The Hive Queen Empress reigned from a reptile-shark thing a full five thousand miles long, slightly larger than the old Acanti Starsinger had once been. It was huge and ominous, a dreadnought and star carrier both, given its size. Over a billion Brood lived upon it as it glided through space, a moving temple and castle, the greatest bastion of their people.

And now it was being herded and chased by an entire living planet!

I could tell the Hive Queen Empress was trying to tell the Brood to abandon the fight and flee in all directions, but her personal strength just wasn’t able to get past the massive psychic broadcast of defiant rage and territorial instincts. The Brood were fighting to the bitter end, because that was what they thought she was telling them to do. Even if they questioned it, they couldn’t defy it, because she was the Hive Queen Empress...

If it was only a Warworld, they could have taken it down by bombarding it with their numbers, swarming over its surface, and infiltrating its insides before ripping it apart. The fact that they couldn’t make a Warworld of their own was the only reason they weren’t among the top tier of races fleeing the Negative Zone, but their intelligence-gathering had given them that status regardless.

A Warworld and these massive fleets with their incredible weaponry, and on top of that the devouring Song of the Acanti coursing through the swarm and consuming them left and right constantly, never growing glutted...

Even the Brood could respect endless appetites of that caliber.

But now the Brood could finally see and dimly understand the incredible artistry of the strategic plan. The fleets were now in front of them, all around them, stringing them out to be devoured, and as the Great Bear led the Acanti in, it was like a great hungry wave coming up behind them, while their scattered forces tried wildly to get past those in front of them and were being cut to pieces.

Golden streams of light of immense power, wielded by individual soldiers, sliced through any desperate defenses with endless quantum might. They’d only had reports of one bearer of such a weapon, but now they were looking at thousands of them...

The Galactus Fleet was right in front of them. It had suffered the greatest losses among the defenders in the fight, and the ships had also dealt out the most damage. The only paths the Hive Queen Empress had out of this fight led right into the heart of the Galactus Fleet, and it was perfectly obvious what was going to happen if she pressed forward.

But... would they dare risk the planet ahead of her? The Hive Queen Empress switched course for D’bari, intending to use the planet as cover against the jaws of the planet coming up behind her.

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Mr. Hill pulled out a hundred-ruble note and passed it to Captain Harold. Everyone was watching the immense bulk of the Brood Command Ship and its Swarm up in the half-clouded, lightning-chased, distant-explosion-heavy night sky accelerate towards them. “You boys are scary at this stuff, Cap’n.”

Captain Harold pocketed it without looking. “Lady Sama worked out the basic strategy and what we were going to do, Sergeant. We just handled the fine details.”

The Mountain looked to the horizon on his left, where the Crimson Tower of Khan rose to the heavens, rotating right into line with the incoming Brood fleet, which was basically coming into the planet’s shadow.

It couldn’t see that on the sunward side of the planet, the solar winds for millions of miles were converging in a cosmic hurricane, swirling towards D’bari. The planet’s magnetic fields were currently being focused into channels and lenses, with conduits of mystic and psionic force gathering over that hundred-mile-high tower poking out of the atmosphere.

They started to stream across the sky, gathering on that defiant crimson needle under the will of the Goddess sitting atop it.

Did the Brood even realize what was going to happen as they lined themselves up for the killshot?

Did it matter if they did?

It didn’t look all that bright, because most of the light was being focused away from them, and their angle and the distances involved meant it looked like they were behind the bolt, even as it reached out, forked, forked again...

The Brood ran right into the biggest energy discharge they’d ever seen as a Divine Cannon slammed full into the Hive Queen Empress’s fleet.

Dealer tossed out a Card, which grew to massive size and politely gave the Brutes a close-up of what happened.

Hundreds of bolts of solar fire and lightning, particle beams of massive size, arced from one massive bio-vessel to the next, punching through them, eroding them away, minor arcs splitting off to blow apart smaller vessels in passing. Separated by many miles, you could actually follow the advance of the forking bolts as they went through the Brood Fleet, and that one main bolt led them all like a spear. It slammed right into the head of the Command Beast and kept right on going, despite the creature’s size.

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Eruptions blew through the gargantuan mass of the creature, shuddering explosions rippling through the incredible mass, and pustule-cities of millions of Brood ignited like fireworks all over its bulk. Every tiny vessel in its vicinity exploded from ambient discharges, while the forks of cosmic lightning all around it reduced every bio-ship in the vicinity to bursting carcasses tumbling through the void.

The Great Bear behind didn’t even slow down as its maw opened. The massive bolt of power flew right past it, barely missing as it headed out into space to dissipate. Way down on the planet D’bari, Mr. Hill felt an awesome and nigh-limitless control of gravity reach out and grab at the tumbling, destroyed Brood fleet that right now was going to slam into D’bari and probably shatter the mantle of the planet in doing so. It dragged them backwards, without affecting D’bari’s mass at all.

The jaws of the Great Bear were more than large enough to accommodate even the Command Beast, let alone the rest of the fleet. That yawning portal into cosmic hell gaped wide, and then closed as the planet rotated and veered away.

The Mountain couldn’t feel any disruption or influence of its mass affect D’bari at all. He wondered at the numbers behind all that, what it would mean to have that level of control and power, and made a note to have Dealer run them numbers for him, just as an exercise.

The fighting wasn’t over, but the First Battle for D’bari was. Some ten billion or so Brood had made planetfall in one form or another, and all but a couple million of them were now dead.

Every member of the Brute Squad had killed at least thousands of them, even Captain Harold and Angel. Some truly nasty artillery, carpet-bombing, and strafing fire had accomplished most of it, not to mention the godly lightning strikes taking out thousands of invasion landers.

“How long until the next wave?” Mr. Hill asked Captain Harold fatalistically.

“Between two and three days is the estimate. Word is spreading that the Great Bear is here, and the proud races that love a good fight are seeing this as a challenge, especially once they realize the Brood are dead. We don’t have a good read on all of them, so all we can do is watch and wait.”

“Tech-users, or bios?” The Mountain asked, watching the Great Bear recede into the distance with remarkable speed.

“We expect some bio-races are already on the way here, hoping to harvest dead Brood for biomass.”

The Mountain glanced in one direction unerringly, the Captain looking after him, to where a dot on the horizon was vacuuming up a pillar of whiteness.

Around them was basically a carpet of dead Brood and their slave-creatures, extending all the way to the horizon, covering every hill, valley, and gulley, blood and gore flowing in their own new rivers. The air was heavy with particles of gore and different kinds of blood and ichor, but they all knew that even those would be burned away by the vivus.

“There’s fifty thousand Brood and their spawn about a hundred miles thataway,” Dealer reported, the information being fed into their systems. “They found a cave network and headed underground.”

Mr. Hill just nodded. “Looks like we gots to plug a hole and bury some worms. Lemme walk the area, girl. Rest o’ you jarheads get yourselves vivused clean, and get everything back in shape. This has just started.”

Dealer reached out to take his hand and teleport away, while Captain Harold shouted out the assembly orders so they could be sent back for some R&R.

Mr. Hill could ask the planet how many revolutions it had been. He could look at his tactical display. Mostly, it didn’t matter how long they’d been fighting.

Two of the Octessence Avatars were dead, overconfident and surprised that the Brood were able to bring out weapons that could hurt them, even suppressing Cain Marko’s protective force field. All of them had been wounded, with Black Tom getting his right arm and both legs blown off. None of them would have made it out of the fight without the Juggernaut covering for them, and Cain Marko had personally carried three of the surviving five others out of there and within range of Dealer’s Cards.

The nasty little buggers had made a fight of it, and yeah, there had been some minor losses among the Brutes, somewhat more severe among the pure infantry.

Only a couple dead among the Vanir Volunteers, killed and obliterated before Ursula could get to them, just like his own mooks. It just made the Vanir more ornery and spoiling for revenge.

They might get more invading biotech races, but it was more likely that the next fights would be against actual soldiers from high-tech races, so things might get even meaner.

It didn’t matter, he’d be there for the fight... after he Weight Pulsed these skulking Brood drones and their pets, and flattened them in their hidey-holes under a million tons of rock.

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The Acanti were the most tireless of those fighting, taking over more and more of it as the exhausted fleets withdrew to resupply and recover from several Terran days of basically continuous fighting and slaughter. The Brood always had fresh reserves to throw in, right up until they didn’t, and by that point their frenzy had seized them, the psychic turmoil prodded them on, and there was only more and more fighting, until suddenly there was none and the Acanti were chasing the few survivors through the stars.

The amount of biomass was incredible. Thousands of the smaller Acanti pods were already diving into the Great Bear’s mouth, where billions of tons of bioship carcasses were being drawn out of space and concentrated for their feeding pleasure, while other Acanti zipped around space, gathering the carcasses up in feeding clusters, or were just scooping them up like minnows after lighting them up, swallowing them down in endless series. The largest Acanti could pop down a dreadnought-sized creature with no effort, after all.

The Galactus Fleet had lost forty percent of its ships, taking the brunt of the fighting head-on, but they had killed off a similar amount of the Brood, outperforming even the Acanti at the task. Very few of their crews had actually died, and they were shifting to new ships coming off the lines of Taa II even now.

I still wondered what Ego the Living Planet had done that Briggs had killed it and taken its body as a Warworld. As a cosmic creature there was a lot of obfuscation about it, so I couldn’t just track it, but it wasn’t really a surprise.

More Zoners were coming. News of this fight and the annihilation of the Brood was rippling across the galaxies, the first time a truly major race had been defeated utterly. They were going to die, as I was monitoring them in Cosmic Awareness and the Acanti were committed to eliminating them entirely. They weren’t going to get away, hide in the shadows, and regrow and rebuild.

They were going to go extinct, exactly as they always should have.

More Zoners were on their way to follow them, wondering what it was about this system that had us defending it so strongly, and totally willing to take the fight to earn the prize.