Life is good, Ariock thought.

He was self-aware enough to know that this much existential contentment was warranted and long overdue for him. He lay on a blanket beneath a deep night sky peppered with stars, hands folded, more relaxed than he had felt since armored Torth had busted into his sky room.

Vy lay next to him, peaceful and satisfied, her loose hair surrounding her naked body in waves.

They fit together.

A tight fit, but they both seemed to enjoy that. Ariock doubted he could be any happier. He was going to get married! He had a future with Vy as his wife! It wasn’t subject to the whims of an evil galactic empire.

There were no more barriers. The Torth Empire was in retreat.

Die-hard Torth were leaving every major urban region, piling into their beat-up starships and flying towards remote outposts that could support life. They were giving up. The future could only be brighter and more happy than—

His wristwatch pinged with the private channel sound.

Ariock tapped it to show that he was listening.

“Ariock.” Garrett’s gruff voice crackled over the supercom, relayed from sketchy satellites. “Meet me in the War Room ASAP. We have a problematic situation.”

“Got it.” Ariock sighed. The old man was usually realistic about threat assessment, so there was probably something awful happening, somewhere in the universe, that only Ariock could handle.

Vy cuddled up. “No rest for the galactic hero,” she said teasingly.

Ariock understood that she was not making fun of his life. Vy just had so much faith in him, she could not imagine him letting people down. No doubt she figured he would slay any threats and be home in time for dinner.

Ariock kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back in time for lunch. Ready to go home?”

Vy nodded sleepily.

Ariock teleported them to his bedroom suite in Freedomland. He left Vy on the huge bed and searched for his specially-formulated immunity tablets, simultaneously using his powers to dress himself. Immunity was more necessary than armor. He never went into a dangerous situation without the tablets. He found the container on a shelf and pocketed it.

Fully armored, he decided to skip a leisurely walk. He teleported directly to the lobby of the War Room.

Kessa looked startled. She smiled in relief when she saw that the sudden arrival was Ariock. “I guess I am on time,” she said.

Ariock led the way inside. Garrett and Evenjos sat side by side at a vast table of burnished meteorite.

Kessa took a seat. “Where is everyone else?”

“This is a secret meeting.” Garrett wore a grim look. He rested one gnarled hand on the tabletop. “We’re going to start by bringing you two up to speed.”

Ariock sat in the throne-like chair reserved for him. “Where’s Thomas?”

“On his way,” Garrett said. “He’s the one who called this meeting. He asked me to fill you in.”

“Okay.” Ariock item-teleported a water pitcher and cups. He splashed the pitcher full of pure water from his favorite mountain stream, then used his powers to simultaneously pour cups for everyone present.

“Thank you.” Kessa pulled her cup closer.

Evenjos gave her own cup a dismissive look. She did not need nourishment. Ariock felt some chagrin, remembering that she was essentially undead.

“All right.” Garrett stood, implying that this was an official report. “A few weeks ago, the Death Architect seized one of our superluminal nodes. That was no big deal. Or so I thought at the time.”

Rogue Torth grabbed anything they could get their hands on. Mostly, they stole weapons and food. Communications satellites? Well, Ariock supposed the loss of the Megacosm had crippled Torth everywhere. It was no surprise that the death cultists wanted radios and supercoms and whatnot.

But so what? What could the remnant dregs of the Torth Empire possibly learn from eavesdropping on random people?

“You’re making the same wrong assumption I made,” Garrett said with a pitying look towards Ariock. “Unfortunately, they didn’t steal it for use as a spy device. Or not solely, anyway. The Death Architect wanted to reverse engineer Thomas’s communications technology. And that’s what she did.”

Ariock tried to think through the implications. What would an enemy super-genius do with superluminal communications technology?

He was stumped. Phone calls weren’t going to replace the Megacosm. Movie streaming was a poor substitute for what Torth could already do with their minds.

“You should know this, Ariock,” Garrett said in a barely tolerant way. “What can the internet do, that Torth cannot do?”

Ariock didn’t like to feel like an idiot. He drained his water cup, hiding his annoyance. The old man had probably learned whatever he knew from Thomas.

“Computerized automation!” Garrett spread his hands as if that explained everything. “She’s gained the ability to synchronously link up devices across the galaxy.”

Kessa gasped. She must have grasped the implication, and it horrified her.

“That means,” Garrett went on for Ariock’s benefit, “she can rig bombs to simultaneously explode. She doesn’t have to rely on her followers. She doesn’t need her death cultists at all. She has sole control over a doomsday device!”

“What?” Ariock thought that was a massive leap of logic. “How do you know?”

“We know very little.” Garrett emphasized the last two words, as if ignorance was personally offensive. “But I pieced together some stray thoughts from a minicosm, and I got worried. Her cultists are talking about artificial gravity grids and degenerate matter. Also extremal combinatorics. We surmise that they want to use temporal streams to leverage something. I hardly know the baseline science behind what she’s asked her cultists to do. They hardly know, either.”

“Okay.” Ariock did feel vaguely stupid. He should have foreseen terrorism from the death cult. But he was unable to imagine whatever terrible threat Garrett seemed to fear.

“So this morning,” Garrett said, “I visited Thomas and reported everything I’ve overheard.”

“Okay,” Ariock said, his tone encouraging. “And…?”

“And now we are more than worried,” Evenjos put in. “We are terrified.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Ariock still felt slow. He was missing something. If the Death Architect had a terrible weapon, wouldn’t she have already set it off? What was stopping her?

“For all we know, she’s rigging it right now to go off at the press of her little finger!” Garrett mashed the air with his finger, miming the savage press of a button.

“What makes you sure?” Kessa asked.

Thomas’s voice came from the doorway. “I’ll fill you in. Brace yourselves. It’s complicated.”

He floated into the War Room on his newly minted smoky gray hoverchair, flanked by the Twins on their own hoverchairs. Although Thomas could walk nowadays, hoverchairs were a low key way to traverse large areas at a pace that was faster than a brisk walk.

Thomas parked at the table, and the Twins glided to a stop behind him. Ariock poured water for the trio of super-geniuses.

“Serette and Mondoyo are going to be vital to helping stop this threat,” Thomas explained. “So I took the liberty of inviting them.”

The Twins looked a lot less healthy than Thomas did. The girl Twin wore breathing tubes and wheezed with every breath.

Ariock began to get up, to heal the child. Evenjos beat him to it. She broke apart and reformed in a standing position, whereby she poured healing energy into the ailing girl.

It had little effect.

Evenjos returned to her seat, looking disappointed. Ariock could not add anything beneficial on top of her efforts, so he remained where he was. No healing or medical intervention would save a super-genius in a death spiral. The girl Twin needed regeneration healing.

Perhaps Ariock should have spent time on Serette rather than fooling around with Vy? Agh. He had so much trouble juggling his schedule.

Thomas ignored the byplay. He used his power to project a holograph above the huge table. Miniature solar systems hung in midair, replete with planets, space stations, dreadnoughts, and the flecks of streamships. It all moved in sedate, aquatic trajectories.

“We have evidence that the Death Architect had her cultists bury nuclear bombs in urban centers,” Thomas said without preamble. “She accomplished this before our people fully took over certain hubs, such as Permafrost City. She would have had the foresight.”

His holograph lit up with hundreds of target markers.

Were those urban centers? In danger?

“They’ll be remotely activated,” Thomas said. “I doubt their transceivers are superluminal, since she presumably buried them before she gained that technology. But she now has the technology to create intermediary transponders. She can have those positioned close enough to each bomb to trigger its activation sequence.”

The holograph gained a secondary set of lights, red and threatening. Each transponder targeted a hidden bomb.

Ariock noted that the transponders could be hidden anywhere at random. They were in deserts, forests, underwater. One of them showed up on an orbital satellite.

“And then,” Thomas said, “boom.”

Holographic cities exploded in rapid blooms.

The casualties would be devastating.

“How long do we have?” Ariock leaned forward.

“No idea.” Thomas made the admission as if it pained him. “We’ve already found four bombs and deactivated them, thanks to Kessa.”

Kessa looked bashful. “I had nothing to do with it. The first bomb was discovered by a local on Paleoterra. Each city has their own investigators. They are doing what they can.”

“You’ve coordinated the search,” Thomas told her. “And we’re grateful for that.”

It seemed they had already discussed this threat and taken care of it. Ariock shifted in his chair, wondering why he had been invited to this meeting. He might be able to ghost around and detect fissile materials, but that would be a long, slow process, compared with what teams of searchers could accomplish.

Besides, he was not the only person who could ghost. Plenty of penitent warriors would be happy to find the bombs and deactivate them.

Ariock considered changing the topic. Kessa might be thrilled to hear about Ariock’s engagement to Vy! Perhaps the happy news would get Thomas out of his pessimistic mood?

Thomas gave Ariock a look that seemed heavy with portent. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I have reason to believe that these metro bombs are a casual side project for the Death Architect. I suspect she’s doing it only as a means of distraction. She doesn’t want us to guess her real purpose.”

That was ominous.

“Judging from what Garrett picked up from her cultists,” Thomas said, “I believe she is planning something much, much worse.”

Worse?

Ariock stared at Thomas blankly, unable to imagine anything worse than nuclear bombs hidden beneath neighborhoods and nurseries on hundreds of planets, and rigged to explode simultaneously at the touch of a button by a sociopathic alien super-genius.

Maybe Thomas was trying to be funny? Was this his idea of a joke?

Thomas cleared his throat. “It seems she’s directed her cultists to take control of a quantum spin foam research station. They’ve also taken an experimental collider, and we have evidence that they’ve constructed copies. And they’re cannibalizing gravitational gridworks, which means they’re likely creating ultracold neutrons, or containment for degenerate matter or hyperons.”

None of that meant anything to Ariock.

“They’re manufacturing black holes, in other words.” Garrett sounded as if he was explaining elementary elements to a child.

“That’s one theory.” Thomas shot Garrett an annoyed look before focusing on Ariock again. “Their activity suggests that they are theoretically capable of star lifting. That means they can generate a ring current around a star and collect plasma, and turn the results into homogeneous cold catalyzed nuclear matter. That’s the stuff inside neutron stars.”

Ariock sighed, tapping his fingers on the tabletop. His telepathic friends had already discussed this threat before he’d even woken up this morning. Of course they had. And they didn’t need things explained to them. Ariock was just their big, dumb helper; the one who was always a few steps behind.

They probably didn’t even want Ariock in a strategy meeting. That was why they hadn’t invited him until now. They just wanted to point and tell him what to do.

“Dumb it down, please,” Ariock said curtly. “What do you need me to do?”

“Sorry.” Thomas looked guilty. “I’m making inferences based on what scant evidence we’ve been able to glean.”

“She doesn’t want us to figure out what she’s doing,” Garrett said. “She hasn’t even enlightened her loyal cultists. They’re making their own guesses, albeit not too dissimilar from ours.”

“Go on,” Ariock urged Thomas.

“Okay,” Thomas said. “She has the means to destroy a solar system. That won’t be totally devastating if it’s localized to one system. But we have a wrinkle: the temporal stream network.”

Thomas’s holograph became a glowing web of galactic fuzz, like a flattened dandelion head ready to blow apart. It vaguely approximated a spiral disk.

“Temporal streams are a great gift to our galaxy,” Thomas said. “They were constructed by ancient aliens, and to this day, no one knows how to create new ones. But that gift is also a back door to terrible destruction.”

Ariock supposed that must be the case for all great gifts. It was certainly true for Yeresunsa powers.

“Temporal streams can deliver us across light-years instantly,” Thomas said. “But by that same token, they can also spread destruction faster than light speed.”

Ariock didn’t like where this explanation was heading.

“So, for instance,” Thomas said, “if the Death Architect is going to catapult degenerate matter into two ends of a temporal stream, there’s a likelihood that each payload will feed mass to the other. To give you some idea of the forces involved: One teaspoon of degenerate matter is heavy enough to pull this planet out of its orbit. Drop a teaspoon of that stuff, and instead of it falling, the planet will rise to meet it.”

Ariock considered his own strength.

He might be able to move the ultradense payloads one at a time. Each payload would weigh more than a planet, possibly more than a star. What if he had to deal with several at once?

Did his strength have a limit?

“They would become black holes,” Thomas went on. “Black holes that grow continuously in a relativistic loop.” His holograph zoomed in on one piece of fuzz. It began to strobe, as if crisscrossed by fast moving shadows. “Each would very quickly grow supermassive. They’d merge together and overwhelm the whole temporal stream network.”

His diagram morphed into the galaxy.

An explosion seared through one tendril of one of the spiral arms. Countless stars went dark.

Ariock hoped Thomas would use plain language sooner rather than later. He shook his head, indicating how lost he felt. He hadn’t even had breakfast yet.

“It would explode outward,” Thomas said, “ripping through a solar system within a matter of hours.”

The galactic map grew blotchy. Stars died in clusters.

“This would be happening outside every temporal stream gateway,” Thomas said. “She can automatically extrapolate the calculations needed to hit key solar systems. And she can hit them using superluminal relays, without needing anyone to be on site.”

“The destruction would grow into a blight on our galaxy,” Garrett said.

“Or worse,” Thomas said glumly. “I can hypothesize a few variations of her plan. Instead of forming a supermassive black hole, the payloads might induce zero-time quantum tunneling, which converts a metastable Higgs field into a decaying false vacuum. All matter within a light-year of every temporal stream would vaporize.”

Thomas threw his hands wide, and holographic stars vanished in flashes of light.

“Or she’s creating chain reactions that engender blobs of dark energy,” Thomas said. “To overwhelm gravity and other forces. The dark energy would accelerate the expansion of space to the point of creating a localized Big Rip. That’s the catastrophic end state of unlimited expansion.”

His holograph exploded in a vaporizing light display.

Then it vanished.

Everything was gone.

“Another possibility is a Q-ball storm,” Thomas said. “Or a strangelet storm. Any of those options would cascade into a calamity that wipes out existence.” He stated it plainly. “She’s going to destroy the universe.”