Destroy the universe?

Ariock wanted to reject that cartoonish nonsense. The Death Architect was a heartless alien, sure, but this went beyond destructiveness. It was stupid mindless craziness.

He hoped it was a joke. He hoped he had misunderstood.

“You understood correctly.” Thomas hunched his narrow shoulders, as if the incomprehensible threat was his fault. “I’m guessing she enacted this plan by reverse-engineering our superluminal communications network. Our technology is the key she needed to make this work.”

He said ‘we’ and ‘our,’ but Ariock heard his guilt. Thomas had invented the technology.

He blamed himself.

“Are you absolutely sure about this?” Evenjos asked Thomas in a pained voice.

“Right.” Kessa seemed eager to pinpoint hope. “You say that you have scant evidence. Is there any chance that your interpretation is wrong?”

Thomas shook his head. “She’s taking every step I would take, if I was going to destroy everything in existence.”

Everyone seated around the table stared at Thomas. The fact that he actually could kill the universe… Just how often had he mentally run through ways to be a destroyer?

“She has particle colliders,” Thomas said. “And Hawking radiation suppressors. The type of equipment she’s stealing suggests that she’s creating containment for something substantial. More substantial than stabilized micro black hole grids.”

Mondoyo leaned sideways, speaking from slightly behind Thomas. “Due to the war, super-geniuses have become free to work on anything. It’s the first time in history we’ve been mentally free like this. And it’s been this way for over a year.”

Ariock suppressed his unnerved reaction. Kessa, Evenjos, and Garrett exchanged glances. They all knew that the Torth Majority had forbidden their own citizens from inventing weapons of mass destruction.

But now?

The Death Architect had no constraints. She was free to do whatever she felt like doing.

“Not only that,” Mondoyo said in the higher pitched voice that meant Serette was speaking through him. “But the Torth Majority told us to invent weapons of mass destruction. They specifically commanded us to do so.”

“Exactly,” Thomas said grimly. “The Death Architect has been given a free pass to ponder ways to murder people. There’s no consortium of scientists who will vote against her or tell her no. She murdered the other super-geniuses. There’s no one left on her side who can act as a voice of dissent. There’s no more Torth Majority to question what she’s doing. Or rather, her cultists have united into a new sort of Torth Majority. They have a Necrocosm, and it’s one hundred percent obedient to her.”

Ariock had blithely disregarded the Death Architect as a low key background threat.

Now he realized that she was the main threat. Even the Torth Empire at the height of its power was not as deadly as that little girl. Why had he forgotten that?

Well, he knew why. She was a child. A disabled little girl.

Ariock no longer saw the Twins as monsters, having visited them a few times. He could not fear Nea, the four-year-old. He had ceased to fear super-geniuses. Rebuilding galactic infrastructure had seemed more important than dealing with the last surviving Torth threat.

That was horrifically shortsighted.

“No one has even guessed what she’s up to,” Thomas went on, “except for us.” He indicated himself and the Twins.

Ariock stared at the place where the holograph had visually vaporized.

Would he end up alone and dying as a failure in a black void of utter nothingness?

Like in his recurring nightmare?

“Why?” Ariock asked the obvious question, because he felt lost. “Why is she doing this?” He could barely grasp the situation. “Why does she want to destroy the universe?”

“That child has been a sociopathic murderer since she was a toddler,” Garrett said. “The Majority should never have let her off a baby farm.”

“I don’t know her well.” Thomas sounded pained. “But I’ve visited her mind, and I think it’s safe to say that she doesn’t fear death. Or anything. She’s not sentimental. She won’t care. It’s likely she arrived at this idea based on some chain of logic.”

Thomas was never wrong.

“She has no survival instinct,” Evenjos said in a tone of realization.

“That is correct,” Mondoyo said. “She had an excuse to live—for scientific curiosity—but she may be chasing an idea that overrides that. We know her well.” He glanced towards his ailing partner to include her. “We’ve had concerns ever since she successfully plotted to murder the Upward Governess.”

“I thought that one was murdered by the Swift Killer?” Ariock said, remembering his failure to protect the brave super-genius.

Thomas and Mondoyo both shook their heads.

“Who do you think whispered in the Swift Killer’s mind?” Garrett asked.

Ariock supposed he must have known that.

He just didn’t want to imagine an enemy who looked so sweet and innocent. He had seen holographic representations of the Death Architect. She wore bows in her hair.

Yet that sweet-looking child had defeated him, a galactic hero with near infinite strength.

And hadn’t she also tricked Thomas, in a way?

“She murdered all of our colleagues,” Mondoyo reminded everyone. “She exploited the fears of the Majority.”

Indeed, the Death Architect had lured other super-geniuses into death traps.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Without emotions,” Mondoyo said, “what purpose is there to life? The Torth are not truly emotionless. They only pretend. They wear tranquility meshes and suppress their inner truths. But the Death Architect is one of the rarities who actually lacks emotions, as far as we can tell.” He seemed to receive an extra thought from Serette, and he nodded towards her. “Right, except for scientific curiosity. She does have that.”

Ariock struggled to maintain a good mood, but a sense of desolation engulfed him, as if he was dreaming rather than being awake. Inside his imagination, Vy tumbled away into darkness, screaming for him.

He couldn’t save her.

Failure.

Misery.

The end of all things.

“So what do we need to look for?” Garrett asked with a confused frown. “I guess you’re saying she can contain black holes. So does she have a rig somewhere that we can destroy?”

“She has the means to mine neutron stars,” Thomas said. “But we don’t know where she’s mining.” He projected a holograph of tumbling asteroids and glowing hints of temporal streams, all in motion. “With her colliders, she can contain degenerate matter. I would recommend that we destroy those, but by now, she’ll have made duplicate facilities, hidden from us.”

“She can do that?” Garrett asked.

“She has millions of worshippers,” Thomas said. “And robots, possibly. The laws are gone. She can invent or manufacture whatever she wants.”

“The entire galaxy is her lab,” Mondoyo said.

Ariock felt hope slipping away.

He could detect life sparks within a solar system, if he spent days of focused concentration. But it would take him eons to scan the whole galaxy in search of nefarious activity. He had failed to detect every enemy ship within his own personal solar system, where Freedomland was located. Ghosting had its limits.

“Can we shut down the temporal streams?” Kessa asked.

That was an excellent idea.

But Thomas shook his head sorrowfully. “No. Serette and Mondoyo are providing paradigms that might allow us to deconstruct the meshwork of ‘now,’ but please understand, this is very theoretical quantum physics. No one knows how temporal streams work. Not even the Death Architect.”

Mondoyo spoke up. “She doesn’t have to. She’s using them as-is.”

Thomas nodded. “We’re all starting from scratch, since the Torth Empire outlawed this research. In twenty-four thousand years, no one ever figured out how to divert temporal streams, or how to create new ones, or shut them off. We’d like to solve this. But there are no precedents. And time isn’t on our side.”

“So what should we look for?” Garrett asked. “Are we going to just scan the Araya Moon Belt for the umpteenth time and hope that this time, her lair jumps out at us?”

The Death Architect lived on some unknown asteroid, shielded by mirror traps. Finding her seemed impossible. But if they could ascertain her general vicinity…

Well.

Ariock could destroy a solar system.

Innocent people lived on Tuthwa and Permafrost City and other cities in the Araya Moon Belt, but maybe they could evacuate before he crushed moons. Asteroids. Planets. Whatever it took.

The emptied cup in his hand bulged over his fingers. He had subconsciously enhanced his strength and crushed the metal.

The high windows darkened. Ariock’s mood was making the clouds thick and ominous. Dust motes floated throughout the War Room, buoyed by the excess tendrils of Ariock’s extended awareness.

Everyone gave him a look. Some were judgmental, some were sympathetic. The pity was worse.

Ariock struggled to pull himself together. He was such a psychological mess. He felt like a battered gladiator psyching himself up before his next fight.

“Unfortunately,” Thomas said, “I would assume that she has failsafes in place. If she wants to destroy the universe, she’ll have automated the whole process. Including the trigger. I would bet that her doomsday is set to trigger upon her death.”

Garrett swore.

Evenjos echoed him.

Ariock felt like a doomed idiot. Why was his first impulse mindless destruction? The Death Architect probably wanted him to come charging in like a blundering bull. She had manipulated him that way before.

She kept outsmarting him.

And everyone knew it.

“Are you saying we’re doomed?” Garrett threw his hands up in exasperation. “There’s no possible way for us to find her facilities before she detonates everything?”

Thomas replied in a bleak tone. “There’s a way.”

“One way,” Kessa said.

Everyone looked towards her.

Kessa blinked, as if surprised they hadn’t all thought of it already. “Thomas must brainwash the Death Architect into telling us where to find the trigger. He needs access to her mind.”

Thomas nodded. “Correct.”

But that circled back to the original problem. They needed to find the Death Architect.

Except instead of killing her, they had to either take her prisoner, or else bring Thomas to her lair.

“We have to take that abhorrent child alive,” Garrett said in a tone of disgusted realization. “We have no choice.”

Thomas nodded.

Garrett swore again.

“Why can’t we use her cultists?” Evenjos looked from Garrett to Thomas. “Abduct them. Brainwash them. Then let them go with secret orders to find the little girl and report her location to us!”

If not for the dire situation, Ariock would have been impressed by Evenjos’s flexible thinking, as well as her willingness to rely on Thomas’s “evil” power. She used to fear his brainwashing more than anything.

“I’m willing to try that,” Thomas said, although he sounded unwilling. “But I’m no good at the gentle stage of brainwashing. Anyway, her followers—”

“They’re clueless,” Garrett said in a hopeless tone. “She surrounds herself with battlebeasts and slaves. Maybe robots. None of her followers know where she is.”

“And she’ll expect us to try anything to find her,” Mondoyo added. “She’ll take precautions.”

The universe was running out of time.

Ariock felt it as surely as if he watched an hourglass or a clock. The entirety of the universe was on a countdown timer. The people who sat at this table were the only ones between doomsday and salvation.

“It’s not entirely hopeless,” Thomas said. “Kessa has been making inroads in the search.”

Kessa looked surprised to be called out, but she readily explained. “Our network of spies and smugglers never stopped searching for the Death Architect. They have reported suspicious confiscations. It is known that the Death Architect experiments on humanoid subjects. She used a lot of Alashani for her scientific tests.”

Ariock straightened. This sounded morbid, but it also might lead to the salvation of the universe.

“We need to implant superluminal trackers into people,” Thomas said. “Especially in Alashani who live outside of Freedomland.”

Like Flen.

“It’s invasive,” Thomas admitted with a guilty look. “I know. But I think it’s a wise precaution at this point.” He gestured around the table. “And we all need tracker implants. I’ll have one, too.”

Evenjos looked skeptical. A tracker wouldn’t work with her unique body unless she made a conscious effort to carry it at all times.

Ariock wanted to say that they would find another way. A better way.

“Anyone who might run into her cultists should be trackable,” Thomas said. “That includes everyone here. One of us might even serve as bait, if we come up with a plan to lure her. She might take a risk if she thinks she’ll get to run experiments on an actual hero of prophecy.”

Garrett chuckled in a morbid way.

“Right. Okay.” Ariock made himself sound normal, but on the inside, he was all too aware that he was no match for a super-genius.

His brain was merely human. Fallible. Weak and mushy.

The Death Architect had already beaten him. Twice.

His future was blackness and death.

The end of all things.

No. Ariock refused to let that become the future. Wasn’t it nothing but a stress dream?

Garrett had once told Ariock that he might have a touch of a seer ability.

But that just meant having hunches. If Ariock could actually dream the future—what a ridiculous notion!—then he would have dreamed about quite a lot of things before they happened. Surely he would have foreseen the Torth showing up in his sky room? Oh, and the death of his father? And of his mother?

A fragment from a past nightmare flashed through his mind. A heap of corpses. He was their killer, and he was shocked to see that his mother was one of the corpses, severed in half by a twisted piece of metal.

A chill ran through Ariock. Hadn’t he actually dreamed his mother’s death while she was still alive?

Trauma could mess with memories.

Anyway, he had dreamed all kinds of horrors when he was a gladiator, thanks to that mesh helmet. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Everyone, particularly the mind readers, gave Ariock looks of sympathy. Thomas looked like he wanted to say something.

Ariock felt like an overgrown child. Did he need soothing? He was the Strength. He needed to be strong.

He took a deep breath and forced himself to be a functioning hero. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll wear a tracking implant or whatever you need. And I’ll get rid of any rigs or bombs. Just point me in the right direction.”