But its death was already written. The researchers had plunged countless probes into the star and they all confirmed that it was beginning the long slow process that would eventually lead to collapse and an explosion. It had nearly burned out all of its fuel and, soon enough, it would die. Paula merely intended to speed the process up astronomically. The star wouldn’t be allowed to turn into a supernova, not when human intervention could turn it into a black hole. It would be much more useful as a black hole, or so she hoped and prayed. The Administrator had made it clear. If she failed today, she would be expelled from the Technical Faction and probably urged to find a whole new career. She had put the fate of the entire Faction on the line.
No one knew if Shiva had once given birth to life-bearing planets, but it only had a pair of companions in its lonely flight, a pair of rocky radiation-blasted worlds orbiting at a safe distance from the planet. There were also a handful of asteroids and comets, but most of them were on the verge of falling into the star or being lost to interstellar space. No one would be interested in the planets, apart perhaps from material for construction work, or a hiding place from hunting starships. It had occurred to her that the reason the star was on such an odd course, perhaps, was that some alien race had turned it into a sublight starship, but a quick scan of the two planets had turned up nothing. They’d both add their mass to the coming black hole.
“Are you sure that this is safe?”
Paula turned to see Chris standing behind her, examining the panel in front of her. She wasn’t quite sure why the Defence Force had insisted on the Footsoldiers remaining with her, unless it was to ensure that she couldn’t run if the experiment failed, although that seemed unlikely. If the star exploded, the starship she was using as a base would have to run before the wavefront of the expanding supernova overwhelmed its shields and vaporised them; the Footsoldiers couldn’t help her escape a supernova. If the Killers arrived — as she expected they would — the Footsoldiers would just be swept away, like flies. They couldn’t help keep her alive.
“I thought you men laughed in the face of danger and dropped ice cubes down the vest of fear,” Paula said, concealing her own fears. The plan had seemed perfection itself when she’d outlined it for the first time, years ago, but now she was on the verge of actually crushing a star down into a black hole, she was unsure. “If you want to leave, I’m sure one of the starships will come in and recover you.”
“I didn’t say that,” Chris said, defensively. “I just wanted to know if this was safe.”
“Not really, no,” Paula admitted. “If everything goes to plan, we should be well-shielded from any display of stellar bad temper. If part of the plan falls apart, we may be in worse trouble than I had thought, particularly if the star goes supernova and blows up underneath us. And if the black hole’s gravity field fluctuates, we might end up being swallowed by the gravity and crushed down to atoms. The warp drive might not be able to get us out in time…”
She smiled. “Any more questions?”
“No,” Chris said, finally. He grinned, suddenly. “I think I’d sooner take my sick leave right now.”
Paula snorted. “Me too, if the truth be told, and this was all my bright idea in the first place,” she said, dryly. She looked back down at the console. The star seemed almost tranquil, with far less activity than some of the more exciting stars in the galaxy, or even a sun-like G2 star. There were no flares or disruptions marring its surface, just a steady level of heat washing out towards the barren planets. “If you want to leave, now is your chance.”
“Get on with it before I have an attack of brains to the head and realise how stupid this is,” Chris growled. “Besides, how many others can say they watched a black hole forming?”
“No one,” Paula said. She pulled up the communications console and checked the location of the Defence Force’s starships. They had been positioned several light years away from Shiva, just for safety, although no one — not even the worrywarts who thought the experiment would go disastrous wrong — could say what there was to worry about. The black hole would, at most, have the mass of the entire system and the insignificant mass of Paula’s starship and the sensor platforms emplaced around the star. It wouldn’t be enough to suck in the Defence Force attack fleet.
The laymen thought of black holes as monsters that swallowed everything that came too close to them, maybe even reaching out towards objects to pull them into the inescapable maw. It didn’t work quite like that, Paula knew; the black hole would start to affect the local gravity background, but the effects wouldn’t be that different from the presence of Shiva itself. As more mass fell into the black hole, it’s gravity pull would increase, but Shiva hadn’t been attracting stellar material for centuries. It wouldn’t turn into a serious threat to the galaxy.
The black hole at the centre of the galaxy would, one day. It had been sucking in material since it had formed and was slowly consuming the galactic core. Paula knew that, uncounted billions of years in the future, it would break out of the core and start pulling in the remainder of the galaxy, but she and perhaps even the human race would be long dead at that point. If the Community survived, they might move to intergalactic space, or maybe by then they would have mastered gravity technology and leaned how to focus gravity beams to dampen the black hole’s gravity field, or tap it for power. It dawned on her, suddenly, that that might be just what the Killers did — they might even be able to tap the core hole for their power supply? It seemed overkill — they already had more power at their disposal than they could possibly require — yet it was doable. Humans might have done it just to prove they could!
She filed her thought quickly, knowing that the MassMind might not be able to accept her personality in time to save her from disaster, and then pushed it out of her mind.
“This is Alpha,” she said, shortly, opening the communications channel. The entire Community — or at least the parts of the Community that weren’t lost in fantasy worlds or trying to reorganise after the Killer blitzkrieg — would be watching over her shoulder. It was a thought she had long since creased to find daunting. She had joined a Footsoldier platoon on a raid into a Killer starship. What could be more terrifying than that? “We are prepared to launch the probe. Stations; sound off.”
One by one, the different automated and manned observation platforms signed in. Paula had argued that only her — and her alone — should watch as the black hole was created, just in case her calculations were spectacularly wrong. The remainder of her staff, the ones who had helped her develop the technique and translated her vision into reality, had refused to leave. So had several eminent scientists who had believed that her plan wouldn’t work — although the Cinder suggested otherwise — and had insisted on watching, probably to expel her personally if it failed. Paula decided that if the star went supernova and killed them all, she wouldn’t mind losing them. The Technical Faction was not supposed to be petty. Science and research were their only gods.
“All right,” Paula said, finally. She keyed a command sequence into the console, and then submitted to a cold mental probe to confirm her identity and orders. She rarely used such precautions — they left her with a headache and a sense of violation — but there was little choice; they had been ordered to take every precaution they could, against threats that even the Defence Force had found hard to specify. Paula doubted that they needed to worry about the Killers reading their files — no one had found any trace of Killer files on the captured ship — but the precautions made sense. If it was the only way she got to put her theory into practice, she would live with it. “The probe will launch in ten seconds. Good luck to us all.”