Galactic Corps. Ian Douglas
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GMT
“Minus three … two … one … mark!” The AI’s voice in Alexander’s mind said, counting off the last seconds. If Bloodlight had indeed gone nova, the shock wave should just now have reached the stargate. Depending on how the gate was tuned, the blast could pass through an open gate, emerging from another gate light years away.
That didn’t appear to be the case this time, however. Four Xul hunterships were drifting just in front of the Carson Space gate, wreathed in lances of plasma and detonating nuclear and antimatter warheads. But nothing had emerged from the other side, no light, no hard radiation.
Had something gone wrong over there?
It was entirely possible that red dwarf stars were simply too low-mass for a Euler triggership to affect. That had always been one of the possibilities, one of the dangers of this mission.
Or perhaps the triggerships had been delayed.
There was no way to tell, not from this side of the gate, or at least not until another battlespace drone emerged to update the combatnet.
One of the four Xul hunterships in the kill zone, a Type I newly emerged from the gate, was beginning to break up under the hellacious, focused bombardment. Under the concentrated fire of every capital ship of the MIEF, even a kilometer-long Xul warship couldn’t hold up for long. A portion of the needle-sharp prow broke away, spinning rapidly end over end. The rest of the Xul vessel was beginning to crumple, and intense radiation was bathing the area. The black hole inside its engineering spaces must have broken free, and was now eating its way through the Xul ship’s bowels.
But the Xul ships were firing back, sending a storm of laser energy and plasma bolts back at their tormentors. Three destroyers, Foster, Johnson, and Mevernen, had been destroyed just within the past couple of minutes, and the light cruiser Yorktown had been badly damaged, savaged by a concentrated volley of Xul weaponry. Now the heavy cruiser Maine was coming under fire, staggering as high-velocity mass-driver rounds slammed into her in a devastating fusillade.
The Commonwealth vessels continued firing, however, with unrelenting determination. As Alexander watched, the hull of the Type I twisted and dwindled, falling in upon itself. There was a final flash of radiation, from visible light through X-ray and gamma wavelengths … and then there was nothing remaining but drifting debris.
“Target Alpha destroyed!” someone called over the tactical net. “Pour it on, people!”
Two more Xul ships, another Type I and a Type II, were receiving the brunt of the expeditionary force’s fire now. The fourth of the group, a Type II, was limping now after receiving a barrage of antimatter warheads across its dorsal surface, with streams of hot gas gushing from several gaping rents in its hull and freezing almost immediately into clouds of glittering ice crystals. It appeared to be trying to reverse course back through the gate.
“Let Charlie go,” Taggart’s voice said over the net, identifying the retreating vessel. “Concentrate on Bravo and Delta.”
Bravo, the Type I, was starting to come apart under the heavy barrage, but it was also accelerating now, pushing deeper into Carson Space. A suicide attack? Or simply a breakdown in communications on board the stricken vessel? The Commonwealth firing line tracked it, continuing to pour fire into its shuddering, crumbling hull. It swept past the PanEuropean gunboat Delacroix at a range of less than ten kilometers. Delacroix’s turrets spun as they followed the Xul warship, slamming round after round of nano-D shells into the enemy’s flank.
Alexander had strongly protested the integration of the PE, Chinese, and Russian squadrons into what was supposed to be a Commonwealth naval-Marine expeditionary force, but the Commonwealth Senate had been … insistent, primarily because of the high losses among the Commonwealth forces over the past few years. Opposed or not, Alexander believed in delivering praise when it was appropriate. He made a mental note to mention Delacroix’s deadly accurate fire when he composed his after-action report.
Assuming he survived to write it, of course. If the star next door had not gone nova, 1MIEF would shortly be in very serious trouble.
AS Squadron 16, Shadow Hawks,
Cluster Space
0731 hrs, GMT
Something had happened to the red dwarf. That much was clear simply through the Wyvern’s optical inputs. But the effect was not what Lee had been expecting.
Within the past several seconds, the star had visibly grown much brighter. Lee’s radiation sensors were off-line, but she suspected there was a strong UV, X-ray, and gamma component to the brightening as well, enough to give some teeth to that flare of visible light.
The increase in energy was more gradual than it should have been, however. Xul ships appeared now in sharp relief between their sunlit and shadowed surfaces, but their hulls weren’t softening and melting, weren’t boiling away under the assault.
Lee knew from the pre-mission briefings that there was a chance the local star could not be triggered into going nova. Like other typical red dwarfs, the local star was comparatively low-mass—about twenty percent the mass, in this case, of Earth’s sun. In nature, only massive stars could go nova, and traditional novae were thought to occur only in binary star systems, when matter from one star fell into the other. The Euler triggerships, moving within a bubble of sharply warped space, distorted the core of a star as they passed through, inducing a rebound effect, it was thought, that generated an explosion of the star’s core. The question was whether a red dwarf, which could be anywhere from forty percent down to about eight percent of the mass of Earth’s sun, could be physically induced to explode. There’d been talk of testing the theory on a red dwarf within Commonwealth space before actually launching this raid, but the thought of blowing up a star, even a tiny one, simply to test theory had been too much for a majority of the members of the Commonwealth Senate. The request, put through by 1MIEF’s science team, had been denied.
Still, it should have worked. Red dwarfs were smaller and cooler than other stars on the main sequence, but they were still stars, working fusion magic in the transformation of hydrogen to helium. There was another consideration as well. The Cluster Space sun was not a typical halo star—one of the thin haze of extremely ancient, cool red stars surrounding the Galaxy, but must instead be a straggler from the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Its lone attendant planet proved that much. Stars from inside the Galaxy—Population I stars, as they’d been designated since the 20th Century—possessed heavier elements besides the usual stellar components of hydrogen and helium and therefore could form planetary systems. They were considered to be metal-rich, the word metal in this instance referring to any element heavier than helium whether it was chemically considered to be a metal or not. Population II stars, the halo stars surrounding the Galaxy, were ancient survivals from an earlier galactic epoch; without heavy elements in their make-up, they couldn’t form planets.
The spectrum of the Cluster Space dwarf showed lots of carbon. Likely, Bloodlight possessed a core of carbon, a by-product of stellar fusion that must have been accumulating for tens of billions of years. The MIEF science teams felt that the rebound effect within a carbon core should result in the detonation of a nova—at least a small one—despite the star’s low mass.
Lee watched the star for a full minute, looking through her cockpit’s transparency with her naked eyes, now, rather than using the Wyvern’s electronic feed. Despite the increase in overall brightness, she could look directly into that ruby spark without discomfort, without her helmet’s optics dialing down to preserve her vision.
Possibly what had been triggered was a stellar flare; red dwarfs, especially small ones, often were unstable enough in their radiation output to earn the name flare stars. Such stars—Proxima Centauri, just 4.3 light years from Sol, was such a star—could increase in brightness by as much as two or three hundred percent, in some cases.
Whatever