknowledged readily.
“Could you describe the way this ability functions?” she asked me carefully.
“Hmm.” I considered the question. “It has multiple aspects to it. The first is the Cosmic size of it. The capacity of the skill rests upon the mental ability of the one who bears it. If you are broad enough in mind and spirit, you can actually behold the spirit of the entire universe itself, and naturally all beings below it fall within your purview. This is akin to a single atom of your body being able to look up and see all of you, as a matter of scale.”
That seemed to impress them somewhat. “So, you are aware of things that happen in very distant places?” Karnak asked precisely. “Other galaxies, perhaps?”
“CAN be aware,” I corrected him promptly. “Knowing all things that happen in all places would take a truly massive brain, or a non-finite mentality.
“From a sensitivity standpoint, I become aware of large events which ripple outwards in their consequences far more readily than minor ones. Thus, for instance, it is easier to see the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence’s decision to belay the war with the Skrulls, an act with wide-ranging consequences, than it is which Ulguhthra hextibla soldier wins a hand of pak’mak from half the universe away.”