Hornet's Nest

Overpowered

On their way to Wichmond, Daigo had to traverse a corridor which was flanked on both sides not by walls, but by an apparently limitless assortment of gadgetry.

“I am an inventor,” Wichmond said. “My company is responsible for the invention and production of all major technological breakthroughs of the last five years. All of which fall under the secretive scrutiny of military intelligence.”

They crossed by tables and desks and closets, filled with blueprints, designs, holograms and actually built prototypes of many countless things. It was a bit overwhelming even to one who had seen countless systems, and one who had seen countless wars.

“I have enriched myself beyond the wildest imaginations…” Wichmond continued, sounding regretful. “At a cost that was hard to stomach, but not impossible.”

Daigo was noticing his twentieth pistol sighting when they came close enough to Wichmond. There, he noticed the light was being produced by a sphere of plasma. A manifestation of energy that Daigo had never seen before.

“Until this one,” Wichmond said.

The sphere was sucked into a box-like container in front of the inventor, and then he turned around. His eyes had terrible dark rings around them, even worse than that of the clones’, and his eyes were blood-shot. It was the look of someone who hadn’t slept in days and had been sleeping badly for weeks. Maybe longer. He was sweaty, dirty, as shaved as the clone but somehow looking even less healthy.

It put Daigo off guard, but not speechless.

“What’s going on, Wichmond?” He still sounded less threatening than he wanted to. “I’m going to need a very good reason not to replace you with your clone.”

“That thing?” Wichmond asked, not even looking at the clone. “It would never pass for me. I anticipated its robbery and broke his mind.”

“Please don’t kill me,” the clone sobbed away, losing strength in his legs, kneeling down to the ground dejectedly.

Wichmond ignored his clone, and kept his gaze on Daigo.

“It has side-effects which are mostly manifested in its emotional stability, as designed. He would be too scared to tell anyone anything. The other clones will work, though, since I had no time to do the same to them.”

Daigo sniffed and steeled himself, properly bringing anger and threat into his demeanor, starting with his pose. Shoulders straighter, head a bit leaned forward.

“What. Is happening?” Daigo stressed again, and in response, Wichmond grabbed the box and showed it to them.

“I have developed this plasma construct. If it comes into contact with a star… it will be absorbed. That will provoke a chain reaction… that will ultimately trigger a heavily accelerated… gravitational collapse.” Wichmond sighed, shedding a single tear of blood. “Death.”

The man was too tired to talk straight, but Daigo didn’t get the feeling he was crazy or saying things that didn’t make sense, even though that’s definitely what it sounded like.

It had to be crazy.

“It. It kills starts?” Daigo asked, carefully.

Wichmond’s wrinkled expression, with the tear of blood paddling its way down towards his chin, betrayed a face far older than it should be. He was supposedly a man in his early forties, but Daigo could swear the old man was seventy.

“Yes,” he said, frowning painfully. “It essentially causes them to… Supernova. That, in turn, obliterates everything around them. Obviously.”

Daigo looked down in shock. He couldn’t believe it. There was no reason the man would have to lie, and indeed, there was no indication that he was. With how he looked and with a crowd of spies trying to get at him. With how he was speaking. The amount of dread and regret in his voice.

Still, Daigo could not believe it. “This is a system killer?” Daigo asked again, in disbelief.

“Maybe more,” Wichmond said with difficulty. “It depends on… on the star. The system cluster. Well. To be quite honest… this is something on a magnitude that even I… would be unable to… we… Apologies. It is impossible to predict how many space bodies will suffer, is my point.”

“That’s insane,” Kyle’s voice propped up, as if on weak knees. “That’s completely insane.”

Daigo gulped in agreement. “…gods…”

“Good, this is what they’re after, D,” Hannes said, the only one there that wasn’t showing that much of a reaction. “We can use it as leverage.”

Wichmond shuddered and stepped forward, re-energized.

“You need to understand. Every major governing body in the galaxy knows about this! I had been developing in secret, however, one of the liaison to the United Republics of Humanity found out about it. I decided to leak my progress to every other intelligence agency… Essentially, I sparked a galactic cold war. In the hopes that I would be left alone... and my project, too. If one of them takes it, everyone will know that they have it, and at once… they will all turn against that one entity. This is a… formidable weapon, but it will not allow any one power to survive a war against the rest of the galaxy. It worked… That is why the Centauri kidn*pped a clone of me… They hoped that I wouldn’t notice, and that he could then reproduce this… invention… in absolute secret. I anticipated that plan. As a precaution, I picked out a clone, made him defective, and then set him up as the easiest to steal. This would buy me time to… properly handle the situation. If it ever happened.”

Daigo faced the man in realization.

“But we happened,” Daigo said.

Wichmond nodded.

“Oh no,” Kyle voiced, wheezing.

“They must have assumed that you were… Competition. Soon as you did away with their spy, and stole their secret clone. Centauri then had two options… Immediately report the theft to all their competitors and see how they react, or act first, and get ahead of their obvious reaction… To come here and take what they need by force. It will not be long at all until the other governing bodies realize that I am under siege. That my work is under attack, and then… They will come for it as well. For what I am holding in this box. For me. For one of my working clones. For this lab.”

Wichmond sighed, shrugging helplessly.

“The sad truth is that they only need one of these things to reproduce the weapon.”

Daigo looked down at the tiny box. He could easily pick it up one-handed and throw it like a football.

“It’s so small,” Daigo remarked, dumbly.

“The more fundamental the science… The more catastrophic its impact,” Wichmond said, ever sadly. “And the easier it is… to reproduce.”

Daigo shook his head, and winced, his head hurting. “But I don’t get it. Were you building for Centauri? How’d they get involved?”

“The spy who took the clone. He was an envoy from the Trifecta Federation, secretly the liaison for… that I mentioned before. He would be sent to oversee my creations, and had been doing so for years. We have been… we were close, and I believed I could trust him. I gave him too much free reign around my moon and he used it… expertly. By the time I found out he was a double-agent working for Centauri, he had taken my bait and left.”

“So that’s the problem?” Daigo was finally understanding. “This is too big even for your conscience? You don’t want anyone having this weapon?”

Wichmond blinked, for the first time it felt like, and a b****y tear came out of each eye.

“I wish I could… I wish I were that… Responsible. And I wish I was brave enough to take care of it myself. But I am not. I am a coward,” Wichmond said, “I made the clones because I refuse to die. I am terrified of it.”

The whole puzzle finally fit together in Daigo’s mind. His head was hurting under the scale of the situation, but he felt mildly elated that everything fit together. That he knew what was going on.

“Fine, great story,” Hannes broke in, earnestly. “D, let’s take the weapon and run, nobody’s gonna harm us long as we have it.”

“What? Are you crazy?” Kyle reacted by pushing against Hannes, who of course didn’t budge an inch. “Didn’t you hear what it does??! We need to get rid of it!”

“Rid of it?” Hannes flinched and looked up at Daigo, suddenly aware that he might make that decision. “This’s our first true chance, D. We can win. We can’t just pass it over.”

Daigo was fully aware that his prosthetic eyes were jittery and that he was outwardly nervous. He didn’t know how not to be. Still, he confronted Hannes directly.

“Didn’t you hear him? They can reproduce it, anyway.”

“Simple, then,” Hannes argued, “we kill ‘im. We kill the clones, we blow up this whole damn place. Then we’ll have the only thing.”

“How the hell do we do that?!” Kyle asked, and it was a fair question. They had packed a few explosives, they could always come in handy, but nothing they had could come close to bringing down that gigantic fortress.

“Just drop it on water,” Wichmond interrupted. “Inside the case, drop it on water. In a matter of days, it will be extinguished. It will be gone.”

Daigo looked Wichmond from top to bottom.

“This is what you want,” Daigo realized.

“Y-yes,” Wichmond said in a stuttering voice.

His eyes started to water with normal tears. The three tiny trails of blood, which had coursed his cheeks, were quickly smudged. They dissipated against his swelling skin. Kneeling down in front of them, Wichmond began to truly cry. “Yes… Destroy all of this. Destroy me. Destroy the weapon.”

“He can’t do it,” Kyle said, having his own kind of realization. “He wants to, but he can’t bring himself to destroy everything he’s ever done. Not by himself.”

That was remarkably perceptive of the kid.

“D!” Hannes pulled focus, “this ain’t the time to be stupid.”

Daigo didn’t feel stupid, though.

He looked down, he looked up, back at the box, back at Wichmond, at Hannes and Kyle and even at the emotionally challenged clone. Daigo thought back to the Hornet’s Nest. Back to Kiyin. Back to her planet.

The snapshot by his bed flashed in his mind.

“What I love most about you, kid, is how fast you adapt to everything.”

And now he was hearing voices. His mentor. The ship captain that he started working for when he was a young orphan trying to find his way out of Hellias three. Daigo hadn’t thought of him in almost a year.

“Whole damn ship’s tearin’ up all around us, everyone’s losing their damn minds, making things worse, but not you. You already got an angle. You know it might not work out, but you got it. And you’re workin’ it.”

Daigo noticed a tear rolling down his cheek then. He reflexively turned his face so Hannes and Kyle wouldn’t see. His prosthetic eyes were self-lubricating, which is to say they depended on the rest of the mechanism that eyes depended on, and that meant that his tear ducts were still there and working fine.

In that situation, he wished that wasn’t the case.

“That’s what I love about ya, kid,” his captain had said. “Go on and work your angle, and if it doesn’t work? Don’t sweat it. You’ll be great, kid, trust me. Just never lose that part of yourself, and you’ll be great.”

The decision was up to him and, for the first time in his whole life, it was too big a decision to make. Daigo just couldn’t ignore the consequences of being wrong. He couldn’t believe things would just magically turn out alright.

Making the wrong call could doom galactic civilization. Daigo was completely out of his depth.

His body and mind were doing things he had never experienced before. His nervous system seemed to be giving him trouble he had never experienced. With the tiny bit of reason left to him, Daigo was able to understand that he was panicking.

“Captain?”