“Tell me the route to the nearest breach,” Maddox said.
“Can you commit it to memory?”
“Yes.”
The Builder creation began to explain the torturous route to Maddox.
“That’s not going to work,” Maddox said. “We won’t reach the hull opening in time.”
“I suggest you begin praying to the Deity then and making your peace with Him.”
“Question,” Maddox said. “Can you switch the gravity settings in the corridors?”
“Of course,’ the Builder thing said.
“Make everything weightless.”
“Would that help you escape?”
“Yes,” Maddox said.
The Builder thing paused before saying, “There. It is finished. Now, you must stop communicating with me. I will need to use my last moments to concentrate on control and transfer.”
Maddox stopped talking to the Builder computer. He tore off the translator’s loop and plugin, and realized he was weightless. “Listen to me,” he radioed the others. “This is what we’re going to do…”
***
Maddox gripped Meta’s belt with one hand and propelled them down the corridors with his legs, using his free hand to guide them. She was groggy, going in and out of consciousness.
Despite the broken ribs, Keith practiced zero-G maneuvering like a monkey. The ace shot ahead of them. Riker did his best to keep up.
So far, they hadn’t run into any more bio-robots.
“Even if we get outside,” Rider said, “won’t we get sucked into the transfer node?”
“You ask the cheeriest questions,” Maddox said. “I have no idea. First, we have to get out of the doomsday machine. Then, we can listen to you croak despair.”
One thing helped Maddox remember the route. The feeling of evil had departed. Was that due to the Builder octopus?
As the captain gained speed, negotiating the intersections with cool concentration, he thought about the ancient machine. Who had built it? Did it even belong to this galaxy? Clearly, it destroyed planets. Why, though? What had been the reasoning behind the decision to make something like that?
We’ll probably never know. Oran Rva might have told us, but he’s dead. What about the other New Men, do they know?
“I see stars,” Keith radioed from ahead.
“Is the breach big enough for us?” Maddox asked.
“Oh yeah it is, mate. It’s the loveliest exit I’ve ever seen in my life. I never thought we were going to be able to do it, sir.”
“We’re not done yet,” Riker grumbled.
“No, not yet,” Maddox said. He didn’t want to think about Meta. She hadn’t said anything for some time. Was she dying?
You can’t think about that yet. Get everyone out of here first.
Then, Maddox saw stars. There was a breach through the neutroium hull. He couldn’t believe it.
“It’s not an opening,” Keith radioed. “There’s hard…something like clear plastic, I think. It sealed the opening.”
Maddox drew his blaster. Then, he holstered it. As best he could, he slowed his momentum. Soon, he reached Keith by the jagged breach and its seal. Putting the blaster nozzle a centimeter from the clear substance, he began to burn it. Maddox worked fast. He had no idea how much time they had left.
Finally, he burned a circle, creating a man-sized hole. Anchoring himself, he shoved the substance with his shoulder. The clear plastic-like stuff popped out into space, tumbling away. Some ship atmosphere blew out, but not as hard as the captain would have expected.
“Now,” Maddox said. He pushed Meta through the opening, joining her outside a second later.
Soon, Keith and Riker floated with them. They had each shoved as hard as they could off the hull. They drifted a few meters a second away from the ancient, pitted neutroium. It wouldn’t be far enough, though, when the ionic storm appeared for transfer.
The giant craft slowly began to rotate. At first, none of them was aware of what happened.
“Do you sense that?” Keith asked.
“What?” Maddox asked.
Keith told them about the hull drawing away from them.
Maddox watched the pitted neutroium. The bad feelings had begun again. Was the ancient intelligence waking up for good and engaging the fear machines?
Then, the giant doomsday machine began to move away from them faster and faster.
“There,” Keith said. “I see the exhaust.”
Maddox saw it too, a hot plume. The exhaust stopped suddenly as the giant craft rotated again.
“Why’s it doing that?” Keith asked.
“I think I know why,” Maddox said. “The Builder is making sure the exhaust doesn’t kill or radiate us. Now, the port should spew exhaust again.”
Ten seconds later, it did just that. The plume extended as the planet-killer increased separation from them. Soon, Maddox could no longer see the machine, just its hot exhaust. Quicker than he would have expected, the plume shrank until it was no brighter than a star.
At that point, the magnetic storm appeared, growing rapidly to its regular planet-circumference. Maddox spied purple flashes of lightning. None of the bolts threatened to reach this far. Even so, increasingly heavy static made it difficult to communicate with each other.
“I’m still alive,” Riker grumbled. “Now, we can suffocate once we run out of air.”
“Yes,” Maddox said. “But that’s better than starving to death, right?”
“Are you serious, sir?” Riker asked.
“Not in the slightest,” Maddox said. “I have no intention of dying, not after we’ve won the greatest victory in human history.”
“How do you plan on getting us out of here, sir?”
“At the moment, I have no idea. But until I’m out of air, I’m not giving up.”
***
On Victory’s bridge, Galyan said, “Look. The doomsday machine is transferring.”
“Do you know to where?” Valerie asked.
“According to my calculations, it appears to be heading into the core of the Sun.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No. I am being factual.”
Valerie wanted to howl with laughter. “Could Maddox have convinced the planet-killer to commit suicide?”
“I give that a high probability,” Galyan said. “Ah, this is remarkable. I will record the event.”
***
As had happened many times before, a portal appeared in the magnetic storm. Unlike others of its kind, this portal was highly unstable due to the target. Nevertheless, the great doomsday machine shot into the portal and disappeared.
A second later, the primordial planet-killer transferred into the core of the Sun.
The G2V spectral-class yellow dwarf—a ball of hot plasma—had a mass 330,000 times that of Earth. While the surface of the Sun was a mere 5,800 Kelvin, the core had an infernal temperature of 15,700,000 Kelvin.
The core, with a density 150 times that of water, extended outward from the center to twenty to twenty-five percent of the solar radius. That was the only region of the Sun that produced an appreciable amount of thermal energy through fusion. That happened to be a proton-proton chain reaction, which turned hydrogen into helium.
The neutroium armor was massively denser than the surrounding plasma. The doomsday machine slid through the Sun’s core, withstanding the heat and thermonuclear fusion far longer than seemed possible. The traveling distance was simply too far, however, especially at the planet-killer’s present velocity.
In the end, the core’s fantastic heat and energy output blasted through the neutroium. The ancient machine with its terrible secrets disappeared into the hot plasma, adding its molecules to the nuclear fusion reaction. The deadly menace to the Commonwealth, to all of humanity, had become a smear of atoms.
Long before the doomsday machine’s alien intelligence perished, the Sun caused the unstable portal to collapse. That left the magnetic storm on the other side of the transfer point.