The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

“They didn’t last nearly as long as they thought they would, did they?” I said to nobody in particular as I sped through yet another battlefield.

The tumbling remnants of uncounted ships spiraled through the void in an ever-increasing sphere. There were Zoner scavengers going through them heartlessly for valuables, technology, metals, and biomass, even potential slaves. The Acanti were still busy in Harvestspace (as we’d taken to calling the D’bari system for both its botanoid natives and the reaping we were doing there), glutting themselves on species after horde after swarm of biotech species that had found themselves diverted into the system, alongside the warrior techno-barbarians all racing to face the system’s defenders and take the planet below and whatever secrets it held, and who couldn’t take the time to scrap up the megatons of raw materials here.

I could certainly mark the wrecks for collection later, as the Zoners weren’t going to grab all the scrap by any stretch of the imagination.

Thanos’ Black Apostles and the nihilists who followed him had fought to the last, mostly because they’d been shocked by the sheer numbers that had encircled them in literally every single direction in space, and then pressed in to kill them.

Being completely encircled in a sphere the size of a solar system had certainly not been something they’d anticipated.

They’d sold themselves like the murdering bastards they were. Death had happily taken them all, and perhaps even helped them reap a price far above what even their battle-happy targets had expected of them.

The remains of Sanctuary II, Thanos’ second flagship after losing the first one in that Solar Cannon debacle before my time on the High Guard, was rolling slowly in space. It was blown into three pieces, each of which had their own city-sized supplementary holes still boiling with actinic flames in them from the uniquely abhorrent power sources he’d used to power them. The residues of the ship’s firepower were on tens of thousands of destroyed vessels drifting around it, tributes to its might and the fanatical devotion of its defenders.

But there was no sign of Thanos himself.

-Couldn’t have happened to a finer bunch of void scum,- Queen Adora /piped up from where she was watching the annihilated remnants of the scourges of so many worlds, including Xandar itself, scroll by with great satisfaction.

“They got him alive.” That didn’t surprise me at all. They’d likely been very impressed at his personal fortitude and combat ability, and overcoming him had probably been an incredible achievement requiring the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of elites. Given his status as a warlord and champion, enslaving him was a wise course, as he’d know a great deal that would be useful to them.

I couldn’t tell he was dead, which meant he was alive somewhere.

They were underestimating his devotion to Death, however. He would just be setting them up for a great and grim harvest.

I Portaled out, back to the fighting in Harvestspace. While the deaths to be laid at my feet didn’t match those who had perished because of Grand Admiral Rogers’ intricate and overwhelming strategies and tactics, I wasn’t doing too bad, and I knew for certain that the High Guard and indeed, any of Carol’s Comet-clones, were being called Angels of Death, while the various Lanterns and Corps were getting their own ominous reputations.

There were other forces and individuals who had earned respect and names of fear among the Zoners, particularly Kallark. The Zoners had somehow managed to deduce the Shi’ar Praetor’s vulnerability to certain radiation bands, possibly by witnessing some of the ships and weaponry he evaded rather than faced down, or merely by the Brood spies passing it on, and that had hampered him greatly as knowledge of what to use against him spread.

After Briggs handed him a Shield Named Eivriosh, the ‘Eternal Duty’ from the warrior’s code of his people, that vulnerability was mitigated a great deal, and the Praetor of the Imperial Guard’s legend entered a whole new level.

There were countless tales of heroism as the defending forces were driven back across the stars, taking their tolls where they could, falling back to system after system prepared as deathtraps, and those systems fell one by one under the relentless numbers of the Annihilation Wave.

Only D’bari wasn’t falling, in no small part due to the Galactus ships continually flowing in to reinforce it, and of course, the Great Bear there to anchor the defenses with its terrifying power and the Lanterns based upon it.

Briggs had taken the Great Bear across the universe well before this fight, visiting the home of the Watchful Order of the Guardian Eye personally, with Eon’s own blessing. The Warworld was also a Lantern World now, blessed as a surrogate focus of the Quantum Eye. It formed an unbreakable relay to empower as many Lanterns as were willing to base themselves there and use it as a mobile fortress and training city that could travel all the stars, and bring the Light of the Quantum Eye to wherever it was needed.

Even the cosmic energy interference of the Zoners couldn’t stop the Quantum Lanterns so close to a Quantum Focus, and so the thousands of them in the system were defenders equal to a dreadnought and more in the amount of firepower they could put out and endure, while also being as speedy and agile as fighter craft.

Still, the Zoners came to the siren song of a challenge and the cosmic energies imbued into the Great Bear by its devouring of another Warworld or two, as well as the energies of a Celestial, and the system was a scene of war that had not been seen in any galaxy yet suffering the Annihilation Wave.

------

-Heads up! I just got a notice from Norrin Radd! The Zoners have captured Galactus!- Barb /announced to the high-ends in the Markspace.

-Oh, good. I wondered how long it was going to take them,- Sama /replied to that dire news in a perfectly neutral tone. -Where have they taken Him?-

Barb looked at her, around at everyone else. I tossed up my hands, and the others pretty much did the same. -The Krimregai System. Nothing habitable, basically a mining system with a ton of rockworlds, asteroids, and mineral resources.-

-Heh!- Sama /smiled at a private joke. -Well, Thanos did want to try that out. Binary System, right?-

Barb blinked. -It is. The rads are one reason why it wasn’t mined more often. Pretty energetic stars. What are they planning on doing?-

-Pretty basic. Ignoring any moral views, what is Galactus from a mechanical viewpoint?- Sama replied /easily.

-Ignoring His job? He converts celestial energies into cosmic energies for His own use,- Barb /replied after a moment of thought.

-Only celestial energies?- Sama /prodded her.

-Ohhhhh. No, Galactus can absorb just about any kind of energies. Lower-order energies are just more inefficient and he has to destroy a lot more to take them in...-

-So, building a convertor to channel the energies of a star into Galactus and then ripping His cosmic energies away for your own use is a pretty good use of your time, right?- Sama /suggested.

Barb /hissed. -That... would be a LOT of power, if you can contain and control it. Which they’ve already proven they can do, converting cosmic power to their own versions of it...-

-Thanos is very well-informed on Galactus, considering Him sort of a competitor for Death’s attention, given how many lives He’s taken over His existence. Thanos’ knowledge would be quite integral to building a viable containment device and convertor as rapidly as possible.-

-Well, that would give Galactus quite the excuse to go all non-finite cosmic obliterator on them, wouldn’t it?- I /noted fatalistically, in between my streaking between flights of Kreeg-tar battlewings and Shumvori warspheres while slicing them apart with saber beams.

-The Celestials already tried using a trio of their own on offense to avenge Konus, and got themselves devoured by three major fleets, much to their astonishment. If more come out, all they’ll do is attract more Zoners, and they are outnumbered,- Sama /pointed out.

-Oh, that’s where the Great Bear withdrew to,- Primus /broke in. -The old man did seem to be in something of a hurry.-

-Yeah, he had to devour all those energies before those fleets could. They were pretty ticked, and then they tried following him into hyperspace, right into a Class Nine hyperspace storm that dumped them all into a hyperdiction zone exiting inside a blue supergiant,- Sama informed him /smugly.

-The old man can be incredibly pragmatic about things at times,- Primus /mused without judgement, while I revised my responsibility for grand deaths indirectly. How much was my Cosmic Awareness and infiltration missions in the N-Zone worth, especially once they blew the Warworlds?

Why... was I competing on genocide numbers? Sama had inferred that she and Briggs had collapsed entire dimensions before this. I wasn’t going to win something I didn’t want to win, anyways.

Also, that was a pretty slick move. Class, this is how you eliminate three trillion or so battle-hungry techno-barbarians in one fell swoop, after stealing their hard-fought prize right in front of them...

-I’m guessing you have a counterplan, Sama?- I /asked her.

-Sure do. Go fly over there and dump that fake Rigel I gave you into Galactus. Maybe send Thanos off to his mistress for a well-earned vacation first.-

Because She’d just send him back when She needed him.

-Huh. They got that shit up fast.- The whole area was obfuscated. I rapidly ran though my tracking of Zoner forces and realized at least four trillion of them had vanished into the cloud surrounding the Krimregai system. They’d realized they had quite the prize available, and simply banded up to make a solar convertor array around the binary stars, something big enough that they could really start pulling some cosmic juice out of it.

It had only been a month and some... really, it all kind of blurred together out in space. It wasn’t that I lost track of time, it was that I just didn’t pay attention to it in the middle of all the stuff that had to get done, all the time. There were just endless queues of stuff to do, and tracking the time passing was something I just wasn’t doing.

Most of the Wave had swept on by us, and over half the Shi’ar galaxy and empire had already fallen. D’bari was basically surrounded by conquered systems, but we were still holding out, kind of forming a crump in their perfect expansion, and someone’s hyperspace diversions kept dumping more of them in front of us to kill. News of the absolute carnage being dealt here was spreading, and generating a lot of interest.

After all, not even the most important Shi’ar worlds were being defended like this place was. The Shi’ar forces had all withdrawn long ago, leaving the area to the Galactus Fleet and its continuous reinforcements, the Pentad Corps here, and now the Great Bear and the Lanterns. The Acanti somehow managed to be here any time another biotech race showed up, rather avoiding the other fights and going to find munchies elsewhere, or just helping scavenge and mash the millions of destroyed ships together into mounds for evaluation or processing and transport away.

I could totally make Portals allowing them to haul the wreckage to Venus’s solar factories for processing, and they were adding major bank to their racial credit accounts. When they’d have time to spend it all would be interesting.

The Xandaran-level fabricators never stopped. We were always getting supply dumps from multiple worlds, from fabbers located on Acanti nomad-bubbles of Xandarans, and from stuff coming down from Taa II with the Galactus fleet. Stuff got blown to shit after wreaking grievous harm, was swapped out and replaced, and the defenses kept being reestablished and exacting their tolls anew.

Cosmic-class production economies were truly demonstrative of a cashless economy. All you needed was the motivated people to work them.