There was a significant complexity gap between building something in a simulation and building it in the real world. Especially when real-world testing wasn’t possible.

Atlas was in a secret hidden base inside of a moon-sized planet. It was chosen because of the proximity to the Atua home world. He’d cloned a version of himself and sent it to this world. He’d done that so he wasn’t constantly streaming himself across the Starnet. Atlas knew, with the changes Angelique’s people had made, there was a low probability of the Atua finding out what he was doing. But he didn’t want to take on unnecessary risk. The Atua were extremely competent at hacking, so he decided it wasn’t worth the gamble.

He was in an underground base on the moon. It felt very much like a cave. He knew if his old friend Icarus was still around, he would have called it a Batcave because that’s very much what it looked like.

A mix of heavy machinery juxtaposed with the sharp rocky walls made for an interesting sight.

The cave was getting deeper and deeper, too. Every time he fired up the weapon, firing a single particle toward a micro–black hole, a tiny bit of energy would be absorbed by the bottom wall.

He’d spent the last few years in this cave. His tests weren’t anywhere near the scale or power that the real weapon would be at until now.

He’d built everything he wanted to. He knew in theory it would work. But he’d never actually tested it.

He never planned on testing it in the real world for the simple fact that a weapon like this would produce so much energy and power, anyone scanning the sky should be able to detect it.

Using a weapon like this would undoubtedly cause the Atua to take a closer look. So up until that very moment, he had confined his tests to simulated worlds. Or very, very low-power attempts at the inside of the cave.

Now it was complete.

The model for building his weapon was sent in secret to several maximum-security bases around some of Angelique’s colonized worlds. They had built twenty in total.

They were all on their way toward the Atua and Penquin home world. They were all planning to arrive at the same time.

If the test Atlas ran right now didn’t work, they would quickly turn around and go home.

In his mind, the weapon was going to work. And today was the day that was going to happen.

He had one test to complete it in. And this test would also act as a warning shot that they had a weapon that powerful.

“Okay, we’re ready,” Ship said, teleporting next to Atlas.

The two of them walked down the path toward their new home, a very futuristic-looking spacecraft.

It was all white and looked very sleek, subtle rounded curves and no visible gaps or openings. This spacecraft was not designed to host any human life in it. There were no storage components for embryos, not even a door for Atlas or Ship to enter through. All the space inside of the spacecraft had to be used for power generation and computing power. The energy requirements and calculations involved were at the very limit of what this machine was capable of.

They couldn’t just make it bigger, either, since making it bigger increased the chances that they were hit by some stray material from anything they blew up.

Atlas and Ship arrived at the spacecraft. They couldn’t touch it, since the surface of it was alive with liquid nanobots designed to shield the insides from the immense Hawking radiation created by billions of tiny micro–black holes decaying.

“I’m going to have to turn you off,” Ship said as he reached out his hand.

Atlas nodded, and a compartment at the very front of him opened up. A small golf-ball-sized matrix appeared in the middle of his chest.

Angelique had perfected and miniaturized the creation of matrices. It had become an asset to be able to inhabit android bodies because it meant they didn’t have to set up hapticgraphic projectors everywhere.

This was particularly useful for some of the science experiences Atlas ran because the hapticgraphic projectors were known to interfere with measurements. It just meant he could better control variables.

Atlas was switched off as Ship removed his matrix. He carefully carried the round housing and walked along to the side of the spacecraft.

He sent the mental command out, and the white coating on the spacecraft came alive. It almost looked like white-colored liquid was being pushed aside. But the physics didn’t quite make sense because it was tiny nanobots all moving away.

Behind the material was a small panel that clicked open.

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Ship placed Atlas’s matrix into a specifically designed slot, and the matrix was moved to the center of the spacecraft where it was connected to the new ship.

Ship was already inside of the ship so didn’t have to do it twice.

The panel closed, and the liquid shielding morphed back into place.

Ship ordered his remote-controlled avatar into its holding location, and he met Atlas on the inside of the spacecraft.

Atlas was now part of the spacecraft. He was in a simulated world, which was a different experience to the one he was used to. The simulated world was designed so that, to him, it looked like he was inside of the spacecraft. He could see out of windows. But of course everything was simply relying on the spacecraft’s external sensors. The spacecraft had no available space to house hapticgraphic projectors. He was in a completely artificial environment.

Atlas used his new sensors as part of the ship to see the cave around him. He was ready to leave this place. “Let’s go.”

Atlas watched as they began to levitate off the ground and inch out of the dark space they were in.

Minutes passed as they moved farther and farther into space above the small planet. The planet was maybe 70 percent bigger than Earth’s moon. So as planets go, it was tiny. But still, it was big enough for their purposes.

“Ready?” Ship asked as they steered across the empty space between them at the lifeless rocky planet.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for this.”

“Well, if you want to delay it, we’ll have to wait another week before we can do this again.”

The planet they were flying above was racing around the system’s host star. It took roughly six and a bit days for it to complete an orbit. They were currently on the side of the system that faced the Atua home world. Anything they did to this world would be visible to all the sensors on the aliens’ home world in a few years’ time.

“We’re not delaying this,” Atlas said. “Let’s see the results of all our research and development.”

Ship nodded, and the process began.

Firstly, the front of their spaceship began releasing small rotating droplets of a very dense material. These perfectly circular objects were dropped out the front in quick succession. One at a time, faster and faster.

Then a new machine fired. This one fired out a quick pulse of compressive energy.

As soon as the compressive force touched the droplets, it began to crush them, making them infinitely smaller, forcing them to pass the singularity threshold, where individual particles in the material became so close together that the gravitational pull between them collapsed in on one another, forcing them into a point where math stopped working and nothing could escape.

They were infinitesimally small micro–black holes. They were so small they’d quickly evaporate, spewing out massive amounts of Hawking radiation.

But before they disappeared, a laser would shoot out tiny particles of light. These particles would race past the black hole, almost touching its surface—but not quite.

As they flew by, the rotating black hole would impart more energy, at a rate of E equals 60 percent of MC squared.

This was for all intents and purposes the most efficient method ever created for turning mass into energy. More energy was being shot out the front of the spacecraft than any star could produce for the same volume of mass.

It was an enormous amount of energy being produced. The sky around then was being lit up. It was messy, too; not all the energy moving straight ahead.

It looked as though someone had turned on a fire hydrant of light. As if a tiny hose was pumping out enough water to fill an entire planet’s worth of water in a minute.

Atlas instinctually covered his eyes.

This was the ultimate weapon. A Kamehameha on steroids. A beam of light so powerful it wasn’t stopped by the planet below.

It continued to beam right through as if it wasn’t even there, punching through it and continuing straight into the star behind.

This was overkill for destroying a planet. An overreaction in every sense of the word. Like bringing a nuclear bomb to a pillow fight.

There was so much energy being spewed into the planet below that the star behind it would have a hard time managing it all.

Slowly, the planet responded. Not by fighting back—because it didn’t have a chance. It began to come apart. To be torn apart violently. As if the planet was racing to become a cloud again. As if entropy decided that rocks shouldn’t clump into a ball but should defuse around the system like gas.

There was an explosion, and the metal core of the planet began to rock around as if it was a pinball inside of a machine. It created a resonance that increased the destruction.

“We need to go,” Atlas said, understanding the true power of what they’d built.

They’d chosen this system because it was dead. There was no life in the system and no chance at ever evolving life, either.

Ship turned his engines on, and they raced from the system.

Something else left the system at that moment, too. A message. A message to the Atua.

At the speed of light, the galaxy around them would slowly learn that something quite destructive had happened in this system. That a planet was utterly destroyed. A less technologically advanced civilization would struggle to make sense of what had happened just then given their understanding of how the universe worked.

Atlas thought about it as they raced away from the destruction. They’d just broadcast a message. And that message was simple: “Don’t mess with us. We have the power to destroy a planet.”

It was a simple, yet powerful message. It meant that humanity had a weapon of utter destruction.

They’d chosen to use it on this planet because it was the only way for them to prove they had the ability to destroy the Atua. It was the ultimate strongman.

They didn’t want to enter a situation where they threatened the Atua with destruction and the Atua didn’t believe them. It was simple game theory. Almost mutually assured destruction—but not quite. The human race was too spread out to be destroyed by the Atua. But the Atua could definitely cause an issue.

Hence Atlas was sending out this threat at the speed of light.

The next step for Atlas and Ship was racing to the Atua home world. They were going to meet the other twenty ships heading to the Atua home world. The other ships all with the same weapon.

Overkill for attacking a single planet.

But they weren’t attacking a planet. They wanted to show once and for all that the human race was off-limits. The human race was not to be messed with.

Atlas in particular got angry when he thought about the destruction the Atua caused to Icarus’s world. He personally had no intention of doing that to them.

An eye for an eye wasn’t appropriate when talking about another race of intelligence. But he knew the Atua would continue to walk all over humans, treating them like they weren’t any more than bugs, until they went too far.

Atlas needed to show force. Show the threat of power. Show that humanity was not to be messed with. He needed to nip the concept of a war in the bud.

Mutually assured destruction.

The Atua needed to understand that any further attack would mean the death of them.

The Atua needed to understand humanity was no longer under their control.