No don’t hurt Us leave Me alone stop go away We don’t want You turn around go away no no no no We don’t want ...

Wet, white eyes gleamed in the dusty light of the Mirror Prison. Fear reached Thomas like a stench.

“Could you try to do twelve today?” Jinishta said. “Instead of ten?”

Thomas tightened his mouth. He longed to be anywhere else, preferably in his sunny laboratory, coaching Varktezo on capacitors. That was where he belonged. Not in this grimy underground facility.

But cities throughout the galaxy were emptying, shaken by the threat of what the Betrayer could do.

The Torth Majority kept urging their military ranks to fight, but peer pressure could no longer overcome the sheer panic that most Rosies and Servants felt when faced with the prospect of being taken prisoner. The Torth actually seemed willing to let Ariock have the whole planet of Umdalkdul.

So Ariock was busy teleporting armies around. He no longer attended these daily zombification sessions.

“I’ll try.” Thomas floated towards the first prisoner, a ragged woman who stood alone in a holding cage. “But my rule applies. If I sense a mind that can be rehabilitated—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Garrett grumped. “You reserve the right to choose another prisoner.”

Why was Garrett here? Thomas wished the old man wasn’t so fascinated by zombification. Garrett did not attend every session, but he showed up more often than not.

Thomas plunged inside the mind of his first victim of the day.

That was how he thought of them—not as doomed prisoners, but as sacrificial victims. He was not an executioner. He was worse.

Please no. The imprisoned Servant of All moaned wordlessly. Please spare Me. I will do anything You want (Great Mind) (Conqueror). I will be Your slave forever. Just please, will You deign to show Me mercy?

From the perspective of victims, the Conqueror was no longer the Betrayer, no longer Thomas. He was a colossus of incomprehensible mental size and fierce complexity. Physical frailty? That was inconsequential to mind readers. Torth mostly paid attention to the psyche.

This former Servant saw a being who contained more than ten thousand lifetimes.

The Conqueror was even more terrifying than the Giant. He was destruction incarnate.

The Conqueror did not downplay his own mental stature. It was nothing but the naked truth. He knew what sort of monster he was. It was pointless to try to reassure the victim or drag out this process. He just wanted to get his quota over and done with.

He inhaled her fear and wrestled it downward, shoving himself into the depths of her mind. He tasted hidden sorrows. Dark moments. Abuses. Indulgences.

Shining moments rose to the top like clouds.

Injustices lumped in a heavy gloop.

The Conqueror grabbed salient memories the way a diver might grab sunken coins from a treasure chest. He weighed and sorted everything he sucked up. His internal scales of justice tipped back and forth, judging cruelties against kindnesses.

This Servant was not quite as cruelly sadistic as most victims, but she was no innocent lamb. She had tortured slaves. She felt nothing for them. No pity, no empathy.

She had never done anything good or kind.

Her thoughts wrenched in a terrified scream. NOOOOO! Her terror caused her to whine out loud.

I’m sorry, Thomas thought to the victim.

He wrenched her mind.

Memories vaporized. Individuality was gone. The will of the Conqueror seeped into her broken mind, overriding everything else.

Vacancy replaced her terror. The zombie no longer understood that she used to be a Servant of All, or that she used to have free will. Her mind was reduced to an echoing cave of neediness.

She blinked when Thomas blinked. She swallowed in sync with Thomas, and looked wherever Thomas focused. To Thomas, it felt like having double vision, only multifaceted. It was double everything. He had an extra body.

Easy for a super-genius to handle. Impossible for anyone else.

Thomas silently listed subroutines, giving the new zombie a bunch of priorities to follow. It was a laborious process. Zombies with ordinary mental capacity could only remember so many instructions per second, nowhere near as fast as he could process information.

At least he could ensure that these latest zombies would swallow and blink without instruction. They would perform the basics of self-sufficiency.

“Who wants this one?” Thomas sounded hollow. It was difficult to act kind or friendly while his subconscious sifted through innumerable irrelevancies.

“Tchensi,” Jinishta commanded.

The named warrior stepped forward, looking disgusted. None of them liked to babysit zombified Torth.

They might have felt differently if they were mind readers, comfortable with sending commands at the speed of thought. But the albinos were superstitious about letting the zombies get within telepathy range. They insisted on speaking every order out loud. What a drag.

Thomas silently layered more priorities into the zombie’s broken and ready mind. The zombie should henceforth obey the warrior known as Tchensi. The zombie must ignore any command from a Torth. Thomas attached extra importance to that command, embedding it at the root of the zombie’s instructions, so that no one else could override it.

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And last but not least … the zombie must detach herself from the Conqueror’s direct control.

That broke the synced-up feeling.

The zombie silently awaited instructions from her newly assigned owner, while Thomas was glad to be rid of the excess sensory input.

He dared not tell anyone that the zombies were like extensions of himself. Garrett suspected it, but Thomas was not going to confirm the old man’s suspicions.

“It’s safe to open the cage,” Thomas said.

He floated the short distance to the next cowering victim, while the warrior named Tchensi tested out her new minion with a routine of exercises.

“Hopefully this batch will last longer,” a warrior muttered.

“They will be much more effective if you keep them close,” Thomas pointed out. “Thoughts are faster than words.”

Thoughts were clarity. A mind reader would never misinterpret a command, provided they were close enough.

It was no wonder that Audavian had begun to zombify his own loyal telepaths all those eons ago. Telepaths were perfect fodder for minions. They were better than robots, able to fully absorb the intricacies of someone else’s will. With a billion expendable extra bodies, the Conqueror could probably do just about anything, seize anything…

A chill rippled over Thomas.

No.

That was certainly not what he was going to do. He was not a power-mad tyrant, like the Torth Empire made him out to be.

“Come on,” Garrett said, oblivious to his thoughts, beyond telepathy range. “We haven’t got all day.”

No one dared go near Thomas when he was doing this kind of work.

He went on, acting as judge, jury, and executioner. He tore through the mind of an ultra-cruel Servant who had never felt anything for slaves. No pity. No empathy. This one’s life had been full of vapid pursuits, without a care for the harm and pain he caused.

Another victim.

Another.

The Conqueror weighed their consciences and their histories, all while enduring their pleas for mercy and their perceptions of his power. His victims screamed like people being fed to a hungry god. A few of them even tried speaking out loud, in English, just in case it might stir up some vestigial shred of human mercy.

If only they had felt mercy towards their slaves.

If only they had joined the Conqueror. They regretted not doing so now, of course. Too late. They should have exhibited fear and softness when it would have made a difference.

“Please,” the final victim whispered, her voice raspy, her eyes pink and red. She had been a Rosy Recruit. “Please let me die.”

The worst thing about twisting minds was not the garbage he absorbed, or the cruel act of obliterating their souls. The worst thing—the real reason he felt morally bankrupt—was the act of destroying knowledge.

One individual mind was only a droplet of knowledge in comparison to the vast cache inside the Conqueror’s mind. And his capacious mind was but a droplet next to the Megacosm. Even so … droplets could add up into a stream or an ocean. The only way to preserve their knowledge was to absorb and absorb and absorb.

I’m sorry, Thomas silently told the final victim for the day.

He dove into the primal depths of her core mind, and wrenched it with practiced ease.

The victim ceased pleading. She became a mere echo of every thought and every reflex that the Conqueror had. His mind churned with sadistic experiences from his victims. He would need an hour to assimilate most of what he’d absorbed.

“Why don’t you take this last one for yourself?” Garrett suggested.

The Conqueror needed a millisecond to process the suggestion. Once he understood what Garrett had said, he wished he had misheard.

“I don’t want one.” Thomas braced himself for a fight.

Garrett put his hands on his hips. “What you want,” he said, “is some common sense. I expect the Torth Empire will start getting crafty any minute now. You’re a high value military target, and you have zero battle experience. I think it’s obvious that you need round-the-clock protection.”

Thomas bristled with more misgivings than he could put into words.

“Garrett,” Jinishta said with disdain. “We agreed that no mind readers should own zombies.”

They had agreed. A whole war council had been held, and they had all agreed that zombified Torth did not belong under the command of anyone who used to own slaves.

“We all need to be able to sleep safely.” Garrett pointed to Thomas. “Remember, if we lose him, we lose the war.”

How flattering.

A gulf already existed between Thomas and everyone else. Did Garrett want to exacerbate that? People mistrusted them both. One zombified body shield could easily become two or three, and then more. Thomas could end up commanding an army he didn’t want. And how would he look, with an army of braindead minions following him around?

“I have bodyguards,” Thomas pointed out. “I’m safe.”

That might be a bit of an exaggeration.

Shingyu and Yanalthram resented the job of guarding Thomas. As far as they were concerned, Thomas and his lab assistants lounged about like princelings. Most soldiers believed that scientists were a bunch of weaklings who chatted about esoteric matters, while braver people fought and died in order to protect the Freedomland way of life.

There was some truth to that.

In any case, Thomas never complained about his council-appointed bodyguards. He pretended to be grateful. He wanted the war council to see him as weak and mostly useless. That was better than the alternative: Proving to everyone just how dangerous he could be.

“Rekvehs have enough advantages without owning zombies,” one of the warriors pointed out.

Several warriors glared at Garrett.

Thomas knew the old man was unused to criticism from fellow warriors. Most of the time, Garrett pulled off the swaggering, boastful attitude of an Alashani warrior, and many of them treated him like kin, despite his “evil” power to read minds. He was, literally, a cousin to Jinishta. He was family.

He looked ashamed.

Jinishta shot the offenders a stern look, but then she fixed her glare on Garrett. “Freedomland has never been attacked and the Torth are evacuating every city we target. Is now really the time to add extra power for you and Thomas?”

Thomas added his own stare. If the old fool insisted on forcing him to own zombies, rumors would fly, and the next war council could turn into a mutiny. Did Garrett really want to instigate a mutiny?

“All right, all right.” Garrett showed his empty palms, placating. “But we do need to discuss these matters.”

“Yes,” Jinishta said in a dangerous tone. “Agreed.”

“In the meantime,” Garrett said, “let’s work on productivity. Do you think you can try for fifteen tomorrow, boy?”

The Alashani turned their glares towards Thomas.

“We have a finite number of prisoners,” Thomas pointed out. “I advise against burning through them so quickly.”

As the Torth grew more competent at evacuating cities, Ariock and his forces were taking fewer and fewer prisoners. Most of the Torth they collared were powerless Yellow Ranks. Those became penitents, forced to perform the menial labor that farm and factory slaves used to do. Thomas refused to zombify any non-threatening Torth without powers, and Ariock backed him up on that.

“They’re disposable,” a warrior argued. “We are not.”

That was fair.

“You have a good number, for now,” Thomas argued. “And I have important duties in the research annex. I’m researching the inhibitor and ways we can attain immunity to it. I can’t afford to spend a lot of time each day—”

“Too bad,” Garrett overrode him without an ounce of mercy. “This should be top priority for you. In fact, I’m making it a command.”

Thomas backed away. His excuses were weak and he knew it. He had already completed the superluminal communications network. He had other projects, but science was slow.

And the warriors were right.

The Twins and the Death Architect were out there. Scheming. Industrious. As disabled children on the losing side of this war—for now—they were easy to underestimate, but they had all the resources of a galactic empire at their beck and call.

Meanwhile, as Ariock kept conquering cities, people took his strength for granted. Ariock himself took it for granted, growing more confident with every fresh victory.

Overconfidence could prove fatal. Any super-genius knew that.

“They’re wasted as prisoners,” Jinishta told Thomas. “If you can turn more of them into zombies, you should.” She paused, studying him. “Can you?”

Thomas felt trapped, unwilling to lie.

A little piece of his soul withered.

He was the evil stuff of nightmares. The Torth understood that, even if his allies did not.

He nodded. “Fifteen. But no more than that.”