And if it wasn’t for the damned war, we could do so much more here, she thought, looking at the holo that showed a large scale representation of this section of the Perseus Arm. They could have rallied a true rescue mission, thousands of ships lifting most of the population of this world and relocating them to safe planets. And that damned time bomb keeps ticking away. How long do we have? I guess that Lewis will give us that answer.
Chapter Five
A supernova is probably the most interesting thing in this Universe that can kill you.
Dr. Larry Southard.
JULY 15TH, 1000. D-355.
“I really don’t like getting so close to this thing, Captain,” said Commander Stephanie Harrison, the Exec of the LC Merriwether Lewis.
“You and me both, Ms. Harrison,” agreed Captain Walther Huang, staring at the holo of the bright blue ball that was centered within the viewer.
From a distance it had looked so peaceful. From their current vantage of thirteen light minutes, with the star on high magnification, it looked anything but. Huge prominences rose from the star, arcing millions of kilometers out into space to, mostly, fall back onto the surface of the stellar body in great splashes that could swallow scores of Jovian worlds. Each flare would have totally destroyed a terrestrial world that got in its way. But there were no worlds that close in to the star. The few planets it had were further out, the closest over a hundred million kilometers, and entirely covered in either molten rock or superhot gas. None of those worlds would be given a chance to cool, to become something of use to the intelligent species of the Galaxy.
“The star masses approximately twenty eight Sols,” stated Lt. Commander Christi M’tumbo from her sensor station, using the term for stellar mass based on that of the sun that mankind had evolved near. “Running close in spectrograph now.”
The Captain nodded as he looked at the tactical holo. Their own ship sat at over two hundred and forty million kilometers from the surface of the inferno, electromag shields on full, the supermetal radiator surfaces facing away from the star radiating furiously, trying to relieve the ship of the heat being sucked in from the superhot body. And in closer, at one hundred million kilometers, arranged in an equidistant formation around the periphery of the stars, blinked the icons of the probes Lewis had deployed.
“Data coming in and correlating now,” stated the Sensor Officer. “The star is definitely into the last stages of carbon burning. Program estimates neon burning will commence in four months.”
“We need a better name than ‘the star’ for this thing,” said the Captain, looking at the numbers coming up on his side holo from the sensor station.
“How about Big Bastard,” suggested the XO. “It fits,” she continued as the Captain sent her a questioning glance. “It’s certainly big, and it’s going to be a bastard when it blows.”
“OK,” said the Captain with a smile. “Big Bastard it is.”
“The star, I mean Big Bastard,” said M’tumbo with an embarrassed smile, “will start burning oxygen in seven months. Silicon four months after. The core will start accumulating iron in approximately three hundred and fifty days.”
“And then she blows,” said the Exec in a hushed voice.
And then she blows, agreed the Captain in his thoughts. And six months later the radiation wave strikes a world with billions of sentient inhabitants and wipes them out. The Captain shook his head at the thought. If it had been a time of peace, the Empire might have been able to rally an effort that would have save most of that population. But, engaged as they were in a war of survival, they just didn’t have the resources to spare. We might get out a couple of million, out of what? Six billion plus.
“Sir,” said M’tumbo, excitement in her voice. “I have an anomaly here. Make that several of them.”
The Captain walked quickly over to her station to look down on the holo. There was an object there, almost completely black against the background fury of the star. And nothing to give it scale.
The Sensor Officer adjusted to take, lowering the background brightness, firming up the image. What appeared was a globe with numerous spiked projections on its surface. He looked over at the tactical holo, finding a dozen of the objects arranged around Big Bastard, sitting about sixty million kilometers from the roiling surface.
“How big is that thing?” asked the Captain as M’tumbo started sending radar and lidar beams toward it.
“It will take about eight point eight minutes for a return,” stated M’tumbo, looking up at her Captain.
“It takes what it takes,” agreed Huang, staring at the object, trying to will the information to appear sooner than allowed by the laws of physics. That never works, thought the Captain, a natural explorer who wanted to know, and know now.
“Getting the feed from active sensors now,” said M’tumbo as the information started scrolling across a screen at her station. She hit a panel, and the info appeared on the main holo.
That big, thought the Captain in surprise. Not the biggest thing in the known Universe. That would have to be the Donut. But big enough.
Each of the objects was over fifty kilometers in diameter. Except for the protrusions, the surface was completely featureless. With one exception.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“It does look like an opening, sir,” agreed the Sensor Officer. “Most probably to some kind of a hangar.”
“It looks big enough for the Lewis to enter,” said the Exec from CIC.
“I want a team to go to the nearest structure and check it out,” said the Captain, looking at the object. Which could contain tech we desperately need. “Pick the people, and let’s get a look at this thing.”
* * *
Lt. Commander Chadrick Balasubramanian kept his eyes focused on the viewer as the shuttle was on final approach to the artifact. Commander Bala, as he was known to the engineering crew, was the obvious fit for commanding his mission, with his specialty in engineering, and degrees in the mechanical and electrical aspects of the discipline. Add to that an interest in ancient civilizations, and he was perfect for this mission.
But I sure don’t like getting this close to this furnace, he thought, his eyes taking in the bloated form of the blue giant that back dropped the structure. He knew it wasn’t supposed to blow for about a year. Intellectually he knew that. But deep down in his lower animal emotions he cringed with terror that the stellar furnace might blow at any minute, converting all that he was to glowing atoms tossed about on the supernova wind.
“It’s damned hot already,” said Warrant Officer First Debra Conner, the pilot of the shuttle. “Big Bastard is really putting out the ergs. I can’t wait till we’re in the shadow of that thing.”
“Won’t make any difference,” said Bala, shaking his head. “The whole object has to be hotter than hell, if it’s sat out here for as long as we think it has.”
“Temperature readings on the outer surface of the object put it at four degrees above absolute zero,” said the Pilot with a smile.
“That’s impossible,” said Bala, looking to his own screen to verify what she had said. Unless it’s real. He thought over what he knew about thermodynamics. The star had been pumping heat into that object for how long? Thousands of years? Enough time to raise the temperature of the entire object to tens of thousands of degrees. Even if the surface away from the stars was made of supermetal radiators, the temperature coming off of it would still be in the tens of thousands of degrees. But it was just above the ambient temperature of the space between the stars.
“So we might just freeze to death,” he said aloud, mostly talking to himself. “Wonderful.”
Actually, it was not as bad as burning to death when the heat of the star overwhelmed the cooling systems of the battle armor suits. A frozen body could actually be reanimated with nanotech. A body reduced to ash could not. Still, his mission parameters called for checking out anything unusual, on an object that was unusual in its own right.
&nbs
p; “Let’s see what’s in there,” he told his Pilot. “Get us into the shadow of the object, and we’ll send a probe in to check it out.”
It took some minutes for a slow approach to the object. When they had entered its shadow the shuttle began to lose heat at a prodigious rate through its own supermetal radiators. One of the true wonders of modern tech, supermetals were a series of elements high up on the periodic table, inhabiting an island of stability among neighbors that only lasted in the microseconds before decaying to lesser substances. But the supers, s-iron, s-gold and s-platinum, had half lives in the hundreds of years, and had the wondrous properties of being super superconductors of all forms of energy. They made possible the inertial compensators that allowed fragile beings to travel in vessels accelerating at multiple hundreds of gravities, converting inertia to heat, then radiating it out into space at an almost unbelievable rate. And, since they had to be made in industrial processes that used up entire moons and planets as heat sinks, there was never enough of them for every need. But there were enough in this shuttle to let it quickly download heat into an environment that was much colder than the vessel.
“Launching probe, now,” called out Conner, hitting a lit up panel on her board.
The probe, a meter long robotic craft bristling with sensors, dropped from the open bay of the shuttle and boosted at a gentle ten gravities toward the entrance of the object. Halfway there it reversed its drive, until it floated to a stop just outside the opening, its passive sensors questing for every bit of information they could find.
“There’s no appreciable energy being radiated by the object,” said Conner, watching the take from the probe on multiple holos. “Heat just above absolute zero, five Kelvin.”
“Go to actives,” ordered Bala. “I want to see what’s in there before I let the probe poke its nose into whatever’s waiting.”
Conner nodded and sent the commands to the probe. Images started to form on the holos as the takes from lidar and radar came back. But they were very distorted images, without the clarity one would expect from active sensors. “Something seems to be absorbing most of the active sensors’ energy,” said Conner, adjusting the gain.
“Send it in,” ordered the Commander. “We’ll see what its visual sensors can tell us.”
Conner nodded again, then maneuvered the probe inward with a small joystick set on her board. Its cameras could see in all spectrums, but it was also radiating energy out on all those spectrums to give its sensors something to see by.
The opening was about four hundred meters wide, and extended into the object at least two kilometers uninterrupted. At the end it widened somewhat, forming a round chamber two kilometers in circumference. A featureless round chamber, as far as any of the returns from the probe could indicate.
“Move it around the chamber,” ordered Bala.
Conner began moving the probe around, getting with ten meters of the wall, then moving around, active sensors on full.
“What are we looking for?” asked the Pilot.
“An opening,” replied Bala. “Of any kind.”
Conner grunted and set the probe on a search pattern that would cover every surface of the chamber, eventually. Bala sat and waited in his own seat, watching as the probe covered square meter after square meter of the surface.
“I think we have something here,” said Conner, as the probe stopped in front of a wall section that looked no different than any other. “Look here,” said Conner, zooming in the holo. “The consistency of this line here is slightly different. Like a nanoseal.” The line went upward for a couple of meters, then took a right turn.
Bala nodded. He was familiar with nanoseals, which were widely used in Imperial tech. Where there was a door, the added strength of nanites sealing the materials of the hatch and surrounding hull made it almost one piece. The nanites could open the bonds in an instant when wanted or needed, making the door seem to appear out of nowhere while opening quickly. It was also used to make armored suits much more internally sturdy, eliminating the weakness of seams. And it seemed that the aliens used a similar process.
“Try different forms of radiation into that area,” ordered the Assistant Engineer. “Send it in varying patterns, and let’s see if we can get this thing to open up.”
They tried that for almost twenty minutes before something happened.
“Something is impacting on the probe, sir,” said Conner, punching some lighted panels on her board.
“What kind of something?”
“Energy all across the spectrum, being beamed into the probe from several sources around the surface of the chamber. A lot of radio waves.” The Pilot hit another panel and the sound of the waves filled the cockpit.
“Can you translate it?” asked Bala.
“I can’t even figure out the algorithm they're using for their signal. Without that, they could be sending a full tridee movie, and I wouldn’t know. But if I had to guess, they’re trying to warn us away.”
“I want to see inside this thing, so I’m going to ignore that warning,” said Bala, his curiosity getting the better of him. “I want a full power laser along that line. If we can’t burn through, at least we should be able to generate some outgasing we can collect for sampling.”
“Are you sure, sir?” asked the Pilot, giving the Engineer a nervous look.
“I’m sure. Now do it.”
Conner nodded and punched in the commands for the probe. They were close enough to the object that there was no appreciable delay in the probe receiving the command, or in their getting its take. “Probe laser is impacting the line,” said Conner, even though there was really nothing to see. Which in and of itself was notable, since any metal gas coming off the target would have made the beam visible.
“Increasing power,” said Conner, looking back at her leader to see if he might change his mind. “At full power.”
“Run through different frequencies,” order Bala. It’s like those constructs on the planet. We haven’t been able to touch them with anything we have. But they also didn’t react to us at all while we were trying to get samples.
The holo died, and Bala gave Conner a questioning look.
“We’re not getting any signal from the probe, sir,” she said, checking all of her links, sending new commands to the probe. “Nothing. If I had to guess, the probe is no longer intact. It warned us, we ignored it, and it took action.”
“Send in the other probe,” said Bala after a moment’s thought.
“You sure you want to do that, sir?”
“Do it. We’ll just observe this time around, and see if it will let us stay if we mind our manners.”
Conner launched the second probe, and they watched as it went through the entire approach process and disappeared into the object. And then the signal died.
“I would say that we are no longer welcome, sir,” she told the Engineer.
Bala cursed under his breath and stared at the large object, whose purpose he was no closer to figuring out than when he first saw it. “Gather as much information as you can on passives for the next twenty minutes, then take us back to the Lewis.”
“Only passives, sir?”
“I don’t want to piss it off anymore. I may be impatient at times, but my momma didn’t raise an idiot.”
Chapter Six
Sometimes we find things in our explorations that make us sit up and think. We believe we’re the big dogs in space, but sometimes something comes along to prove us wrong.
Captain Stafford Singh, Exploration Command.
SEPTEMBER 5TH, 1000. D-304.
So, what’s the connection between those big constructs in orbit around Big Bastard and the things on the planet, thought Captain Albright. She knew there had to be one. Otherwise, it would be the most unlikely coincidence in the history of space exploration. Both were large, both seemed to be all but indestructible, and the same number of objects occupied both locations. And we don’t have a clue as to what they do.
She pushed that thought away, something that she wanted to spend more time on, to work on a subject that was not close to her heart. Dealing with these damned natives. I almost wish we could just boost out of here and leave them to their own devices. But that was not an option. Her directives were clear. The primary purpose of the command was to explore, to discover, to advance science, to advance the Empire. But running a strong second was the directive of to help other alien races in need. And one about to be wiped out by a nearby supernova was definitely one in need.
Just their bad luck that their primary got caught up in the gravity of the blue giant five thousand years ago. Her historians had been looking over the records of the Klassekians. The blue star had appeared in the sky about five thousand years before, when the first civilizations on the planet had started on the road of astronomical observation. The blue approached and swung the primary into a far orbit of between six and eight light months. Not enough to endanger the primary in the short term, but not allowing it to escape either. It was just their fate to be pulled along behind a ticking time bomb.
And these damned fools just won’t cooperate, and I don’t have enough people to do everything I need to do to start their evacuation. She looked at a report on her holo from her com section, detailing the increase in broadcasts calling for the eviction of the humans. Rumors abounded that the Imperials were here to kidnap their people, to use them for some unknown project involving dangerous labor, or for biological experiments. Hysterical stuff.
“Ma’am,” came the call over the com. “We’re picking up hyper translations from VII down to VI. Two objects in the eight million ton range, and three much smaller.”
“Resonances?”
“They’re ours, ma’am. No doubt about it. ETA to normal space, three and a half hours.”
After a moment’s thought the Captain switched the link to her com officer
Exodus: Machine War: Book 1: Supernova. Page 7