The star began to shrink, a process that was soon going to end in its destruction. Priority alerts automatically triggered deep within the navigational complex of a coreship that had only just materialized in the outer reaches of the Night's End system. The coreship was still busy decelerating, its guidance systems directing it towards a cluster of mining habitats orbiting a gas giant called Bluegas, three light-hours out from Night's End's sun.
Lines of communication throughout the system were pushed to capacity as the news leaked out that something was happening to the sun. The neutrino burst caused by the initial phase change had been detected, but its significance was understood only by the Shoal-members dwelling within the coreship's central ocean.
The coreship changed course, using the gas giant's gravity to help boost it outwards, as it once more began to accelerate. The drive spines jutting from its surface began the long recharging process, but it was still going to be some time before it would be ready to boost back out of the system. The Queen of Immortal Light received the first reports of unusual solar activity not long after the first neutrino pulse had been detected.
Senior Court Adviser Dampened Woodsmoke was at hand while the Queen had been resting in an antechamber next to the birthing chamber. She had recently dismissed the court attendants who had been preparing her for a state ceremony – the promotion of a new batch of Hive Administrators – but instead now found herself embroiled in constant communication with a dozen different military, scientific and intelligence specialists scattered across the entire system.
The news was appalling. She had taken an enormous risk by dealing with the Emissaries, and now her entire Hive was going to have to pay a price more terrible than she could possibly have imagined.
She became aware that Woodsmoke was still waiting patiently on the scaffold next to her enormous head.
'Where are my proxies?' she demanded. The five royal proxies meant survival for the Hive in some form, if nothing else. She still couldn't quite believe what her most trusted scientific advisers were now telling her.
'Four are in the inner system – all except the Scion Amber Rust. She just returned to Night's End on board a coreship making a scheduled stop.' Woodsmoke paused before continuing. 'There are reports that the coreship hasn't begun its routine deceleration and is blocking all incoming comms traffic. Based on what we know now, it's almost certainly intending to escape our system before… well, before our sun goes nova.'
The Queen stared up at the high windows of her chamber. She had never been able to fly; no Queen could. Their wings were vestigial, even in youth, leaving them utterly dependent on their subjects. The afternoon light cast shadows on the chamber's pale walls, then darkened briefly as clouds passed in front of the traitorous sun. She could see the peaks of the great Hive Towers of Darkwater, some of which dated from the earliest days of settlement.
All gone, just minutes from now.
'Nominate the Scion Amber Rust to assume full duties as Queen of Immortal Light, effective immediately – priority transmission and encryption. I also want a separate, equal priority transmission sent to my sister instantly. I ask that, in the name of filial loyalty, she extend the hand of friendship and support to the new ruler of Immortal Light.' Not that there's going to be much left for the proxy to rule.
She peered across at her Adviser. 'You understand how important this is?'
'I do.'
The Queen watched as the Adviser departed in order to make the final arrangements.
So simple, so quick; the work of millennia undone utterly in a few short hours.
At least she wouldn't have to mourn for long. Or suffer the knowledge that her sister had won an admittedly pyrrhic victory. Six hours later, the delicate balance between the star's energy and its gravitation seesawed out of control, and in a fraction of a second it shrank before releasing almost all of its energy in one single cataclysmic blast.
A second neutrino burst heralded the star's death. Seven billion years' worth of stored solar energy was released at once, sending a shockwave of plasma spreading out through the densely populated system at a quarter of the speed of light. When the star detonated, the coreship was already deep into its gravity slingshot past Bluegas. The crew picked up and intercepted tach-net traffic from inner-system probes and satellites that hadn't yet been wiped out. From the point of view of the habitats orbiting Bluegas, the sun was as tiny, serene and distant as ever. But their days were numbered regardless.
The coreship's crew made their calculations: the main shock-wave would reach them in just under twelve hours' time. They endured a barrage of queries and threats from Bluegas's orbital habitats; the Bandati there already knew something was happening, but just what, they weren't being told.
There was no time to decelerate, to rescue any of the inhabitants of those habitats. The time needed to pick up refugees would seal the fate not only of the coreship, but of an onboard population numbering in the millions. The shockwave reached Ironbloom within a few minutes, superheating the atmosphere on the sunwards-facing side to just shy of a hundred thousand degrees centigrade. Storms of a kind unseen since the planet's formation ground the Hive Towers of Darkwater to dust, while secondary shockwaves moving at hypersonic speeds spread the destruction to the planet's night-side, annihilating anything standing more than a few metres above the ground.
Before very long, Ironbloom's atmosphere was torn away like peel from an orange. Superheated particles that had once been the towers, mountains, rivers and oceans of Night's End were caught up in the shockwave and carried further out towards the rest of the dying system.
Further out, the gas giant Dusk was far larger than the rocky inner worlds, and so took a lot longer to die. When its moon, Blackflower, finally emerged from its parent's shadow, it was burning with a bright incandescence. Hundreds of ships from the cities orbiting the moon tried to escape by driving hard towards the outer system, while staying as long as possible within Dusk's cone of shadow. But even that was shrinking as the gas giant's atmosphere was stripped away at an accelerating pace. The coreship had finished its close pass of Bluegas and was already swinging outwards once more on an arc tangential to the expanding nova. As communications traffic first from Dusk and then from spacecraft and habitats further and further out failed, it became clear that time was running out.
Twelve hours after the nova drone had first torn out the brightly burning heart of Night's End, the plasma shockwave finally reached Bluegas. Two of its moons, composed primarily of compacted rock and ice, were the first to go; the shockwave's temperature had dropped exponentially by the time it had travelled this far, but it was still many times hotter than the surface of the star that birthed it.
Bluegas's densely populated orbital cities winked out of existence one after another, like fireflies coming too close to an open fire. The nearby coreship had barely finished powering up its drive spines when the shockwave reached it a few moments later. Within a few hours, news of the destruction of an entire, heavily populated system began to spread. Reports, pictures and rumours flooded the open tach-nets. Within the Consortium itself most of the initial stories were dismissed as fabrications, but it wasn't long before it became clear that communications out of the Night's End system had come to an abrupt halt.