The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

The Brood had many abilities and powers, but they did suffer for a lack of long-ranged firepower. Bioships were not the best platforms for mounting cannons, and so in a battle of ranged firepower, they tended to come out second best.

That generally wasn’t an issue for them, as speed, maneuverability, and overwhelming numbers were generally their preferred method of fighting. Facing that sort of firepower, they’d simply charge their attacker, overwhelm them with numbers, board them, and turn the crew into Brood to replace those who had been lost, stealing their weapons to use for their own if they could.

The crazed lightning webs covering so much area drifted through the hearts of the various Swarms, cooking them between solar flares the size of cities, especially the smaller bioships. Their sensors could read that the solar wind coming off the star was bending and inundating the whole area, wearing away at their sensors, hivemind links, and radiation protection, while occasionally apocalyptic bolts of cosmic lightning would chain across thousands of miles and between dozens of bioships, slaughtering them all.

Added to some incredibly lethal point defenses, and the fact that trying to swarm the hungry Acanti usually ended with them feeding themselves into waiting maws, and the whole attack was crazed confusion tearing the Brood apart and literally eating them alive.

The first royal Brood queen died when the Nova Ship Searching Horizon reached across a half-million miles and drove a Nova Cannon blast into the brain of its enslaved kraknoid bio-carrier. There were plenty of lesser noble queens to maintain control of its billions of minions, but the death still shook the hive-mind.

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“BRACE!” The Mountain shouted into coms, and the entire Brute Squad got hurriedly into a stance and froze, or exerted maximum personal null gravity.

One breath later, the pulse of Weight flared out at one hundred times gravity.

The roaring drone of the massive Swarm of flesh-eating borers, their acidic jaws capable of eventually grinding through metal and stone, stopped in the same instant. At 3200 feet per second per second, they dropped from the sky, potentially hitting supersonic and being torn apart by winds and friction, definitely losing their wings, and since they were all within a kilometer of the ground, they all hit the surface like fragile, pulpy bullets.

The very air crushed them with its pressure as they splattered in countless numbers all around the Brute Squad, hand-long squirmers torn off the gladiator’s bodies haplessly and killed by even a few inches of freefall.

One second later, the gawdawful pressure and weight lifted, the air exploding back towards the sky, and the Brute Squad all groaned and straightened despite themselves.

The Swarm that had coated most of them in writhing bodies was now crushed carapaces and splattered goo all around them. Ahead of them, the Brood advancing under the cover of the Swarm were also lying shattered and broken by the weight of themselves and their weapons.

Mr. Hill grinned grimly, huffing a bit. Making a Weight Pulse that intense over that large an area was not something easy to do, and he definitely couldn’t do it frequently, but a Swarm was the perfect thing to use it against, the Brood infantry only a happy bonus.

Captain Harold lowered his Shield and shouted, “Forward!” and the Brute Squad bounded and bounced through the mess, hooting and calling as they covered the ground towards the horde of Brood drones and special breeds outside the Weight Pulse with great speed.

Mr. Hill launched himself towards the front as Captain Harold engaged his jets, easily catching up to and keeping pace with the bounding Brutes closing in on bio-organic troops and weapons of war. Great swords, hammers, and axes burned with energy fields as they slammed right into the troops in weighty impacts of superhumanly powerful bodies clad in a lot of armor, with many a large-area fusillade of cutting beams, explosive rounds, and tremor blasts sending the landscape heaving from the impacts.

Flint Marko was riding Hawkeye’s cyclone, reaving thousands as they moved through the Brood lines in a howling, blood-spraying gale of razored sands. Angel was guarding them with a mindblade and Shield, snapping his angelic wings to deliver walls of razor-sharp Sun Striking feathers, or gleaming with psi-power to block energy blasts or bat away anything leaping at Hawkeye as he grimly watched over his wingman.

The Mountain crashed to the ground, his Stillflight Field came up again, and unwary Brood plummeted to the ground with their flying beast-slaves. Mr. Hill’s Flail once again set to spinning as he advanced into the teeth of them.

The carnage on the ground continued.

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I was killing about one Brood ship a second.

It was good for an individual, but against the overall numbers, not so much. The main reason was that space was big, and I didn’t have infinite range on my energy blasts. When things are moving at miles per second, they were generally out of range of me coming up on and killing something else, unless I was diving into the heart of a swarm around a major carrier and was willing to eat the consequences.

So I just zipped around at top speed. Occasionally I’d get lucky and flash into the middle of a tight cluster that ignored the fact that fusion warheads were Area of Effect devices, and I could spin saber beams in all directions and cut them apart. Other than that, I had to chase down my targets one by one, just like normal.

Still, if they converged, it was like they were setting up a fricasseed dinner table. They were trying to do that with boarding attempts, and I and the fighter screens were flitting from one cluster to the next as the targets all came together, and the combination with the enhanced point defenses of our ships was lethal. Tumbling bioships in multitudes were spilling past the capital ships, and the Acanti reserves were snatching them up like fish in an aquarium at feeding time, really unsettling the Brood.

The best thing about burning them vivic and eating them? The Acanti never got full. The carcasses all burned down to basically nothing, were converted directly to energy, and the space whales grew... and they could just keep eating.

No matter how many Brood there were, the Acanti could just eat more of them!

Several Shi’ar or allied starships did get inundated by boarders, but Of the Invulnerable World meant I could flame the whole hull of the things and only affect that which lived. The marines on the inside could handle the boarders once they had no reinforcements coming, and if the Brood kept coming, well, I wasn’t afraid of their smaller ships in the slightest. I could plot and track them all with Cosmic Awareness, I could avoid anything really dangerous with the Red Eyes, and I could then take out those things that were really dangerous at incredible speed.

First Sersi flitted in to coordinate with me. She wasn’t transmuting the ships directly to destroy them, as that kind of use of cosmic power would probably have set off some alarms. Nope, she was actually using a railgun-type device and transmuting the ammunition into horribly explosive things, while making new ammo out of random matter as she went. Her Eternal Core was powerful enough that she would qualify as one of the fastest Eternals ever, so she had no problems keeping up with me, and with telepathic coordination, we started ripping through stuff in a wider and wider area.

Kismet and Comet, Carol’s Flare fully up and venting white hole annihilation, were working together over there, doing much the same thing. With our ability to really cut into the small stuff, the local capital ships could focus on the larger bio-ships and let them have it. If the Brood spewed out fighter-sized stuff, I started predicting that fact and getting into position for sustained fire or AoE’s to annihilate all of them.

The four of us converged on a carrier-beast that looked like an insectile-squid on creep-out-cola being savagely pounded on by a Shi’ar Dreadnought. The streams of calamari that began streaming out of it like swarms of flies ran right into a holocaust, distracting it and prompting it to try and swing at us, just as a load of railgun shells of the new Venom loads, hastily calibrated by the master matrix in the database of aliens and readings we’d made, slammed into it.

Whoo, that yellow and green light exploding sure looked odd, but you couldn’t argue with the results. Whatever psychic reinforcement to its hide existed was cut through like butter, and massive holes were blasted into the tens-of-kilometers long body, causing all sorts of havoc within, as well as straight-out blowing off three of its four main grappling tentacles.

Conventional fire walked all over its hide, and Brood ejected in jellyfish-like nodules from their pustule-cities and within it as the creature writhed in its death throes. I could hear them all screaming in the hivemind as eager Notes converged, and Acanti materialized out of nowhere to sweep them all up hungrily, a flight of adults surging past and leaving half the Broodship’s escorts in ruin with thunderous Chords sweeping the heavens and turning the solar wind into living, lashing firefalls of death.

The Acanti snatched up the tentacles as snacks, set them on vivus, and kept right on going after swallowing whole swathes of fleeing Brood down. The Shi’ar Dreadnought powered after them as they made for another hive-group, the Acanti taking out the screens to the carrier-beast behind them.

If the bioships screening the carrier were less than five kliks long, that was generally accomplished by these particular elders swallowing them directly. The Acanti were only getting bigger, even if they weren’t pausing to eat the really big stuff during the main fight.

The Brood were not courageous. They were savage, and obedient, but they were not brave. The drones would all die willingly at the command of their queens, but the queens were not soldiers themselves.

I watched the tipping point arrive with Karnak Awareness rejoicing in the success of all the weak spots shattering and creating more of them. It slid past as the Brood didn’t realize they were doomed, thinking that because we prioritized the small ones that the hive was still intact and important, and there were so many of theirs in reserve, and we would tire and need to rest...

And then the Great Bear arrived.

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You had to be looking for it to feel it, and you needed to be sensitive to the Brood hivemind. That one master voice, driving them all from the heart of the Hivemind, lording it over considerably less than a trillion Brood now, was trying to hide her worry and agitation at the scope of this battle and the cost of the slaughter. She had been unprepared for the fight to begin with, and the omni-directional assault didn’t allow them to take up their best formations, as pretty much every major Swarm and sub-Swarm was immediately under some form of attack.

It was like the entire surrounding space was making war on them!

More to the point, there was an underlying wave coming through the hivemind now, amplifying that one driving instinct now: Fight! Hunt! Prey! Assimilate!

It was an integral part of the hivemind, and the vicious instinct only rose and rose. The fact that it began to swamp any reservations of the Hive Queen Empress of the Brood, burying them under waves of continuous aggression, went unnoticed.

There was no fleeing, no breaking apart into countless swarms to bedevil the entire cosmos with their numbers in a lethal diaspora. There was fight, Fight, FIGHT!

There was no questioning the Hive Queen Empress, and so the Brood fought, using their traditional means and tactics against enemies totally optimized to fight them back.

The arrival of the Great Bear amazingly went almost unnoticed, lost in the ferocity of the Brood counter-attacks and the sudden cessation of the hivemind in its immediate area. Every large bioship within tens of thousands of miles of its arrival point died, falling to cannons literally as large as they were. The burning maw opened and sucked them down as the living world soared into the heart of the swarm. Glowing figures raced forth from it, unleashing the quantum power of Infinity from the eye-like Lanterns that came with them, and the Watchful Order of the Guardian Eye joined the fight in their thousands.

The artistry of the movements of everything fighting was impeccable. Briggs took his living world through spiraling arcs of the Brood Swarm, and the fighting fleets and forces formed tunnels for him to rage through as he did.

He didn’t slow down, either. Countless Brood bio-vessels were splattered flat against the planet, if they weren’t straight-off sucked into its maw.

The fleets trapped and contained the Brood from the outside, and the Great Bear and the Lanterns ripped them apart from within, leaving only tumbling carcasses for the Acanti to feed upon in their wake. The spiraling path of death wound through the Brood, and the hivemind died, even as FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT continued to be broadcast through it, overwhelming any other commands and giving the Brood no choice but to do just that.

And so, the Brood fought to their deaths, doomed by their own hivemind.