Arkadin opened his eyes for the first time for a while. He had been travelling blindly through the toxic planet that supposedly contained the heart of Kinisis, and he had finally made it to a chamber that wasn’t flooded with fluids that emitted so much radiation, they could kill a mortal being in seconds. The journey had been treacherous so far, and Arkadin had mostly been navigating via echolocation and awkwardly feeling through the world around him. However, this new location in the centre of the planet was still dangerous, perhaps more so than the radioactive, flooded tunnels. Here, the radiation was stronger than ever, pulsating through the air in relentless waves.
“Well, this is horrible…” Arkadin muttered, rubbing his eyes. Everything glowed blue, and he could see stray particles bouncing into each other. Arkadin’s skin itched and tingled, feeling hot, almost burnt to the touch, as the radiation tried to penetrate into his body. Despite not having proper internal organs, Arkadin felt slightly sick, as if his stomach was churning.
His new surroundings weren’t much better. The outer walls were metallic but rather soft, as if carved out of gallium and cobalt. Dim blue specks were embedded in the walls, offering a bit of light. However, they were not particularly necessary, mostly because of the mass in the centre of the room. At about 20 metres in diameter, a dull, translucent sphere floated ominously, held in place with a myriad of thin, metal ropes that were secured to the outer walls. These ropes seemed sturdy, but the central sphere bobbed ever so slightly.
Inside the central sphere though, another much smaller sphere could be seen, hovering on its own, and a bit more energetic. It glowed, a cool, blue glow, with little enjoyable warmth. The heat it generated was mostly radioactive and ultra violet, with occasional flashes of blue and green. An aura circled the core, akin to an aurora except more aggressive. Bolts of lightning and miniature solar flares would occasionally flicker into existence, collide with the outer sphere, then evaporate into nothingness.
“This must be it…” Arkadin grunted to himself, feeling rather uncomfortable. He had dealt with wild energies like this before, back in his old death god days, cleaning up white dwarfs and neutron stars before they got too cold and dangerous, but he had never felt anything as intense as this. Contained within the outer sphere was what Arkadin assumed to be a quark star, a body so dense that the atoms inside it had disintegrated into their core components, electrons, protons and neutrons, and those components had been crushed further down, to the point that they had dissolved into THEIR components, quarks. What was once a blue giant of a star had slowly crushed itself over eons, shrinking down into something that was now no more than five metres wide. It was supposed to take trillions of years for such stars to form, longer than the age of the current universe. Longer than multiple of Kinisis’s universes. Just how old was Kinisis anyway?
Not really knowing what to do, Arkadin began by cutting the metal wires. As each one snapped, the translucent orb and its captive star began to move more uneasily. Clearly Kinisis had kept this place sealed up for so long that any sort of technology used to monitor the quark star had long disintegrated, and, considering how easily the wires had snapped, the place was no longer maintained in any way.
With the wires no longer an issue, Arkadin could now more closely inspect the spheres. It seemed that the outer sphere wasn’t containing the quark star, it was protecting it. Analyzing how sound passed through, or rather, didn’t pass through the outer sphere, Arkadin noticed that, should the sphere be breached, the delicate gravitational balance of the quark star would be shattered, causing it to expand and rupture. If that happened, matter around the quark star would decompose and also become quark matter, causing a universe-ending chain reaction. However, if Arkadin simply added a bit more gravity, the quark star would lose its battle with gravity and collapse into a spinning singularity, a black hole, which Arkadin could then simply remove the energy from, causing it to disappear.
Smiling, Arkadin reached for the small device Epani had given him.
“Ready when you are, sister…”