Storming Heaven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Shiva was a red supergiant star in the later years of its life, Paula knew, although it would have survived for millions of years longer without human involvement. Its mere presence at the edge of the galaxy — if thousands of light years from Star’s End or another human settlement — was an oddity in a galaxy that was full of oddities, although her own private computations had concluded that the star had originally drifted out from the galactic core and eventually settled into an outlaying orbit. It had probably taken billions of years to reach its current location before it died… and she was going to kill it.

It was easy, looking down at the star from several AUs distant, to believe that it was immortal, an endless constant in a universe of change, but Paula knew better. Shiva already massed over fifty times the mass of Sol, the star that had watched over Earth before the Killers arrived and destroyed the planet, and its death could not be long delayed. In astronomical terms, the star was already on the brink of collapsing into a nova, or perhaps even a black hole, without her intervention. It was mere seconds, as the galaxy reckoned time, from death. In human terms, it probably still had millions of years to go.

But its death was already written. The researchers had plunged countless probes into the star and they all confirmed that it was beginning the long slow process that would eventually lead to collapse and an explosion. It had nearly burned out all of its fuel and, soon enough, it would die. Paula merely intended to speed the process up astronomically. The star wouldn’t be allowed to turn into a supernova, not when human intervention could turn it into a black hole. It would be much more useful as a black hole, or so she hoped and prayed. The Administrator had made it clear. If she failed today, she would be expelled from the Technical Faction and probably urged to find a whole new career. She had put the fate of the entire Faction on the line.

No one knew if Shiva had once given birth to life-bearing planets, but it only had a pair of companions in its lonely flight, a pair of rocky radiation-blasted worlds orbiting at a safe distance from the planet. There were also a handful of asteroids and comets, but most of them were on the verge of falling into the star or being lost to interstellar space. No one would be interested in the planets, apart perhaps from material for construction work, or a hiding place from hunting starships. It had occurred to her that the reason the star was on such an odd course, perhaps, was that some alien race had turned it into a sublight starship, but a quick scan of the two planets had turned up nothing. They’d both add their mass to the coming black hole.

“Are you sure that this is safe?”

Paula turned to see Chris standing behind her, examining the panel in front of her. She wasn’t quite sure why the Defence Force had insisted on the Footsoldiers remaining with her, unless it was to ensure that she couldn’t run if the experiment failed, although that seemed unlikely. If the star exploded, the starship she was using as a base would have to run before the wavefront of the expanding supernova overwhelmed its shields and vaporised them; the Footsoldiers couldn’t help her escape a supernova. If the Killers arrived — as she expected they would — the Footsoldiers would just be swept away, like flies. They couldn’t help keep her alive.

“I thought you men laughed in the face of danger and dropped ice cubes down the vest of fear,” Paula said, concealing her own fears. The plan had seemed perfection itself when she’d outlined it for the first time, years ago, but now she was on the verge of actually crushing a star down into a black hole, she was unsure. “If you want to leave, I’m sure one of the starships will come in and recover you.”

“I didn’t say that,” Chris said, defensively. “I just wanted to know if this was safe.”

“Not really, no,” Paula admitted. “If everything goes to plan, we should be well-shielded from any display of stellar bad temper. If part of the plan falls apart, we may be in worse trouble than I had thought, particularly if the star goes supernova and blows up underneath us. And if the black hole’s gravity field fluctuates, we might end up being swallowed by the gravity and crushed down to atoms. The warp drive might not be able to get us out in time…”

She smiled. “Any more questions?”

“No,” Chris said, finally. He grinned, suddenly. “I think I’d sooner take my sick leave right now.”

Paula snorted. “Me too, if the truth be told, and this was all my bright idea in the first place,” she said, dryly. She looked back down at the console. The star seemed almost tranquil, with far less activity than some of the more exciting stars in the galaxy, or even a sun-like G2 star. There were no flares or disruptions marring its surface, just a steady level of heat washing out towards the barren planets. “If you want to leave, now is your chance.”

“Get on with it before I have an attack of brains to the head and realise how stupid this is,” Chris growled. “Besides, how many others can say they watched a black hole forming?”

“No one,” Paula said. She pulled up the communications console and checked the location of the Defence Force’s starships. They had been positioned several light years away from Shiva, just for safety, although no one — not even the worrywarts who thought the experiment would go disastrous wrong — could say what there was to worry about. The black hole would, at most, have the mass of the entire system and the insignificant mass of Paula’s starship and the sensor platforms emplaced around the star. It wouldn’t be enough to suck in the Defence Force attack fleet.

The laymen thought of black holes as monsters that swallowed everything that came too close to them, maybe even reaching out towards objects to pull them into the inescapable maw. It didn’t work quite like that, Paula knew; the black hole would start to affect the local gravity background, but the effects wouldn’t be that different from the presence of Shiva itself. As more mass fell into the black hole, it’s gravity pull would increase, but Shiva hadn’t been attracting stellar material for centuries. It wouldn’t turn into a serious threat to the galaxy.

The black hole at the centre of the galaxy would, one day. It had been sucking in material since it had formed and was slowly consuming the galactic core. Paula knew that, uncounted billions of years in the future, it would break out of the core and start pulling in the remainder of the galaxy, but she and perhaps even the human race would be long dead at that point. If the Community survived, they might move to intergalactic space, or maybe by then they would have mastered gravity technology and leaned how to focus gravity beams to dampen the black hole’s gravity field, or tap it for power. It dawned on her, suddenly, that that might be just what the Killers did — they might even be able to tap the core hole for their power supply? It seemed overkill — they already had more power at their disposal than they could possibly require — yet it was doable. Humans might have done it just to prove they could!

She filed her thought quickly, knowing that the MassMind might not be able to accept her personality in time to save her from disaster, and then pushed it out of her mind.

“This is Alpha,” she said, shortly, opening the communications channel. The entire Community — or at least the parts of the Community that weren’t lost in fantasy worlds or trying to reorganise after the Killer blitzkrieg — would be watching over her shoulder. It was a thought she had long since creased to find daunting. She had joined a Footsoldier platoon on a raid into a Killer starship. What could be more terrifying than that? “We are prepared to launch the probe. Stations; sound off.”

One by one, the different automated and manned observation platforms signed in. Paula had argued that only her — and her alone — should watch as the black hole was created, just in case her calculations were spectacularly wrong. The remainder of her staff, the ones who had helped her develop the technique and translated her vision into reality, had refused to leave. So had several eminent scientists who had believed that her plan wouldn’t work — although the Cinder suggested otherwise — and had insisted on watching, probably to expel her personally if it failed. Paula decided that if the star went supernova and killed them all, she wouldn’t mind losing them. The Technical Faction was not supposed to be petty. Science and research were their only gods.

“All right,” Paula said, finally. She keyed a command sequence into the console, and then submitted to a cold mental probe to confirm her identity and orders. She rarely used such precautions — they left her with a headache and a sense of violation — but there was little choice; they had been ordered to take every precaution they could, against threats that even the Defence Force had found hard to specify. Paula doubted that they needed to worry about the Killers reading their files — no one had found any trace of Killer files on the captured ship — but the precautions made sense. If it was the only way she got to put her theory into practice, she would live with it. “The probe will launch in ten seconds. Good luck to us all.”

The countdown seemed to take hours. “Probe launching,” she said. The torpedo fell away from its position under the starship. “Probe launched. We have impact with stellar atmosphere in two minutes.”

“Gosh,” Chris commented. “This is exciting.”

“Shut up,” Paula said, throwing him a sharp look. “I am bringing the probe’s warp field online… now.”

The probe’s icon changed rapidly. “Power levels remain constant,” Paula added, hearing the note of relief in her voice. If the probe’s power systems had failed, the best that would happen would be a complete failure. The worst would be a supernova as the warp field collapsed and destabilised the star. “We’re in business.”

There was a long pause. “The probe is now entering the star,” she said, finally. She had a sudden mental image of a needle penetrating a balloon and fought down the urge to giggle. God alone knew what would happen if this entered the Community’s standard procedures. The Technical Factions had all kinds of ideas. They could use the process to create rare elements, elements unobtainable outside a supernova, or even mine the gas once it had cooled off after being blown out of a star. It was industrial work on a grand scale, a sign of what humanity could do, after the Killers were defeated. “The warp field is remaining consistent and stable.”

Chris was suddenly beside her, peering over her shoulder. “How are you still getting a signal from it?”

“Quantum entanglement,” Paula said, slowly. “There’s nothing else that will work in such conditions, even gravity-wave transmissions. If the probe is lost, we’ll have the telemetry to tell us what happened to it.”

The mass of the probe was steadily increasing as it flew deeper into the star. “And even if the probe is lost after another forty minutes, the process should be impossible to reverse, or even to destabilise and create a supernova,” she added. On impulse, she reached out and gave him a hug. He pulled her into his arms and they shared a long embrace. “And now…”

Deep within the star, the probe was slowly falling towards the stellar core. It was cool, as stars went, but a human or even a Killer starship would have vaporised instantly. The probe, wrapped in its protective warp field, barely noticed the heat; it was too busy creating a gravity field at the core. As it sucked in atoms from the star, its gravity field grew stronger, pulling in more and more atoms. The process was accelerating even as Paula broke the embrace and checked the console. The star was on the verge of collapsing, either into a supernova or a black hole.

“We’re picking up gravity waves,” Paula said, as the starship rocked slightly. “The star is being compressed into a ball.”

A supernova bomb would have released all the energy, triggering a supernova, but the black hole probe couldn’t let go of a single particle of energy. Instead, the gravity field grew stronger, compressing the captured material down towards a ball and drawing in more matter, which in turn added to the compression. The cycle was unbreakable. As the probe came to rest at the centre of the star, the process picked up speed, adding the planet’s natural gravity field to the artificial one created by the probe. Nothing, even light itself, would be allowed to escape. The star’s mass was being compressed into a tiny area…

The process started to speed up as the probe was finally crushed out of existence, it’s tiny life coming to an end, but it was already too late. The new core was sucking in the remaining matter without any need for a midwife and the star was dying rapidly, massive eruptions of stellar material bursting up from its surface before being pulled back down towards the surface and down towards the growing gravity well. The core just grew hungrier and hungrier, and, as it consumed more of its parent material, its hunger only grew. Paula checked the warp field quickly, knowing that if the warp field failed the starship would die, but there was no need to worry. They were safe.

“He’s dying,” Chris breathed, from beside her. Paula understood what he meant. The star was no longer fighting for its life, but was just collapsing into a black hole. The reports from the sensor platforms confirmed that the gravity quakes were fading away as the black hole stabilised, drawing out the remaining death of the star into a sadistic orgy. The remaining stellar matter flattened out into a funnel, pouring into the black hole, as if water was being let out of a bath. “What about the planets?”

“They’re slightly destabilised in their orbits,” Paula said, after a moment. The effect was still too small to be easy to predict, but the MassMind calculated that one of the planets would eventually fall into the black hole and the other would be tossed into interstellar space. Perhaps it would be converted into a Community settlement as it drifted out of the galaxy, or maybe it would just remain a hazard to navigation. It would be years before anyone had to take any substantial decision about it. “If one of them falls into the black hole, it will release more gravity waves as it dies.”

The black hole was almost invisible now, even though it was easy to make out where it had to be, amid the glowing waste of the star. It was tiny, yet it was so massive that its mere presence warped space and time. She allowed her imagination to plot out the location of the event horizon, where nothing could escape, even light. A million works of fiction discussed what might be waiting at the other side of a black hole — a new universe, or perhaps even a white hole in the original universe — but she knew that anyone who dived into that black hole would be crushed out of existence. They hadn’t managed to link it to any other black holes yet, let alone the Killer communications network.

And the gravity waves would be racing out across the galaxy. The closest known Killer system was over three thousand light years away, but they would be already aware of the black hole, if they cared. There was no way to know for sure — despite her words, Paula wasn’t as certain as she claimed that the Killers would come to investigate, even after the Cinder had burned one of their settlements out of existence. The entire fleet could be standing by… for nothing.

She checked the chronometer and was surprised to find that hours had passed as the black hole came into existence. It had felt like minutes, perhaps less. Her eyes felt gritty and she summoned her nanites to wash them and relieve her tiredness. She had just made history.

“Now all we have to do is take control of it,” she said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “I’ll start configuring the gravity generators now and…”

An alarm sounded as new gravity waves flickered into existence, far too close for comfort.

“What’s that?” Chris demanded. “That’s the near-space alert system!”

“That’s the Killers, right on time,” Paula said. She wanted to make a jaunty comment, but the words stuck in her throat as wormhole after wormhole shimmered into existence, disgorged a Killer starship, and then faded back into nothing. “I’m reading… thirty-three Killer starships, advancing on a direct intercept course.”

“I see,” Chris said. She didn’t know how he could remain so calm when she wanted to panic, or hit the warp drive and flee. A single Killer starship was daunting enough, but an entire fleet…? “I think they’re pissed.”

Paula gave him an icy look as the new icons advanced towards the starship. They were pacing themselves, as if they were cats hunting a tiny and very isolated mouse. Paula knew that the Defence Force had new weapons, perhaps even new tactics, but all of a sudden she had no confidence in them. It wouldn’t be long before the Killers overran their position and blew her starship apart.

“No shit, Sherlock,” she said.