Exodus: Machine War 1 Supernova. (27 page)

The next day
Phillipson was back.  “I want to get a better look at those alien artifacts,”
he said, pulling up a holo of one of the objects in orbit around the star.  “I
need you to move your ship closer, so we can put some people aboard.”

“I can’t do
that, Doctor.  Haven’t you seen my report on the objects?  After putting that
first probe aboard one, everything else we have gotten near it has
disappeared.”

“But not
destroyed,” insisted the scientist.  “And everything you sent over was a
machine.  I’m betting that whoever built these things built in a failsafe to
protect organic sentient life.”

And you’re
not going to be the one betting his life on that
, thought the Captain,
shaking his head.

And so it went,
with Dr. Phillipson making daily demands, and the Captain refusing him.   Huang
knew they were still doing good observational science here.  He just regretted
that the asshole he was saddled with would get all the credit.

*     *     *

First Councilman
Rizzit Contena sat in his seat at the head of the council chamber and listened
to the interminable debates about how his nation shouldn’t cooperate with the
aliens.  After months of attacks, after they were assured that Zzarr was no
longer among the living, people were growing weary of the terror attacks. 
And
if we refuse to cooperate, where does that get us.  The humans have already
taken hundreds of thousands of people off planet, and built shelters for
millions more.  Are we supposed to destroy those shelters, just to satisfy a
bunch of fanatics.

“And if we stop
cooperating, the fanatics of Honish will stop hitting us.  Stop hurting us. 
They are not hurting the humans, with their superior tech, armor suits, and
spaceships.  They are hurting the innocent among our people.  So if we give
them what they want, they will stop.”

“What about the
people that have already been taken off planet?” he asked the council member. 
“We can’t give them the return of those people without the humans cooperating. 
And I can’t see them doing that after going to all the effort they went to of
evacuating them in the first place.”

“Then we demand
that they do.”

“And with their
superior tech, armored suits, and spaceships, why would they listen to us?”
asked another council member.

“Then let’s put
it to a vote,” said the junior council member.  All agreed, and the vote was
taken, with it split equally among the sitting council members.  Which left it
up to Rizzit to cast the deciding vote.

“We will give
the humans their time, and hope they will save as many of our people as they
can.  And I, for one, will not bow down to cowards who can only strike at the
weak.”

The meeting
broke up with half the council angry, the other half just afraid, and one
leader who hoped he was making the right decision.

Chapter Twenty-two

Sometimes we think we’re the
masters of the Universe.  One only has to look at the remains of a supernova to
know that for the lie it is.

Dr. Larry Southard.

JULY 3
^RD
, 1001. D-0

“Spectrograph is
showing iron burning,” called out the Sensor Officer, looking back at the
Captain with alarm.

Captain Walther
Huang looked up from his chair, his eyes narrowing as he looked at
Big
Bastard
in the viewer.  It didn’t look any different than before, but the
spectrograph lines along the side told the story. 
And we’re sitting nine
light hours away, which means what we’re looking at now happened nine light
hours ago.  And the iron burning stage will only run for about twenty hours. 
Shit.

“Prepare for
jump into hyper I,” called out the Captain, and the crew of the
Merriwether
Lewis
came back with their acknowledgements.

“What is going
on, Captain Huang?” asked Dr. Avery Phillipson, running over from the station
he was using to monitor the star.  “I need more time to take readings.”

“You’ve had all
the time you’re going to get, Doctor.  I’m not about to risk my ship just so
you can get some more information, just before the thermal wave hits.”

“You’ll have
plenty of time when the graviton wave hits,” said the scientist, putting hands
to hips.

“Not according
to my Exec,” said Huang, watching as the lights on the status board turned
green, indicating that all hatches to the outside were closed, all crew
aboard.  “She thinks we’re going to be unable to go to and from hyper once that
damned star blows.”

“And I think
your Exec is an idiot,” growled the Astrophysicist.

“Since I don’t
agree with your appraisal of Commander Harrison, I am going to jump my ship
now.”

“You have orders
from above to cooperate with me,” said the Scientist with a scowl.   “And I
expect you to follow those orders.”

“With the clause
that I am not to put my ship at risk,” said Huang, standing up from his raised
chair and looking down at the smaller man.  “Those orders were not a suicide
pact.”  The Captain sat back down and looked straight ahead to his Helmsman. 
“Jump her into hyper, Ensign.”

“Aye, sir,” said
the Helm, pushing the panels on his board.  “Jumping to hyper, now.”

The hyperdrive
opened the hole in hyper I, and the light cruiser slid into the higher
dimension.  Huang felt the characteristic nausea from the translation,
something he had grown used to, if not immune.  Dr. Phillipson bent over,
clutching at his stomach as he was wracked with much more severe illness.  Then
the ship was through and the space around them had turned the red of the alien
dimension.

“Set a course
for Klassek, fastest turnover at each hyper barrier.”

“Aye, sir.”  The
ship started to accelerate from near rest at five hundred gravities, on a
course for the nearest star.

“I must protest,
Captain,” said the pale faced scientist, trying to glare at Huang and failing,
then staggering away.

“Protest all you
want,” whispered the Captain, staring at the back of the scientist.

An hour later
they were jumping to hyper II, an hour after that III.

“Are you happy,
Captain?” asked Phillipson in a hacking voice.  “We lost hours of readings,
when the star would not blow for at least a day.”

“Doctor
Phillipson,” said Huang, trying to keep his temper.  “I...”

“We’re picking
up severe graviton fluctuations,” called out the Sensor Officer.  “I think its
collapsing.”

“You were
saying, Doctor Phillipson.”

“We’re twelve
light hours out in normal space from the star,” called out the Navigator.

“Graviton
fluctuations increasing,” continued the Sensor Officer.  “They’re going off the
scale.”

Dr. Phillipson
looked over at the holo which showed the computer graphic representation of the
star, its surface falling inward, till the star was three quarters of its
original diameter, then half, then a quarter, shrinking beyond, then stopping
for just an instant.  Then came the rebound, as the pressure reached the point
where the star could collapse no more, for the moment.  And it exploded out.

“Graviton wave
moving by in VIII,” said the Sensor Officer.  The sensors went wild for a
moment, and then the wave passed.  Minutes later another wave passed by, this
one in VII.  About eight minutes later came the wave through VI, then V, all
the way down until the III wave, running through the dimension they were in,
came roaring up to the light cruiser.

“All crew, brace
for impact.”  Anyone with a little bit of forethought sought a chair or
acceleration couch.  Most made it.  Those who didn’t were tossed about by  the
passing wave, battering the ship like a tsunami moving through a shallow sea. 
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was gone.  At least the tsunami
part.  The roiling space around them was a seething froth of gravitons, the
messengers that something had gone horribly wrong with a gravitational point
source nearby.

“We’re passing
the old hyper IV barrier,” reported the Navigator, and Huang nodded.

Those barriers
were now moving as the mass of the star was ejected outward.  They wouldn’t
change much, at first, but would eventually move out to over twice their
original circumference.  Then they would rebound in as the globe of ejected
mass continued to spread and grow less dense, until they conformed to the mass
effects of the new five or so solar mass black hole which was even now
collapsing to its event horizon.

“Give us fifteen
minutes at this velocity, then attempt translation up to IV,” the Captain
ordered the Helmsman.

Fifteen minutes
later the translation was attempted, with no effect.  The hyperdrive generators
sent out their masses of gravitons, raising the region just in front of the
ship to thousands of gravities for a microsecond.  That should have torn open a
hole in the fabric of hyper III, giving them an opening into IV.  Instead, they
were lost among the roiling gravitons that swirled through space, blown away by
the gravitational wind that prevailed.

“No luck, sir,”
reported the Helmsman, looking back at the Captain with a frown.

“Try moving us
back down into hyper II.”

Again the helm
activated the hyperdrive generators, again the gravitons were sent out in the
focused beam, this time at a lower power level and a different resonance.  And
again they failed to open space.

“There’s your
answer as to what would have happened to us, Dr. Phillipson,” growled the
Captain, looking back at the astrophysicist.  “We wouldn’t have been able to
translate into hyper, just as my Exec hypothesized.  And we would be waiting
for the thermal wave to come along and smack us with enough energy to kill
everyone aboard, if not melt the ship.”

The cowed
scientist said nothing, simply looked down at the deck.  Huang turned back to
the main holo, configured in tactical mode, which showed the system behind
them.  According to the projection, the thermal wave had already obliterated
the two innermost planets, and was just about to hit the orbit of the third one
out.  Anything that survived the awful influx of photons would soon be wiped
away by the massive wave of particles, traveling at point nine seven light
speed.

“I guess that
the ships at Klassek will get the news when the hyper VIII graviton wave hits
them,” said the Navigator.  “In about, two minutes from the initiation of the
supernova.”

So, they knew
about it some time ago
, thought the Captain. 
And it won’t be long until
they can’t translate into and out of hyper either.  I sure hope there aren’t
any ships approaching the barrier to whatever dimension they happen to be in.
 
That last should not have been a problem, since the ships in and approaching
the Klassek system knew the general time frame of the supernova.  Still, things
had been known to happen because someone hadn’t thought.

And if they
still couldn’t translate six months from now, when the thermal wave hit, or
several days later, when the particle radiation came in?  The ships would just
have to weather it.  Their own electromagnetic fields might be strong enough at
that range to survive, and they could hide in the shadows of planets until the
radiation passed.  No, they were not in danger, but the same could not be said
for the planet.

*     *     *

Besides being a
disaster, the detonation of the
Big Bastard
was also an event of
significant scientific importance.  Not important enough for a manned
spacecraft to sit in normal space and gather information as the stupendous heat
and blast waves passed.  Important enough to deploy scores of sophisticated
probes in a shell around the star, and behind the larger gas giant worlds.  The
probes, thirty-eight of them, sat out at the two light week mark, their
sensitive instruments pointed in at the star, their grav lens telescopes
pointed out past their cold plasma fields, taking in the star and its
surroundings.  The cameras, in all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum,
were still seeing the star as it had been weeks before, and would only catch a
glimpse of something different some hours before the photon heat wave struck. 
At that time the probes might only have those hours of life before they were
destroyed, though there was a chance some would survive.  But the
black box,
the memory core of the probe that was protected by a meter thick of armor
and a superior cooling system, was expected to survive, along with the
thousands of petabytes of information.

Four other
probes were stationed within the system, one behind each of the gas giants,
their multiple cameras pointed out to both sides of the world, focusing in on
the moons in their various orbits.  The view they got was spectacular, if a
little disturbing, as the probes recorded the fate of moons made of mostly ice
as they were hit by the heat wave from the exploding star.  Luminosity
increased thousands of times, and whatever atmosphere the moons possessed was
superheated, then blown away by light pressure in microseconds.  The icy
surfaces first melted, then vaporized, then turned to superheated gas that was
also blown away, leaving what rock had made up the core of the moons to heat up
and go molten.  Temperatures reached in the tens of thousands of degrees,
breaking apart almost every molecule in the crust, the radiant atoms barely
held together by the gravity of the bodies.  Almost thirty percent of the rock
and metal boiled off into space, decreasing the size and gravity of the moons,
which were also being pushed out of their orbit.

The innermost
gas giant the moons were in orbit around, a super Jupiter with almost enough
mass to be considered a brown dwarf, had its own atmosphere superheated, boiled
and mostly ripped from the world, streaming out and around the planet.  The
liquid outer core, starting ten thousand kilometers in, now absorbed the heat
and boiled away.  The probe at that planet fought the superheated gas with its
full strength magnetic field, and failed.  It was pounded by streaming gas,
superheated, and came apart, only the small black box of pure supermetal alloys
surviving.  Of course the object, including its supermetal memory core, were
superheated as well, but the ultra-dense materials were able to handle the heat
at the distance from the star where they had been hiding, over three billion
kilometers.

The black box,
which was in fact a perfect sphere, extruded grabber panels and boosted away at
ten thousand gravities, staying as much as possible within the shadow of the
gas giant.  Unfortunately, the heat buildup was too much, and there was no
cooler space to radiate to, and that probe came apart in a cloud, all of its
precious data gone forever in atoms even the supernova couldn’t produce.

As the heat of
highly energetic photons continued to eat away at the gas giant and its moons,
orbiting at over three billion kilometers from the star, three times the
distance of Saturn from Sol, the radiation wave, travelling at over point nine
light, struck, pushing more energy into the objects.  Anything that had
survived the photonic wave would have been killed, though the heat would have
handled that, but for the fact that the planets and moons had not been around
long enough to evolve life.

The front of the
mass ejection wave, plodding along at point two light, was the next to hit, and
when it had passed there was no trace of the gas giant or its moons.  All of
the octillions of  tons of matter that had made up the objects converted into
glowing molecules and atoms that were swept along with the expanding mass of
the star.

The next gas
giant, this one about the same mass as Jupiter, survived slightly more intact,
if the metallic hydrogen core surviving constituted survival.  It sat at nine
billion kilometers from the star, twice the distance of Neptune from Sol. 
Temperatures here reached into the tens of thousands of degrees centigrade,
enough to melt or boil away just about any matter.  The core of the planet
survived, as did the probe sitting behind it, even when the ejection mass
reached it.

The last two gas
giants also survived, the outermost one retaining its liquid under the gas
surface, though much of that boiled and continued to boil into space.  By the
time the luminosity died to almost nothing a month later, only the metallic
hydrogen core would be left.  The one icy outer planet and the trillions of
Plutinos in the Kuiper and Ort layers were next to go, melted and boiled away
by the heat, which still reached destructive levels two or more light months
from the star.

The heightened
luminosity of the star, millions of times normal, would continue to shine
through the system for months, first increasing over several weeks, then
dropping off.  The remaining mass of the stellar body, still over five times
that of Sol, first moved out with the explosion, then fell back in as gravity
re-exerted its force.  It heated up to millions of degrees as the pressure
increased to almost unbelievable levels, slowing the collapse.  But collapse
was inevitable, and the matter continued to press inward, first turning the
five Sol mass into a ball of neutrons that would normally be the ultimate fate
of matter, there being no space between the particles to speak of.  This mass
was fated to an even more bizarre end, as it crushed past the neutron stage and
continued to collapse, gravity rising to the point where even light no longer
possessed the velocity to escape.  The mass pinched off from the universe into
a self-contained bubble of space-time, and a new black hole was born.