Through layer after layer of thickening plasma I dove, straight to Sheol’s heart, where the subatomic particles were packed more densely than any metal could ever be. Down and down into the depths of hell where not even atoms could exist and remain whole, deeper still I beat my way past wave after wave of pure gamma energy and pulses of neutrinos, down to the hardening core of the star where heavy nuclei were creating temperatures and pressures that they themselves could no longer withstand.
There I released all the energy that had been pent up in me, like driving a knife into the heart of an ancient, dreaded enemy. Like putting to rest a soul tormented by endless cancerous suffering.
Sheol exploded. And I died.
Chapter 31
It was at that final moment of utter devastation, with the star exploding from the energy that I had directed into its heart, that I realized how much more the Creators knew than I did.
I died. In that maelstrom of unimaginable violence I was torn apart, the very atoms of what was once my body ripped asunder, their nuclei blasted into strange ephemeral particles that flared for the tiniest fraction of a second and then reverted ghostlike into pure energy.
Yet my consciousness remained. I felt all the pains of hell as Sheol exploded not merely once, but again and again.
Time collapsed around me. I hung in a spacetime stasis, bodiless yet aware, while the planets spun around the Sun with such dizzying speed they became blurs, streaks, near circles of colored lights, brilliant pinwheels whirling madly as they reflected the golden glory of the central sun.
I watched millions of years unfold before my godlike vision. Without a corporeal body, without eyes, the core of my being, the essential pattern of intelligence that is me inspected minutely the results of Sheol’s devastation.
With some surprise I realized that I had not completely destroyed the star. It was too small to explode into a supernova, the kind of titanic star-wrecking cataclysm that leaves nothing afterward except a tiny pulsar, a fifty-mile-wide sphere of neutrons. No, Sheol’s explosion had been the milder kind of disaster that Earthly astronomers would one day call a nova.
Disaster enough.
The first explosion blew off the outer layers of the star. Sheol flared with a sudden brilliance that could be seen a thousand light-years away. The star’s outer envelope of gas blew away into space, engulfing its single planet Shaydan in a hot embrace of death.
On that bleak and dusty world the sky turned so bright that it burned everything combustible on the surface of the planet. Trees, brush, grasses, animals all burst into fire. But the flames were quickly snuffed out as the entire atmosphere of Shaydan evaporated, blown off into space by the sudden intense heat. What little water there was on the planet’s surface was boiled away immediately.
The burning heat reached into the underground corridors that the Shaydanians had built beneath their cities. Millions of the reptilians died in agony, their lungs scorched and charred. Within seconds all the air was sucked away and those few who escaped the heat suffocated, lungs bursting, eyes exploding out of their heads. The oldest, biggest patriarchs died in hissing, screeching agony. As did the youngest, smallest of their clones.
Rocks melted on the surface of Shaydan. Mountains flowed into hot lava, then quickly cooled into vast seas of glass. The planet itself groaned and shuddered under the stresses of Shed’s eruption. All life was cleansed from its rocky, dusty surface. The underground cities of Shaydan held only charred corpses, perfectly preserved for the ages by the hard vacuum that had killed even the tiniest microbes on the planet.
And that was only the first explosion of Sheol.
Thousands of years passed in an eyeblink. Millions flew by in the span of a heartbeat. Not that I had physical eyes or heart, but the eons swept by like an incredibly rapid stop-motion film as I watched from my godlike perch in spacetime.
Sheol exploded again. And again. The Creators were not content to allow the star to remain. Bolts of energy streaked in from deep interstellar space to reach into the heart of Sheol and tear at it like a vulture eating at the innards of its chained victim.
Each explosion released a pulse of gravitational energy that cracked the planet Shaydan the way a sledgehammer cracks a rock. I saw quakes rack that dead airless world from pole to pole, gigantic fissures split its surface from one end to another.
Finally Shaydan broke apart. As Sheol exploded yet again the planet split asunder in the total silence of deep space—just as its reptilian inhabitants had always been silent, I thought.
Suddenly the solar system was filled with projectiles whizzing about like bullets. Some of them were the size of small planets, some the size of mountains. I watched, fascinated, horrified, as these fragments ran into one another, exploding, shattering, bouncing away only to smash together once more. And they crashed into the other planets as well, pounding red Mars and blue Earth and its pale battered moon.
One oblong mass of rock blasted through the thin crust of Mars, its titanic explosion liquefying the underlying mantle, churning up oceans of hot lava that streamed across that dead world’s face, igniting massive volcanoes that spewed dust and fire and smaller rocks that littered half the surface of the planet. Rivers of molten lava dug deep trenches across thousands of miles. Volcanic eruptions vomited lava and pumice higher than the thin Martian atmosphere.
I turned my attention to Earth.
The explosions of Sheol by themselves made little impact on the earth. With each nova pulse of the dying star the night skies of Earth glowed with auroras from pole to equator as subatomic particles from Sheol’s exploding plasma envelope hit the planet’s protective magnetic field and excited the ionosphere. The gravitational pulses that eventually wrecked Shaydan had no discernable effect on Earth; the nearly four hundred million miles’ distance between Sheol and Earth weakened the gravitational waves to negligible proportions.
But the fragments of Shaydan, the remains of that dead and shattered world, almost killed all life on Earth.
A million-year rain of fire sent thousands of stone and metal fragments from Shaydan plunging into Earth’s skies. Most were mere pebbles that burned up high in the atmosphere, brief meteors that eventually sifted down to Earth’s surface as invisible motes of dust. But time and again larger remnants of Shaydan would be caught by Earth’s gravity well and pulled down to the planet’s surface in fiery plunges that lit whole continents with their roaring, thundering passages.
Time and again pieces of rock and metal would punch through Earth’s tortured air, howling like all the fiends of hell, to pound the surface with tremendous explosions. Like billions of hydrogen bombs all exploding at once, each of these giant meteors blasted the planet hard enough to rock it on its axis.
Where they hit dry ground, they spewed up continent-sized clouds of dust that rose beyond the stratosphere and then spread darkness across half the world, blocking out sunlight for weeks.
Where they hit the sea, they rammed through the thin layer of crustal rocks underlying the oceans and broke into the molten-hot mantle beneath. Centuries-long geysers of steam rose from such impact sites, clouding over the sunlight even more than the dust clouds of the ground impacts.
Temperatures plummeted all around the world. At the once-temperate poles, salt water froze into ice. Sea levels dropped worldwide and large shallow inland seas dried up altogether. The shallow-water creatures who had lived in and around those seas perished; delicate algae and immense duckbills alike died away, deprived of their habitats.
More of Shaydan’s fragments pounded down on Earth, breaking through the crustal rocks, triggering massive earthquakes as fissures the length of the planet widened, chains of new volcanoes thundered, and whole continents split apart. I saw the birth of the Atlantic Ocean and watched it spread, shouldering Eurasia and Africa apart from the Americas.