The Skrull Princess Vl’Drik stepped forwards, staring at me. “Where do you propose we evacuate our non-combatants to?” she asked icily. “If your galaxy thinks it will be spared, you may think again if our people need a place to live! We will sweep over your worlds and take them as surely as ours are stolen from us!”

“While that would be much more difficult than you think, we already have solutions in place,” I replied to her, equally coldly and much more dismissively. A star at the outer edge of Canis Major gleamed on the holo behind me, and zoomed in.

“There are no native species to the Canis Major stars, and so Galactus has taken them over for a minor project of His.” They all blinked in shock at the mention of the World-Devourer. “It was a bit of a test run, and He has agreed to let it stand and be used by the Skrulls for your population.”

A narrow line cut across the flat image of a young yellow star, and the Skrulls stared at it in awe.

“A ringworld!” gasped one of the delegates from one of the kingmaker factions. “The Devourer has made a ringworld!”

“Surface area equal to nearly thirty thousand M-class planets. It has no mining or extractive potential to speak of, but can be roughly terraformed and ecologies introduced with minimal fuss.

“It can also hold a population of a quadrillion Skrulls fairly easily, and the Ringworld is divided into twenty-thousand-mile sections with force and mountain barriers that will allow diversification and imitation of different planetary ecologies with no mixing.

“As for extraplanetary mineral resources, that is a separate problem for you to figure out, but I believe you will have intimate knowledge of an entire galaxy’s worth of said resources to raid from, and although Canis Major is small for a galaxy, it has no major power claiming it.”

The Skrulls stared as the hologram swept over the ringworld and past it, revealing the clouded world, the blue of waters and the white of clouds marching up and around the vast, vast ring, ready for colonization.

“This... is already made?” the Princess Vl’Drik gasped, her eyes shifting as she looked over it. Construction of a ringworld was no small endeavor. It would take years, and the full resources of the Empire, to make such a thing! It was indeed far cheaper to just take existing worlds from other species...

“It was just finished yesterday, as a matter of fact. If you like, we can teleport there now and show it to you in person.”

In the distance, Ben Parker laughed softly, but he was already hard at work on more such constructions...

And what did it mean, that the mighty Galactus had sent this news to the Skrulls... through a Terran?

------------

A ringworld was not a great solution to the problem, but it was a solution. After all, it concentrated the population of the Skrulls greatly in one place. Break the ringworld, pop the sun, etc., there were still many ways to obliterate them forever.

However, it was there and available right now, with all the agricultural space needed to feed a population of non-combatants, and it would be easy to defend, versus being spread out over hundreds of systems. While they wouldn’t and shouldn’t put everybody there, they could put the vast majority of their people there.

The largest evacuation in the history of the four galaxies began... and it wasn’t just the Skrull Empire, as the shapeshifters eventually found out. There was another ringworld constructed within a month, set in Ursa Major, that was set up to accept refugees from both the Kree and Shi’ar empires. Both empires were smaller than the Skrulls, and even with having far more species to accommodate, there was simply more than enough room on a Ringworld to handle everything.

That didn’t mean empty areas would go to waste, as it was certainly possible to turn them into vast areas of agriculture that could feed multiple worlds... or very active militaries.

Worlds were turned into armed fortresses meant to chew up as many attackers as possible. Recruitment on scales unprecedented for warriors was ticking up, emptying worlds of able-bodied would-be soldiers and turning other planets into training camps, even as production of warships and military goods hit unprecedented levels.

There were those who chose to flee the strife, taking as much wealth with them as they could. It was with cold eyes that I helped organize the raiders and privateers who intercepted such cowards, looted them clean, and left them floating in the void to await the mercy of whoever found them... or just killed them, whatever was appropriate.

The knowledge that we were mobilizing on this side did reach the Negative Zone, but had next to no effect there. Their dates were set, and the locations, and the numbers involved meant that there was not going to be any random interruptions or breaks without good reason. Going too soon might mean success, but the races left behind would blame those in front, and they, too, would be coming later, bringing war from behind on those in the front.

All at once, unstoppable, our universe laid out before them. What did they have to fear?

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

----------

An indefinite amount of time later...

“We’ve got just about everyone piling in for the fight now. Ovids, Rigellians, Kymellians, Zn’rx, even Chitauri. The Brood are saying they’ll help, but that’s pretty much a lie, as they are mostly nomadic now, and I’ve a feeling they might be of Negative Zone origin themselves. They are probably just going to try and harvest as much biomatter as possible and reclaim the numbers of their species.”

Obfuscation around their entry point into our universe meant I couldn’t pinpoint where they came from, but it certainly fit the model.

“That’s fine,” Sama nodded. “The more the merrier. How’s the pirate activity ramping up?”

“Oh, is that going to be Hell after this fight,” I winced. “But right now, they are the biggest and best targets for practicing for new crews. All the planets realize how vulnerable their worlds will be once they depart for the fight, so they are ravaging the criminal elements out there.

“As an amusing consequence, slave-trading across the galaxies is at a millennial low, the Brood are finding it even harder to find hosts, and Thanos is sucking in more recruits. However, he is deploying remarkably close to the anticipated invasion point, and if he won’t do something as crass as say he’s going to aid the defense, they are worshippers of death, and the invaders are literally coming here fleeing death. Intelligence says that his forces basically consider them cowards fleeing their proper doom, and they will be the instruments of death.”

Sama nodded once. “Zhuli?” she asked the crimson-skinned Korlugi.

“The Watchful Order’s recruitment continues apace, throughout all the local galaxies. Lady Nimue has been leading us to multiple new recruits of fine moral caliber. The Grand Seers are watching developments here closely, feeling that our work here is going to spill over into multiple galactic clusters with the incursions that are going to come later. This is far from the world of the Great Eye, but an invading, dying cosmos is truly a universal threat.” He paused for a moment. “They also send their utmost respects for us having managed to make an ally out of Galactus for this fight. They do inquire as to how we plan to destroy the multiple warworlds among the invaders...”

“With extreme prejudice,” Sama stated coldly. “Full details after we succeed in doing so.”

“You’re going to the other galaxies to stop the ones there?” I asked her archly.

“I think you can handle the ones here, right?” Sama rolled her eyes.

“There are twenty-six of them. I’ve mined fourteen of them and can blow them at any time.” Adapting their own technology, inserting a few things into the depths of it that ‘belonged there’, and leaving it for them to charge up had been one of the many fun things I’d been doing when I popped over to the N-Zone. “I’m not sure which is being deployed where, of course, so I can only rig them to pop when they come over.”

“And Felicia?”

“She’s set them to warp into stars when they come in, which should take out another four, plus their supporting fleets.” Her work was actually going to kill as many numbers-wise as mine was, and likely exterminate entire species as they crossed over and wound up inside a sun. Outsiders tampering with your cross-dimensional navigations systems and controls was such a naughty thing to do to you.

“So, eight of them to deal with, and going to be much harder once their shield systems are up and they are in Entity-killing mode,” Sama judged.

“That’s the gist of it. Felicia will be on board one, and can arrange for its destruction once it crosses over from the inside. I can get through the shields of one as long as there’s a distraction, although it likely won’t work again if they just re-layer faster than I can break their shields. Primus might have to do something like fly through the heart of one of their Celestial-killing shots to get inside another one.” Which is what Shields were for, right? Not many people knew he actually carried one of his own: Vera, or Faith.

Sama smiled winningly as everyone else at the table gaped, but Primus just sighed and nodded. “Briggs and I will deal with the other five, one way or another. Power shifts?” Sama went on expressionlessly.

“The Spartoi are making a big showing in the Magellanic Cloud. If they can’t rival the Kree, they are still showing some impressive strength and willingness to fight. They’ll come out of this solid if they can keep the momentum going. Whether or not they can keep all their worlds will be a big gamechanger. The guess for the Kree was, what, half their empire?” Centurion Lygaete asked.

“Yes. And there are worrisome indicators from the Phalanx, who might be seeing this as an opportunity to spread their Transmode Virus about,” Carol reported grimly.

Just one Phalanx member let loose on a planet could wipe it clean of organic life, so they were tracked and killed by just about any organic species, if possible. Only the bigger, oldest monsters of the species could remain alive in the face of the scorn of the rest of the cosmos, and so they tended to hide themselves on ruined worlds, regulate their appetites, and try to find alternate power sources.

Callie snapped her fingers. “Cable!” she blurted out. “The time-shifter merc! He had a version of the Transmode Virus, right?”

“DiDi and Cypher took care of it,” I reported, tossing a thumb at the toothily-smiling Sama. Cypher had decoded it, and DiDi neutralized it thereafter. “Hag-for-brains invited him in for a talk on time-travel, idiots in the wrong alternities, unregulated teleporting, how vulnerable his little satellite was to Primus flying by, and did he want to get rid of the alien infection limiting his natural genetic abilities?”

“He is an Epsilon-class mutant psionic!” Jean Grey blurted out. It was her first real High Guard meeting, and she was still a bit wide-eyed at sitting here with all the legends and talking about the fate of galaxies and the universe and stuff. “He’s as powerful as I am with Phoenix Buffs going!” she added in for clarity, which was no small thing.

“Better yet, he’s a Summers. Son of Scott and a different Jean Grey in another reality. Already got him recruited as a battlemind for the upcoming fight. He seemed kind of surprised he still had stuff to learn, but he’s in Cynosure right now, soaking up everything like a sponge.” I sat back, shrugging. “So, Sama, regarding our natural Epsilon psion, what was it like when you walked up and shut down his everything?”

“He had an interesting expression on his face. He’s from the -630’s, and they don’t have Forsaken of any kind down there. He isn’t sure how he got here, and was wondering just how history was so screwed up and different from what he was taught. I offered to send him over to the correct timeline after he was healed up, but he professed to like it here.” She glanced around the table. “He’s full Epsilon, and could sit up here, but he’s also totally into the whole mutant nation vibe as a result of his upbringing. He sees himself as some sort of mutant Messiah or Shaman, given the level of his powers... which is amusing, considering it took so much of them to hold the Transmode Virus at bay.”