The place was wrecked, the bed and dresser and chairs torn to splinters, clothes tossed everywhere, broken glass scattered on the floor like sand at the beach. The safe under her bed was more resistant to energy weapons than Ashok’s, but it had been blown completely apart anyway. Normally, that kind of safecracking would be self-defeating, because it would destroy the contents of the safe too…

  But not when the only thing in the safe was the pentachoron key. That was indestructible, and now it was gone, in the hands of the Benefactor. Did he plan to open the vault? Was it the last day of the war?

  “Not as long as I can still fight,” she said aloud.

  Shall transferred his consciousness to Glauketas from the White Raven and reviewed the security footage. “Kaustikos worked fast. As soon as Callie went into the Hypnos, he accessed a terminal and uploaded some kind of virus that eradicated my consciousness on the station. I’ve managed to quarantine the virus now, but it’s still trying to erase me. With me out of the way, he sealed Elena in the infirmary, locked the Hypnos room, tossed Callie’s cabin, and then… then… went to Ashok.”

  Elena sat in a corner of the command room, quietly weeping.

  “Then he opened the safe, got the dimensional ripper, tore a hole in the air, and went through. He’s gone.”

  “But we know where he went.” Callie held up her hand, and showed them her wrist, with the teleporter bracelet. “Ashok made some modifications to this. He duplicated the phrase-shifting technology. I can go back to the temple, and to the vault. Ashok built the machine I need to avenge him.”

  “You can’t go alone,” Elena said.

  “I won’t. Shall, boot up the big mining drone in the cargo bay. It’s not military, but if it can cut through rock, it can cut through Axiom.”

  “Yes, captain.”

  She started toward the cargo bay, and Elena caught her arm. Callie expected Elena to say ‘I love you’ or ‘be careful’ or ‘come back to me,’ but instead, with quiet ferocity, Elena said, “Kill him. Kill both of them. For what they did to Ashok.”

  “I’d kill them twice each if I could,” Callie said.

  Once the drone was ready and her other preparations were made, Callie used the bracelet to rip a slash in the air. Shall muscled his drone through the gap first – it made an audible tearing sound at his widest point, which was beyond chilling – and she followed him, the wound in the air closing up behind her.

  They were back in the temple. Fluted pillars, white walls etched in ugly Axiom glyphs, a smooth white floor, and a dome that looked out onto an imaginary alien sky. The golden metal vault door still stood, and the Benefactor – really here, in the flesh – stood before the door, holding the key, while Kaustikos floated nearby, doing something to a stack of unfamiliar equipment.

  “Callie!” the Benefactor called, voice emerging from a device strapped to one of his wrists – a combination communications device, phase-shifter, and floor-cleaner for all Callie knew. “Kaustikos said he thought you’d find a way to follow us here. I really doubted it, but I suppose he has spent more time with you–”

  Callie began firing her wrists weapons, and Shall blasted them with an array of mining lasers.

  Their beams hit an invisible barrier halfway between them, and the Benefactor made a wheezing, grinding noise that might have been laughter.

  “Stasis technology.” This time the voice emerged from Kaustikos. “That was the real reason we sent you to the Vanir system. I downloaded the technical specifications for the stasis device while you were running aimlessly around on the thirteenth station. The Cleansing Corps were the only ones who had access to this technology by the end, and it’s vital for the completion of our plan.”

  “The stasis device can create force fields, too, you see,” the Benefactor said. “Just a thin slice of air where no time passes, and so no weapon blasts can penetrate. The field can be deployed very selectively. Show them, Kaustikos.”

  The probe did something to the stack of equipment, and Callie was suddenly encased from the neck down in something soft but unyielding – not unlike the sensation of being squeezed inside the wall of the starfish ship, and just as unwelcome. “What are you doing?”

  “We put the air around you in stasis,” Kaustikos said. “Slowed the air molecules down until they’re as solid as steel.” The probe floated over to Shall – who seemed similarly incapacitated – and extruded a manipulator arm, which he plugged into the mining drone’s back. “I’m just going to erase Shall’s mind. Again. I quite enjoy doing that. I wish I’d had time to eliminate him on your ship. I’d love to get rid of all his backups.”

  “That’s hardly necessary now,” the Benefactor said. “They’ll all be dead soon enough. There’s a line I encountered when I was learning your language, Callie – a process that took most of an afternoon – that I quite like: ‘Leave no stone upon a stone.’ A reference to the destruction of a city. I can do better than that. I’ll leave no molecule upon a molecule. No atom upon an atom.”

  “What does that key do?” Callie said.

  The Benefactor turned to look at the vault door, gazing at it for a long silent moment. Kaustikos finished turning Shall’s body into a mindless mining drone and drifted over to join the Benefactor by their machines. The mining drone powered down beside her, slumping – they didn’t bother keeping it in stasis now that it posed no threat. Something moved in the corner of Callie’s eye, but she couldn’t turn her head to get a good look at it.

  “The key,” the Benefactor said at last. “What does any key do? It opens a door.”

  “Fine. What’s behind the door, then?” She didn’t doubt that the Benefactor would keep her alive at least long enough to gloat.

  “The last failsafe of another faction of the Axiom. I didn’t need you to kill them – they all died in the fighting a long time ago. I did need you to free the key, though. The field that held the key was specifically designed to stop the members of any other faction from accessing it, and the station emitted a frequency tuned specifically to turn my bones to glass and shatter them in my body. I couldn’t come within a thousand kilometers of the place myself, and when I tried to send a facsimile of my mind in a drone like Kaustikos, the station detected the Axiom thought patterns and disintegrated my emissary instantly. Purely automated drones failed to overcome the local defenses and those zealous guards. The countermeasures were ineffective against you, though. You really are very good at what you do. I also needed you to acquire a phase-shifter for me, as I had no way to access this place. The wormholes are my playground, but this… little world is something else. Kaustikos stole your shifter–”

  “After I killed Ashok.”

  “Yes, you squashed a bug, how proud you must be. Kaustikos used the shifter to come here, then opened another portal to my location, and I joined him. You never realized the full capabilities of the dimensional ripper. This place, this temple to a dead faction, exists equidistant from all coordinates in ordinary space. You can enter this place from anywhere, and from here, you can go anywhere. Doors from anywhere, to anywhere. It makes for a wonderful command center.”

  “We should get started,” Kaustikos said. “We don’t need to waste time talking to her.”

  The Benefactor looked at the drone for a moment, then reached out with both clawed hands, grabbed the sphere, twisted it apart, and flung each half in opposite directions, where the pieces smashed and scattered and sparked. “I can’t believe we used to be so alike,” the Benefactor said. “Traveling with you changed my artificial counterpart… or perhaps he merely suffered from the limits of processing power and data space in that body. Talking to you isn’t a waste. You are my last adversary, Callie. The last adversary I’ll ever have, almost certainly. Making sure you understand the magnitude of your defeat is a pleasure I would never deny myself. True, it’s no more remarkable than a human outsmarting a rat. Any triumph will do in these late days, I suppose.”

  The Benefactor stepped toward her, holding up the glittering key. “To be used only on the last day of the war. When the final citadel has fallen. When you cannot win, but you want to make sure your enemies lose too. On that day, you insert this key, and the engine of unmaking is activated.” He tapped Callie on the forehead, gently, with the shifting end of the key. It was very cold.

  Callie kept her gaze on the Benefactor’s single blue eye, and didn’t let her eyes so much as waver toward the things happening behind him.

  “Unmaking, and making. When I turn the key, those doors will slowly grind open. Holes will open all around us, rips in the fabric of space time, connecting this temple to distant parts of the universe. Then, the contents of that vault, energies beyond your understanding, will be unleashed.” He showed his teeth, and held his bracelet up to her ear so it could whisper to her. “Those energies will burn the universe down. No molecule left upon a molecule. No atom on an atom. The engine of unmaking will bring about the end of all things.”

  He stepped back and raised his arms. “And the new beginning! This key destroys the universe, and then creates a new one. A universe with the same physical laws and constants, with roughly the same quantity of matter bursting outward from the point of first cause, but in the end, it will be a new universe. New stars, in time. New planets, in time. New people, in time. Only this temple will remain safe and unchanged, this little pocket of hidden reality no bigger than a moon. It will take billions of years for anything interesting to arise out there in the new universe. A long wait for the appearance of life intelligent enough to hail me as a god.”

  The Benefactor walked over to the stack of equipment and gave it a pat. “Hence my need for stasis. I will turn the key, and then I will activate a stasis field around myself, with a timer set for a few billion years. I will wait here for the new universe to become one worth ruling. I have schematics to make all sorts of useful devices when I wake up, to aid in my dominion. For me, in stasis, the end of this world and the birth of another will take the blink of an eye.” The Benefactor bowed. “I couldn’t have done this without your help, Callie. I won’t even kill you – that’s how grateful I am. Of course, you’ll starve to death here soon enough. Wait, your kind die of thirst first, don’t they? Either way, your last sight will be me, floating peacefully in stasis, awaiting the birth of my empire.”

  “Can I say something?” Callie said.

  “Of course. Some parting words for the universe you’re about to lose?”

  “Not really. I just wanted to say: Now, Lantern.”

  CHAPTER 34

  “I don’t trust Kaustikos,” Callie whispered to Lantern. “When we leave the ship, I want you to tell everyone you’re going home, then go hide in the cargo bay. You’ll be my secret weapon, if it turns out I need one. I got the idea from Kaustikos, actually – when the Exalted boarded the White Raven and he said you should hide, since they wouldn’t realize you were on board. I don’t know if we’ll need rescuing this time, but I like the idea of having an asset Kaustikos doesn’t know about. It won’t be long. Just until we send him packing back to the Benefactor.”

  Lantern agreed willingly enough, slipped away from the group, and took a nap on the cargo bay, inside a crate. The Free didn’t need to sleep as much as humans did, but recent events had been exhausting. Her first awareness that anything was wrong came when Callie stopped by the cargo bay to check on her before going to the machine shop… Where she found Ashok dead. Lantern wanted to keen, and mourn, because Ashok was one of the humans she’d grown closest to, and one of the few beings she called a friend. The time for mourning would come, though. For now, she had to focus on avenging him.

  Callie and Lantern devised a plan. Lantern hid herself on the underside of the mining drone, out of sight, gripping with her pseudopods as they passed through the hole in the air to the Axiom temple. At first, she thought they’d win easily, but then they were all gripped in stasis. Once Kaustikos erased Shall’s mind, though, the drone was released, and once Lantern was able to move again, she scurried away while the Benefactor and Kaustikos weren’t looking.

  Ashok and Callie had feared this temple might prove dangerous, so they’d returned weeks ago and hidden dozens of Ashok’s small drones here – on top of pillars, in the shadows by the gate, and up on the domed ceiling, all disguised by shimmering chameleon tech to blend with their backgrounds. Lantern had the controls to activate those drones, and she hid behind a pillar and slowly moved the scuttling things into better positions while Callie kept the Benefactor talking. He did like to talk. Spending millennia hiding in the crawlspaces of the universe would probably make anyone chatty.

  When Callie said, “Now, Lantern!” she set off the drones, each carrying its own powerful explosive charge.

  She’d moved most of the drones as close as she dared to the Benefactor and his equipment, and the results were explosively effective. The stasis machine was torn apart, whirling fragments tearing into the Benefactor, who howled with his own voice from his own throat.

  Now that Callie was free, she sprinted toward the Axiom. The explosions and the shrapnel had torn off most of the Benefactor’s legs and taken both arms on one side, but he wasn’t dead – he dragged himself with the remaining arms toward the key, thrown meters away from him by the blast. He growled and snarled with every inch he gained, but Callie beat him to the key, and kicked it away. She pointed a sidearm at the alien’s head.

  The bracelet on the Benefactor’s wrist – now on one of his severed arms, across the room – began to speak. “Callie. My adversary. It seems I underestimated–”

  “Nope,” Callie said, and fired an expanding ball of plasma through the Benefactor’s bright blue eye.

  Callie and Lantern stepped back through the tear in space-time to the cargo bay on Glauketas. They couldn’t bring the mining drone with them – it was too big and heavy to lift.

  Once they were back on the asteroid, Callie tossed her bracelet through the portal. “I’m sorry to lose the short-range teleporter, but I’m happy to lose that… other thing.” The hole in the air knit itself up. “I think we’re good. The key is in the temple, and there’s no way to get to the temple with both phase-shifters locked inside.”

  “As far as we know,” Lantern said.

  “A ‘yes’ would have been more comforting,” Callie said.

  “Yes,” Lantern said. Then honestly compelled her: “Probably yes.”

  “That’s probably the best I can hope for,” Callie said. “You know, we’ve saved people and places before, but this time we saved everyone in the whole entire universe. You know what that means?”

  “The good whiskey?” Lantern hazarded.

  “The good whiskey,” Callie said. “We’ll raise a glass to Ashok while we’re at it.”

  Shall called the whole crew to the command center and told them what he’d found.

  “Ashok left a will?” Callie said. “That’s unusually forward thinking of him.”

  “It’s a video. ‘To be played in the event of my totally untimely death,’ it’s called.”

  “Let’s see it,” Callie said. “Dim the lights.” She figured if she saw Ashok up on the screen she might cry, and she didn’t need anyone else to see that.

  Ashok’s face appeared, way too close to the screen, his lenses rotating. He stepped back and grinned, which was always unnerving, but also nice. The video had been filmed in the machine shop on Glauketas, which meant he’d recorded this in the not-too-distant-past. “Callie and Shall and Stephen and Drake and Janice and Elena and Lantern and maybe Sebastien if he goes uncrazy and Uzoma and Robin and Ibn and anybody else I forgot, greetings!” So this video was made before they left for Taliesen, when conditions were rather more crowded on Glauketas.

  “If you’re looking at this I must be dead. Ugh. The worst.” Ashok shook his head. “I know the stuff I do isn’t always ‘safe.’” He made air quotes with one baseline human hand and one nest of manipulators. “I figure there’s a good chance I’ll die in a wreck, or get eaten by an alien, or maybe I’ll plug the wrong piece of experimental tech into myself and turn my gray matter to gray goo. I don’t want that to happen, but I’m just an optimist, not an idiot. I know eventually everyone dies. That’s why… I got a new upgrade.” He thumped his head. “It’s sort of a surprise. I’ve been live-logging myself for basically my whole life, streaming my sensory inputs and memory patterns to a drive. That’s good for reliving past glories, and for settling arguments about who said what when. Lately I’ve been thinking, I have all that data, so maybe I could use it for something? I installed a little black box inside the base of my skull. It sits there quietly mapping my neural patterns, collecting data. It’s pretty much the same way Callie’s ex-husband mapped his brain patterns to form the seed of our dear buddy Shall, except his tech was external and not as cool.”

  “Oh, shit,” Callie whispered.

  “Now, I know turning a mental map and a whole bunch of memory data into a consciousness is not easy or cheap, but I’m leaving whatever assets I have, my shares of the Machedo Corporation, the income from my patents, everything I’ve got, to start a fund to save Ashok’s brain! Or consciousness. You know what I mean. I don’t need anything fancy – you could put me in a mining drone – I just want a second chance at life. I know an AI based on me isn’t exactly the same as me, but then again, is the me who wakes up the same as the me who goes to sleep? That’s mind-blowing to think about, right? I took a philosophy class at Luna University, Stephen. Just the one, but it made a big impression.”

  Ashok cleared his throat. “Anyway. That’s it. There are instructions for recovering the mental map and the access code for my life log but uh, definitely check the meta-data and think hard before you watch anything marked ‘DOUBLE PERSONAL PRIORITY PRIVATE,’ because some things cannot be unseen. I love you all – I can say that now that I’m dead and you’re all too sad to make fun of me – and if you want to have a funeral for me that would be great. Everyone can talk about how much they miss me and how great I am. Then you can get to work on bringing me back.”