by Ian Douglas
He wondered what the star’s name was. No one had told him. But then, Starwall Space was supposed to be eighteen thousand light-years away from Sol. You wouldn’t even be able to see this star from Earth, save as a part of the misty backdrop of the Milky Way, somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius.
The data he possessed did say that the star was a Type K0 IV giant, with a diameter of about three times that of Earth’s sun—make it 4, no, 4.2 million kilometers. That would be…he ran a quick calc, and blinked with surprise. Fourteen light-seconds. That was big….
And at 5c, it would take his trigger ship just under three whole seconds to pass all the way through the star. Somehow, when they’d told him he would be flying faster than light through the heart of a star, he’d thought he would be in and out so fast he wouldn’t even notice. He’d had no idea it would take that long to make the passage.
Thirty seconds to go….
He did wish he could see out. There was no sensation of movement or acceleration whatsoever, and not a glimmer of light from the outside. Considering where he was about to go, this was a good thing, he knew. If that glimmer was able to reach him, by the time the trigger ship hit the star’s photosphere the energy would be enough to vaporize the ship.
Ten seconds.
He wondered if he would feel the star’s gravity. No…gravitational effects should be shunted aside by the warp bubble as well. According to the experts, he ought to be so completely cocooned in that bubble that he would feel nothing at all…in another five…four…three…two…
In fact it felt like hitting a brick wall. He felt a violent shock, so hard the interior of his armor instantly embraced him in something like a thick, gelatinous foam to take up some of the impact.
And the shock continued, dragging on for what seemed like an eternity, and which in fact lasted less than three seconds.
Garroway was unconscious by the time he emerged from the star….
* * * *
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Aquila Space
1259 hrs GMT
“Okay,” Alexander said, as his internal clock flickered past 1259 and thirty-four seconds. “Time.”
A QCC message flashed over from the Mars had given them the word. Garroway had switched to Alcubierre Drive at 1258:09 and vanished; at 1259:34 he should have reached the center of the target star. As the seconds continued ticking, Garroway would be hurtling out the other side, and the star should be rebounding in upon itself after the hyper-c shockwave of the passing warp bubble tunneling through its heart.
A second clock was now counting down from seven minutes, eight seconds. That was how long the wave-front would take to reach the stargate from the detonating star.
The problem was, they were operating in unknown territory, here. The passage of the warp bubble should trigger a nova, yes. The Eulers had done this sort of thing at least five times before in their past. But the explosion probably—emphasis on probably—wouldn’t be instantaneous. Theory said the wave of compressing, then expanding space within the star’s core would create a massive shockwave that would force the star to begin collapsing upon itself. At some point, the star’s mass would rebound, hurtling outward as a titanic explosion…but just how long would that take? Several seconds? A minute? Hell…a week?
They didn’t have a week, of course. The Xul Type II was still bearing down upon them. Hermes shuddered under another direct hit.
“Tug Four is gone,” Taggart said. “We’re more adrift now than under power.”
Alexander was studying the tactical situation. The Xul ship was still 500 kilometers away, almost directly between the Gate and the retreating Hermes. The Hermes was accelerating outbound from the Gate, but slowly, slowly, as enemy fire continued to rake her.
“Just how hard up are we?” he asked Taggart.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Look, it may be a bit late, but something just occurred to me. The blast from that nova is going to hit the other side of that gate just seven minutes from now. Do we want to be here when it does?”
“Oh, my God….”
“I suggest, Admiral, that we find a way to put some lateral acceleration on this thing, see if we can nudge ourselves out of the line of fire….”
“You’re right.” A pause. “Damn.”
“What?”
“General, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
“Can we translate?”
“I was just checking that. The quantum tap converters are junk. We barely have enough battery and capacitor power right now to keep firing.”
“Can we change the Gate’s tuning?” If the stargate was open to another region of space—back to Puller 659, for instance—the Gate would effectively be closed when the energy from the exploding star reached it.
“No go. Navigation says they think the Xul are overriding our signals somehow. They tried to connect, and couldn’t. We signaled both Lejeune and Chosin, and they couldn’t get through, either.”
“They may have locked the Gate open, so that if our people come back through, they know they arrive here.”
“Good possibility.”
No one had any idea what would happen when the star blew on the other side of the Gate. The immediate effect would be light and hard radiation, a very great deal of both. Traveling at the speed of light, they would hit the Gate seven minutes and a few seconds after the star exploded.
The second effect would actually be worse. Heavier particles and white-hot plasma would be following that initial wave front, lagging behind by about twenty minutes. Finally, the main body of stellar debris—a fast-expanding shell of intensely hot plasma—might take a day to reach the Gate. The light and radiation of the first front, though, would be more than enough to cause a great deal of hurt if it was able to pass through the open Gate.
“We may still have one chance,” Alexander said. “Let’s try something….”
* * * *
UCS Mars
Stargate
Starwall Space
1306 hrs GMT
Captain Angi checked his time readout. “Okay, everyone,” he said over the FleetNet. “Heads up, now. If that Marine did his job, the star should have blown and the wave-front ought to be on its way. We have thirty more seconds to go.”
The battle continued to flash and flame around them as the Xul ships closed in. Commanding the flotilla, Angi had directed all surviving ships to align themselves in a particular direction, aimed at the stars. Navigational officers on every ship in the fleet had their full attention focused on the local star, which continued to burn peacefully in the distance.
Strange to think that, if all had gone as planned, the star was already destroyed, already a blazing nova.
The light just hadn’t reached them yet.
Fifteen seconds.
For this to work, they couldn’t just slip into Alcubierre Drive at the seven minutes, eight seconds mark. No one knew just how long it would take for the star’s core to rebound and detonate, and, evidently, the Eulers hadn’t been able to explain that part.
That meant that human eyes and AI senses would be studying the star intently, and the word would not be given until some sign of instability was detected.
How long that would be was anybody’s guess.
The UCS Alcyone was gone, crushed from existence by the unseen fist of a Xul force weapon. The Hera and the Salamone both were drifting, helpless wrecks. Other ships were taking hellish damage.
This could not go on much longer….
“Ares? Give me a count, please.”
Ares was the Mars’ shipboard AI, and Angi’s personal assistant. “Five seconds,” the AI murmured in his thoughts. “Four…three…two…one…mark. And counting. Plus two…plus three…plus four…”
“Never mind the second-by-second rundown,” he told the AI. “Is everyone ready to go at the word?”
“All ships, all stations, report ready, Captain.”
“Okay.
Commence acceleration, but gravitics only. Ten gravities.”
“Accelerating, ten gravities. Aye, aye.”
But not all of the survivors of 1MIEF could manage ten gravities. The destroyer Ganga was barely able to make two. Two of the Valkyries, Skuld and Radgrid, were close in against a Xul Type II, pounding away at the monster at point-blank range. Either they didn’t get the word, or their drives were dead. They weren’t moving.
Angi stared into the sullen image of the star. Do something, damn it, he thought. Do some—
“Spectral shift in the star!” a voice called over the Net. “Going to blue!…”
“It’s going!”
“All commands,” Angi yelled. “Execute! Execute! Execute!”
And in rapid succession, the MIEF warships began winking out of existence.
* * * *
UCS Hermes
Stargate
Aquila Space
1306 hrs GMT
“Captain Angi just gave the execute order,” Taggart said.
“Here it comes, then,” Garroway said. “How are we doing?”
“Not good, but we’re moving….”
Hermes massed some two million tons, the carrier Lejeune just over 87,000 tons, but the carrier’s gravitics were still in good shape and she packed a hell of a lot of thrust. Admiral Forsythe, the Lejeune’s skipper, had brought the carrier up to Hermes’ massive flank, pressed her blunt nose up against the hull, and begun pushing, hard.
They’d only had time for a couple of minutes of thrust, and the Xul ship appeared to be trying to target the carrier now deliberately…but the vast bulk of the Hermes was moving out of a direct line with the stargate’s lumen.
This might all be for nothing, Garroway thought, lying in the Ops couch and waiting for death as the Xul ship fired a final volley, or death as a star exploded through the Gate. One of the minor mysteries of the Gate was that light and other radiation did not normally pass through the central opening. That was why you couldn’t signal through an open gateway with radio, or look through from one side to see an entirely different starscape on the other. The physics boys were still arguing about that one; the favored theory was that the gate was open in tiny, discrete instants of time. Why that would block visible light and not a slow-moving starship, though, was not translatable into something approaching standard Anglic.
The face of the Stargate, the space within the rim, was starting to glow.
Maybe it just took a lot of light….
The Gate’s face grew brighter, taking on the aspect of a shining, flat disk. Hermes and Lejeune were almost out of the shaft of light emerging from the Gate, now, almost but not quite. Damage control reported radiation levels rising in the illuminated portion of the ship.
The Xul Type II was still squarely in front of the Gate, one side of its hull sharply illuminated now by the rapidly increasing glare, the other half in utterly black shadow.
“Make to the Lejeune!” Alexander told Cara. “Give us more thrust!”
“Captain Forsythe reports he is at one hundred twenty percent power now. His power tap feed is threatening to overload.”
“Tell him it won’t matter if we can’t get the hell out of the way!”
“Yes, sir.”
Lejeune’s thrust increased. Alexander could actually feel a slight shudder passing through the couch beneath his back, a kind of steady, building thrum as the carrier served as an immense tug, maneuvering the Goliath Hermes aside.
“We’re clear, General….”
“Thank God!”
The Xul vessel had stopped firing, had stopped accelerating, and now was drifting in that hellfire glare.
Probes still within the shaft of light from the stargate reported soaring radiation levels…and then, in rapid succession, they died.
“Make to Samar,” Alexander said after a long, exhausted moment. “Tell them…tell them PFC Garroway has successfully completed his mission.”
* * * *
Cygni Space/Starwall Space
1307 hrs GMT
Nova light flooded circumambient space.
Type IV giant stars do not, as a rule, possess planetary systems, and this one was no exception. It did possess a fair amount of asteroidal debris, and the commune of intelligence known as We Who Are, millennia before, had used that material to build one of their primary nodes.
Circling the star at various distances were no fewer than three hundred fortress-like structures, each the size of a small moon. Thousands of ships of all types, including many not yet seen and catalogued by human observers, were moored at docking bays, or orbiting in the star’s somber red light…some being readied for patrol, some undergoing a periodic refit and updating, some being constructed out of the available local raw materials.
And, of course, there was the stargate itself.
The Lords Who Are of this region of space had long been considering what to do about the troublesome life form known as Species 2824, and its originating system, 2420–544. Some, indeed, had moved at a most unseemly haste in their urgency to do something about the offending life form. The recent return of a galactic picket with word that one of the aliens’ sublight ships had been taken, patterned, and destroyed, had accelerated that haste.
Perhaps that urgency was even justified. Species 2824 had proven to be unexpectedly resourceful. Evidently, they had allied with another troublesome species—designated 3990—and learned that species’ techniques for destroying stars.
The battle with the intruding fleet had been raging for some time out near the system’s stargate, and victory had been assured when, suddenly, shockingly, the entire enemy battlefleet had vanished.
No matter. It could only be a delaying maneuver. The aliens were cut off from the stargate, and could easily be pursued by hunterships. It would take only a few moments for the hunterships to come to full power and engage their drives. They would overtake the fleeing enemy ships in seconds, matching vectors.
And then…
But there was no “and then.” One by one, in-laying stations and nodal structures had been overtaken by the fast-expanding wave of raw, horrific light racing out from the central star. Sensors overloaded and burned out. Radiation soared. Electromagnetic flux burned through circuitry.
The minds of We Who Are once had been organic, but existed now as nested electromagnetic patterns within the circuitry of their ships, their base fortresses, their planet-wide cities. As circuitry melted, those minds were destroyed.
The leaders of the Xul commune, the Lords Who Are, died as the hardware supporting them overloaded, then melted, then vaporized. As they died, the metamind of which they all were composite parts, the metamind that gave shape and purpose to the local will of We Who Are, died. Some individual fragments, lone hunterships or far-outlying bases and outposts survived…but only for a short while. Fast on the heels of the dying star’s light came the more massive, deadlier onslaught of high-energy particles.
And not a single Xul huntership saw the danger in time to save itself.
Not a single one of We Who Are within the Starwall node survived….
* * * *
Jonah
Cygni Space/Starwall Space
1835 hrs GMT
This, Garroway thought muzzily, is not good. I still can’t see out, and it’s been over six hours. Either I’m still going FTL, or the whole damned ship is dead.
Either way…not good….
He was just now clawing his way back to consciousness. His internal timepiece showed how much time had elapsed since his passage through the core of the star.
He felt…terrible, broken and bruised throughout his body, and he felt like he was suffering from an excruciating case of sunburn.
His stomach twisted, then heaved. His internal nano was damping down the nausea, but the treatment so far was only partially successful.
Medical sensors were reporting…no. He couldn’t have absorbed that much radiation….
“Achilles? Achilles, are you th
ere?”
“I am here.”
“What the hell is going on? Why haven’t we dropped out of Drive?”
“Evidence suggests that we have, Private Garroway. The radiation sensors in your combat armor show an extremely high flux.”
“Shit. Did that leak through from the nova, somehow?…”
“Nothing leaked, as you put it, while we were within the star. However, we did encounter some…turbulence during the passage. Many of the ship’s systems were damaged or otherwise incapacitated. The Alcubierre Drive appears to have cut out only about ten minutes after our passage.”
“Then…we got caught in the blast?”
“Affirmative. We were fifty light-minutes from the star by that time, however, so damage was relatively minimal. At least, we were not vaporized immediately. Radiation levels were high. We are also continuing to sustain radiation damage from the stellar background.”
“Pardon?”
“The galactic core is an extremely active region, with overall high levels of particulate radiation. Lieutenant Lee was badly burned after an exposure of about forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes. And I’ve been out here for…”
“Five hours, nineteen minutes.”
Nausea clawed at him. This time, his internal nano couldn’t handle the surge, and he was achingly, desperately sick inside his armor.
A long time after, he sipped water from the helmet input valve near his mouth.
“How…long do I have?”
His suit monitors reported hard vacuum around him. Well…of course. He’d been in vacuum when they’d shoved him inside. He tried to rub his eyes, and was frustrated when his gauntlet bumped against the side of his helmet. He wasn’t thinking very well.
Garroway was seriously tempted to open his helmet. Explosive decompression would kill him pretty quick—a rush of air from his lungs, a sharp pain as he gasped for breath. A moment or two of pain and cold and growing numbness…
The thought of slowly baking to death in hard radiation was not nearly so pleasant. In his mind’s eye, he could imagine the blistering, the sloughing skin. His internal nano would fight to keep his organ systems going, though. He might linger…how long?
