Behind it hung two freighters from New Dresden, sent in yet another symbolic gesture of reconciliation. They looked like pregnant midwife toads, blistered with bulky refugee pods hanging from their cargo spines, steerage for tens of thousands of passengers on the three-week, forty-light year journey to Septagon for resettlement.
Even Septagon would be uncomfortably close to the shock front, but it was the best relocation center on offer. There was money enough to house and reskill everyone, and a governing polity that actively courted immigration. It would be a chance to draw a line under the incident, to look to the future, and to turn away from the dull despair and the cloud of mourning that had hovered over the station since news of the Zero Incident arrived three and a half years ago. There had been suicides then, and more than one near riot; the station was haunted by a thousand ghosts for every one alive. It was no fit place to raise a child.
Dad and Mum and Jeremy had moved aboard the Long March two days ago, dragging Wednesday along in their glassy-eyed optimistic undertow.
There were holes in the facade, empty figures in the family photograph.
Cousin Jane, Uncle Mark, Grandpa and Grandma weren't coming. At least, not in the living flesh; they were dust now, burned by the godwind that would blow past the station in four days' time.
Harried wardens had shown Wednesday and her family to their deck, corridor, segment, and cell. They had a family space: four sleeping pods and a two-by-three living room with inflatable furniture. It would be home for the voyage. They were to eat in the canteen on Rose Deck, bathe in the communal hygiene unit on Tulip, and count themselves lucky for being alive at all—unlike Mica and her husband, friends and neighbors who'd been home on a month's leave for the first time in five years when the Incident took place.
Within hours, Wednesday had been bored silly. Her plants were dead, her nerve garden shut down for cold storage, and they had been ordered to remain in steerage until after departure, with nothing but the inane prattle of the entertainment net and the ship's lobotomized media repository for company. Some budding genius from New Dresden—a more regimented society than Moscow's—had decided that horror interactives and books were unfit for minors, and slapped a parental control on that section of the database. Her friends—those she counted as friends—were mostly on the other ships. Even Herman had told her he'd be unable to talk after the ship's first jump. It would have been more fun if they'd had cold sleep tankage, but there was no way that the station's facilities could process more than a couple of hundred at a time: so Wednesday was to be a martyr to boredom for the next week.
The only consolation was that she had a whole new world to explore—a starship. She hadn't been on a ship since she was eight, and the itch to put learning into practice was irresistible. Besides, Herman said he knew and could show her the layout of this particular vessel. It was a late-model Backhoe series heavy lifter fabricated in the yards over Burgundy, with life-support superstructure by Thurn und Taxis Pty of New Dresden. It was just a trash hauler—fusion rockets, contrarotating spin wheels—nothing as sophisticated as a momentum transfer unit or grav generators. Its jump module was a sealed unit purchased from someplace where they knew how to make such things; neither Dresden nor Moscow had the level of tech infrastructure necessary to throw naked singularities around. But Herman knew his way around the ship, and Wednesday was bored. So obviously it was time to go exploring; and when she told him, he had some interesting suggestions for where to go.
Wednesday was lousy at staying out of locked rooms. Her second-year tutor had summed it up: "She's like a cat—takes a shut door as a personal insult." She took her pick gun and tablet with her as a matter of course, not out of malice or a desire to burgle, but simply because she couldn't abide not knowing what lay on the far side of a door. (The ship had a double-walled hull, and the only doors that breached into vacuum were airlocks.
Unless she was stupid enough to pick a door with flashing pressure warning lights, heavy gaskets, and mechanical interlocks, she wasn't running any risks. Or so she thought … )
The ship wasn't exactly off-limits to passengers, but she had a feeling her presence would be discouraged if anyone noticed her. So she sneaked up into the central service axis and back down into the crew ring the smart way: sitting on the roof of a powered elevator car, her stiction pads locked to the metal as it swam up the tunnel, decelerating and shedding angular momentum. She rode it up and down twice, searching for ventilation ducts with the aid of a torch, before she made her move. She swam through darkened service shafts, down another tube, hitched a lift on the roof of a passenger car, and surfed all the way into one of the main ventilation bronchi. The maintenance moles in the airflow system left her alone, because she was alive and moving, which was just as well, really. After an hour of hobbiting around in the ducts she was tired and a bit disoriented—and it was then that she came across the filtration hood that Herman had told her to expect.
It sat in the floor of a cramped duct, humming softly to itself, laminar pumps blurring quietly in the twilight. A faint blue glow of ultraviolet lamps shone from the edges. Fascinated, she bent close to inspect it. Sterilizers aboard a star-ship? Only in the life-support system, as a rule. But this was the accommodation deck, so what was it doing here? A quick once-over of the mounting bolts revealed another anomaly—a fine wire leading down through a hole in the floor of the duct. It was obviously an alarm cable. Not the sort of unreliable IR sensor that might be set off by a passing maintenance pig, nor a nerve garden eyeball sensor to be bamboozled by shadows, but an honest old-fashioned burglar alarm! She attacked it with her multitool and the compact maintenance kit she'd acquired a few months ago. Wires were easy—
A minute later she had the filtration hood unbolted and angled up at one side. Dropping an eyeball through was the work of seconds. Her camera-on-a-thread—disguised as a toy spider—swam in dizzy circles, revealing a cramped room, locked inner door, shelves with boxes secured to four of the walls. Purser's office or captain's locker? Wednesday couldn't tell, but it was obviously where they kept the high-value cargo, anything compact that had to be shipped in a safe under lock and key, accessible for inspection during the voyage. Deeds. Share certificates. Papers, orders, DNA samples, cypher keys, the odd rare piece of proprietary software. "Why don't you go look?" a familiar voice prodded her. Herman blinked a schematic behind her eyes. "Observe: according to this original blueprint this room should he part of the Captain's quarters."
"Think I'll find any treasure inside?" asked Wednesday, already looking for an attachment point for her rope. The lure of forbidden fruit was more than she'd ever been able to resist.
Locked doors. A teenage girl going through one of those phases.
Modifications to a standard lifesystem. Stop all the clocks: a star has died.
Blue plastic toy spiders. Confidential orders handwritten on dumb paper.
Invisible playmates. Badge dropped down lift shaft. Respiration stops: the universe holds its breath. And …
THE IRON SUNRISE
IMPACT: T zero
Just outside the expanding light cone of the present a star died, iron-bombed.
Something—some exotic force of unnatural origin—twisted a knot in space, enclosing the heart of a stellar furnace. A huge loop of superstrings twisted askew, expanding and contracting until the core of the star floated adrift in a pocket universe where the timelike dimension was rolled shut on the scale of the Planck length, and another dimension—one of the closed ones, folded shut on themselves, implied by the standard model of physics—replaced it. An enormous span of time reeled past within the pocket universe, while outside a handful of seconds ticked by.
From the perspective of the drifting core, the rest of the universe appeared to recede to infinity, vanishing past an event horizon beyond which it was destined to stay until the zone of expansion collapsed. The blazing ball of gas lit up its own private cosmos, then slowly faded. Time passed, uncountable amounts of time wrapped up in an eyeblink from the perspective of the external universe. The stellar core cooled and contracted, dimming. Eventually a black dwarf hung alone, cooling toward absolute zero. Fusion didn't stop but ran incredibly slowly, mediated by quantum tunneling under conditions of extreme cold. Over a span billions of times greater than that which had elapsed since the big bang in the universe outside, light nuclei merged, tunneling across the high quantum wall of their electron orbitals. Heavier elements disintegrated slowly, fissioning and then decaying down to iron. Mass migrated until, by the end of the process, a billion trillion years down the line, the star was a single crystal of iron crushed down into a sphere a few thousand kilometers in diameter, spinning slowly in a cold vacuum only trillionths of a degree above absolute zero.
Then the external force that had created the pocket universe went into reverse, snapping shut the pocket and dropping the dense spherical crystal into the hole at the core of the star, less than thirty seconds after the bomb had gone off. And the gates of hell opened.
Iron doesn't fuse easily: the process is endothermic, absorbing energy.
When the guts were scooped out of the star and replaced with a tiny cannonball of cold degenerate matter, the outer layers of the star, held away from the core by radiation pressure, began to collapse inward across a gap of roughly a quarter million kilometers of cold vacuum. The outer shell rushed in fast, accelerating in the grip of a stellar gravity well. Minutes passed, and from the outside the photosphere of the star appeared to contract slightly as huge vortices of hot turbulent gas swirled and fulminated across it. Then the hammerblow of the implosion front reached the core …
There was scant warning for the inhabitants of the planet that had been targeted for murder. For a few minutes, star-watching satellites reported an imminent solar flare, irregularities leading to atmospheric effects, aurorae, and storm warnings for orbital workers and miners in the asteroid belt.
Maybe one or two of the satellites had causal channels, limited bandwidth instantaneous communicators, unjammable but expensive and touchy. But there wasn't enough warning to help anyone escape: the satellites simply went off-line one by one as a wave of failure crept outward from the star at the speed of light. In one research institute a meteorologist frowned at her workstation in bemusement, and tried to drill down a diagnostic—she was the only person on the planet who had time to realize something strange was happening. But the satellites she was tracking orbited only three light minutes closer to the star than the planet she lived on, and already she had lost two minutes chatting to a colleague about to go on her lunch break about the price of a house she would never buy now, out on the shore of a bay of lost dreams.
The hammerfall was a spherical shock wave of hydrogen plasma, blazing at a temperature of millions of degrees and compressed until it had many of the properties of metal. A hundred times as massive as the largest gas giant in the star system, by the time it slammed into the crystal of iron at the heart of the murdered star it was traveling at almost 2 percent of lightspeed.
When it struck, a tenth of the gravitational potential energy of the star was converted into radiation in a matter of seconds. Fusion restarted, exotic reactions taking place as even the iron core began to soak up nuclei, building heavier and hotter and less stable intermediaries. In less than ten seconds, the star burned through a visible percentage of its fuel, enough to keep the fires banked for a billion years. There wasn't enough mass in the G-type dwarf to exceed the electron degeneracy pressure in its core, collapsing it into a neutron star, but nevertheless a respectable shock front, almost a hundredth as potent as a supernova, rebounded from the core.
A huge pulse of neutrinos erupted outward, carrying away much of the energy from the prompt fusion burn. The neutral particles didn't usually react with matter; the average neutrino could zip through a light year of lead without noticing. But there were so many of them that, as they sluiced through the outer layers of the star, they deposited a good chunk of their energy in the roiling bubble of foggy plasma that had replaced the photosphere. Not far behind them, a tidal wave of hard gamma radiation and neutrons a billion times brighter than the star ripped through the lower layers, blasting them apart. The dying star flashed a brilliant X-ray pulse like a trillion hydrogen bombs detonating in concert: and the neutrino pulse rolled out at the speed of light.
Eight minutes later—about a minute after she noticed the problem with the flare monitors—the meteorologist frowned. A hot, prickling flush seemed to crawl across her skin, itching: her vision was inexplicably streaked by crawling purple meteors. The desk in front of her flickered and died. She inhaled, smelling the sharp stink of ozone, looked round shaking her head to clear the sudden fog, and saw her colleague staring at her and blinking.
"Hey, I feel like somebody just walked on my grave—" The lights flickered and died, but she had no trouble seeing because the air was alive with an eerie glow, and the small skylight window cast razor-sharp shadows on the floor. Then the patch of floor directly illuminated by the window began to smoke, and the meteorologist realized, fuzzily, that she wasn't going to buy that house after all, wasn't going to tell her partner about it, wasn't ever going to see him again, or her parents, or her sister, or anything but that smoking square of brilliance that was slowly growing as the window frame burned away.
She received a small mercy: mere seconds later the upper atmosphere—turned into an anvil of plasma by the passing radiation pulse—reached the tropopause. Half a minute later the first shock wave leveled her building.
She didn't die alone; despite the lethal dose they all received from the neutrino pulse, nobody on the planet lived past the iron sunrise for long enough to feel the pangs of radiation sickness.