Death of a Neutron Star

by Eric Kotani

  “Keep an eye on them, Mr. Tuvok,” the captain said.

  “I will do just that, Captain,” Tuvok said.

  Tyla felt like rejoicing. In all her life she never would have imagined that one ship could back down three Qavok warships, yet she had just watched it happen.

  Captain Janeway wasn’t even smiling.

  “You won, Captain.”

  Janeway shook her head. “I think the war is far from over. The real first is going to happen before us in the next few hours. And I would still wager Captain Qados and the Invincible are going to try something.”

  Tyla felt her stomach twist. “You mean like sending one of those neutron stars toward my homeworld?”

  “Maybe,” Janeway said, staring at the image of the neutron star binary on her screen. “Or maybe something else. I honestly don’t know.”

  Tyla glanced at the screen, then back at Janeway, realizing that she had just witnessed something else for the first time. A captain actually admitting a weakness. It didn’t happen in the Lekk fleet and she doubted it did in the Qavok fleet. These humans really were strange beings, of that there was no doubt. Very strange indeed.

  CHAPTER 9

  IN ALL HIS LIFE DR. MAALOT COULD NOT HAVE IMAG-ined a ship like Voyager. And being on such a ship, watching the final hours of a binary neutron star, was not even something he could have dreamed. The entire last day had seemed unreal, as if maybe he had actually died on that small yacht and this was an afterworld of some sort.

  He finished calibrating the sensor and glanced around the area called “Engineering.” A dozen humans, both male and female, worked silently at panels, or over instruments, as he was doing. The area was big and well lit, and felt, for lack of a better term, scientific. It was cleaner than any lab at home, as if ready for inspection by top government officials. Only here, in Engineering, this was how things always were. Everything in its place and a place for everything. He had never seen another lab like it before.

  A half-dozen humans worked silently while the large bluish column in the center seemed to pulse lightly, making no real noise. All seemed well, normal.

  He glanced down at the panel near him. It showed the details of the binary with incredible accuracy. From the readings, there wasn’t much time left before the two would touch, in a virtual sense, causing the distended secondary to explode and sending the more massive primary shooting through space, the deadliest missile ever conceived by the universe. In about ten hours.

  His finger flew over the board, bringing up a schematic showing the plane of the two neutron stars’ orbits. Then he extended that plane like a flat board through the nearby star systems. The plane cut the Lekk system like a knife. If the Qavok succeeded in sending the runaway neutron star at his homeworld, or even close to it, there would be nothing left for him to return to. If that happened, he had already decided to ask if he could stay on board.

  Behind him the door swished open. Maalot turned and smiled as Captain Janeway entered. She returned his smile, seemingly at ease. That surprised him. She had just come from standing off Qavok warships, yet she looked as if the incident had been an everyday occurrence. Maybe for this ship it was.

  “Doctor Maalot,” the captain said, “are you ready?”

  “Just finished the last sensor,” he said. “We’ll get readings on every band, in every spectrum of light and gravitational radiation, from all angles. We’ll have so much information, we could almost rebuild the binary.”

  “Wonderful,” Janeway said, laughing. “But I think once is enough for me.”

  “Agreed,” he said, laughing with her.

  “We’re almost back in position,” she said. She glanced down at the schematic he had displayed on the board, then up at him.

  Her gaze held his, and he could feel the understanding coming from her. “We won’t let the Qavok destroy your home,” she said, her voice firm.

  “Thank you” was all he could think to say.

  She moved so that she stood directly over the board. Her powerful hands didn’t move as she studied something. And after a moment her shoulders slumped. She turned to him. The expression on her face had changed from a smile of elation to a frown of worry.

  “Doctor, I need you in the briefing room in ten minutes.”

  He nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say. What had caused her sudden shift of mood?

  As one accustomed to having her orders obeyed without question, she turned and headed for the door. He watched her for a moment, then turned back to the schematic displayed on the control panel.

  What could have caused such a reaction? Had he done something wrong?

  For the next five minutes he studied the schematic, finding nothing. Then, after getting quick directions from a crew member, he headed out for the briefing room. It was the longest two-minute walk he could remember taking.

  * * *

  She was the first in the conference room, and she allowed herself to drop down into her chair for a moment. It had taken her only a minute to get the information she needed from the prince’s yacht’s computers. Far quicker than she had expected. She tried to make herself sit back, relax a little. This was clearly becoming one very long day. She had already had four cups of coffee. Or had that been five? She’d lost count. But she’d also lost count of how long she’d been awake now.

  She sat back, forcing herself to take a deep breath and relax her tight muscles. She could feel the joints cracking in her back as she moved her shoulders around. She would have time to rest later. In just a few hours, one of the rarest events in the galaxy would take place. And she was going to be there, watching, maybe even helping it along a little.

  The door from the bridge opened and Chakotay entered. He smiled at her and moved around the table while others filed in behind him.

  “Status of the Qavok, Mr. Tuvok?” Janeway asked as her top staff, as well as Lieutenant Tyla and Dr. Maalot, filed in and took seats around the conference table. Only Paris and Neelix were missing. The two Lekk guests looked nervous. Dr. Maalot’s hands were shaking and he was sweating. Tyla, on the other hand, showed her nervousness by holding her shoulders tight, in a formal posture. Her straight gaze never wavered.

  “The two warships have taken up a position one astronomical unit away,” Tuvok said. “They have been joined by two more. It would be logical to assume more will join those. The Invincible has returned to its original position.”

  Janeway nodded. “Captain Qados is rebuilding his fleet.”

  “It would seem that way,” Tuvok said.

  Janeway shrugged. “Fine by me, as long as they stay right where they are until we get our explosion. Have we taken up our strategic orbit around the binary?”

  “We have,” Chakotay said. “Tom is staying at the helm to make sure nothing goes wrong. Screens are up.”

  “Good,” Janeway said, nodding to her second-in-command. She too felt better with Tom at the controls. He was by far the best pilot they had, and if something happened with the binary, she wanted him at the controls.

  She glanced at Torres and Seven. “Is your project finished?”

  “Within the hour,” Torres answered.

  “We should be working on it now,” Seven said, clearly annoyed at the interruption.

  “In a moment, Seven,” Janeway said, holding up her hand for Seven to stop. “This won’t take long.”

  Seven said nothing, but Chakotay looked puzzled.

  Janeway sighed softly. She would tell him what was going on as soon as the meeting was finished. She had planned to brief him before now, but just hadn’t had the time.

  The door swished open and Mr. Neelix entered. “Sorry I’m late, Captain,” he said, smiling at her as he slid a cup of coffee beside her on the conference table.

  “Thank you, Neelix,” she said, letting the cup sit. At the moment she had to deal with the problem she had discovered.

  “Dr. Maalot,” she said, “in Engineering you had a schematic showing the orbital plane of the neu
tron-star binary. All the possible paths the larger neutron star will take after the explosion.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “Would you be so kind as to put that on the main screen so we can all see it? B’Elanna, please show Dr. Maalot how to do that.”

  It took only a moment before the image was in front of all of them.

  “Tyla and Dr. Maalot believe that the Qavok will attempt to send the star at their home system. Right?”

  Both Tyla and Dr. Maalot nodded.

  “It is what we overheard,” Tyla said. “We would not lie about such a thing.”

  Dr. Maalot was again nodding.

  Janeway held up her hand. “I’m not saying you lied. I’m just trying to get the facts in front of all of us here.”

  Tyla said nothing, so Janeway went on. “B’Elanna, on the screen show the area on both sides of the Lekk home system that the star must pass for the Qavok to be successful. Say one thousand astronomical units on either side would do the damage.”

  “I doubt our system would remain intact at that range,” Dr. Maalot said.

  “I agree,” Janeway said. “But we need to draw the line somewhere.”

  Two short parallel lines appeared on both sides of the Lekk system on the schematic.

  “Now,” Janeway said, “extend those lines so that they go off the chart on the edge.”

  B’Elanna did as she was told.

  Janeway barely avoided wincing when she saw an area they had cut out of the schematic.

  “Before the meeting I downloaded the records of inhabited worlds in this area from the prince’s yacht,” Janeway said.

  With a few quick keystrokes she overlaid the inhabited systems in the area on the schematic, showing the inhabited worlds as green dots.

  “Many of those worlds are primitive at best,” Tyla said. “I don’t see their danger to the Qavok.”

  Janeway glanced around at her staff. All of them, it seemed, were seeing what she had seen in Engineering. “B’Elanna, show the orbital plane as a two-thousand-astronomical-unit-thick disk.”

  The engineer nodded, and a moment later the schematic on the main screen changed to show a volume of possible destruction.

  “Oh, my,” Neelix said softly.

  Janeway knew exactly what he meant. They were inside a star cluster, and there were a few dozen systems within this volume at danger from the runaway neutron star. Why hadn’t she realized this before now? And now that she had, what could they do about it?

  If anything.

  “Captain,” Torres said. “It’s even worse than it seems.”

  Janeway focused on her chief engineer. The half-Klingon was clearly shaken.

  “I took this possible path here,” B’Elanna said, “and extended it.”

  A silence filled the room as if someone had died. Finally Torres said, “It extends through the heart of the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant.”

  “What?” Chakotay said. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “There is as much a chance of the runaway neutron star plowing a path through the Federation as there is of it taking out the Lekk homeworld. Of course, it will take time for it to get there, but it will get there. Actually, predicting its exact course over such a long path is tricky because of the differential galactic rotation and close encounter with stars that could deflect the trajectory.”

  Again silence filled the room as they all tried to absorb what Torres had just said. Janeway was having her own problem with it. She had become so used to their own distance from home, she was having a hard time understanding that an event they were witnessing could destroy entire systems in the Alpha Quadrant. That just didn’t seem possible.

  Yet she knew it was.

  She forced herself not to think about the possible destruction. It was up to them to make sure it didn’t happen.

  “Okay, people,” she said. “What are we going to do about this?”

  “Changing the timing of an exploding neutron star is not possible,” Seven said.

  “One optimistic nonsolution,” Janeway said. “Anyone else?”

  No one said a word.

  “B’Elanna, on the schematic eliminate any path that would cause destruction to an inhabited system, either here or in another part of the galaxy.”

  B’Elanna nodded and bent over the panel in front of her. On the schematic, section after section disappeared, as if some person were eating slices of the pie one large piece at a time. Finally there was only a small slice of the pie left. A very small slice.

  “If the runaway takes this path,” B’Elanna said, “it will miss all systems and leave the plane of the galaxy eventually.”

  Janeway looked at that small area. How in the world were they going to control one of the rarest and most powerful events in nature, enough to send a neutron star along that path?

  It didn’t seem possible.

  But it had to be possible. Otherwise they were about to witness the death of entire systems full of beings. And that wasn’t an option.

  “Dr. Maalot,” she said. “How much time do we have?”

  Maalot shrugged. “The separation between the two neutron stars is under seven hundred kilometers now, and the revolutionary period of the two has decreased to under a half a second.” He seemed to think for a moment, then went on. “Eight hours. “I’d count on the eight hours.”

  “I want ideas in front of me in one hour,” Janeway said, her voice as firm as she could make it. “Dismissed.”

  She sat and studied the schematic as her crew stood and, without saying a word, filed out of the room. Then, as the door whooshed closed, she picked up her cup of coffee and sipped it, letting the wonderful flavor clear her mind.

  There had to be a way to send this neutron-star monster out into empty space between the galaxies.

  She took another sip and then stood. A few hours before, she had been as excited as a child to be able to watch the coming explosion of a neutron-star binary. Now she was calling it a monster.

  Typical of this galaxy. The most beautiful things were often the most deadly. You just never knew.

  She headed for her office, cup in hand. She had work to do, a solution to find.

  If there was a solution.

  CHAPTER 10

  SEVEN WAS BENT OVER AN ENGINEERING PANEL WHEN Janeway entered. As was typical, Seven didn’t look up or even acknowledge that anyone else was in the room, even though Janeway knew that Seven was very aware of everything that went on around her. She just chose not to react to most of it. Janeway often wished she had the same option and control.

  On the monitor above the panel was the clear image of the revolving neutron stars. They now were so close, and moving so fast, they looked indistinguishable from each other. Faint whiffs of hot plasma were drifting away from the spinning pair along their equatorial plane. Janeway had gotten to the point over the last forty-five minutes that she didn’t want to look at the binary anymore. Yet its deadly beauty kept drawing her to watch it.

  “Any ideas?” Janeway asked, taking her gaze off the monitor and moving up beside Seven to see what she was working on.

  “If you refer to a solution to directing the neutron star’s path, I do not believe a solution is possible. So I have finished the gravitational wave energy containment and tested it. It works within acceptable parameters.”

  At first Janeway wanted to shout at Seven for disobeying her order to work on finding a solution. But she managed to keep her mouth shut as Seven turned back to the panel. Seven, actually, had been obeying orders. It was clear she had worked on the first problem for as long as it took to find the answer—that there was no solution. Then she had continued with Janeway’s first order, to construct an energy containment to harness some of the intense gravitational energy pouring off the neutron star binary in its final hours of life.

  Janeway forced herself to take a deep breath and remember why she had come here to talk to Seven in the first place. She had wanted to run some numbers past her, to confirm
her own findings.

  “Seven,” Janeway said.

  Seven turned back to face her.

  “Let’s just say,” Janeway said, turning and pacing, “that an explosion set off at the appropriate time and spot could quicken the timing of the explosion. Would it be possible to time that explosion in such a way as to direct the runaway neutron star?”

  “Theoretically, yes,” Seven said.

  Janeway nodded. “I came to the same conclusion. And obviously so did the Qavok. But what size explosion would be needed? That’s where I got stumped.”

  “I did not,” Seven said, “as you put it, get stumped.” She keyed in a few numbers on the console and nodded for Janeway to look.

  Janeway could feel her stomach clamping up. That number was even bigger than the one she had first come up with. It would take an extremely powerful explosion to cause any change at all in the neutron binary’s normal course of dying. More firepower than all their phaser and torpedo power focused on one spot at the same instant. Twenty times as much, at least.

  For the first time in a long time, Janeway felt small in comparison with the universe around her. When she’d first gone into space, she’d had that feeling often. But over the last few years they had beaten so many things that she hadn’t really been overwhelmed by the universe in some time.

  Until this moment.

  Outside the ship an event was unfolding that would most likely destroy entire planetary systems and send out enough energy in one huge burst to power all the Federation ships for thousands of years.

  What made her think she could alter such a thing? How had she been so arrogant?

  “I ran a warp-core-breach scenario,” Seven said, her fingers flying over the keyboard. She motioned for Janeway to read the calculations on the screen. “Breaching Voyager’s core against the puffy secondary might provide the energy barely sufficient to change the timing of explosion.”

  It took a moment for Janeway to fully understand what Seven had suggested and then discarded as not feasible. She had run, as if it were a matter of course, a suicide option for the entire ship. And was now reporting it as if it were just another daily log entry.