The countdown seemed to take hours. “Probe launching,” she said. The torpedo fell away from its position under the starship. “Probe launched. We have impact with stellar atmosphere in two minutes.”
“Gosh,” Chris commented. “This is exciting.”
“Shut up,” Paula said, throwing him a sharp look. “I am bringing the probe’s warp field online… now.”
The probe’s icon changed rapidly. “Power levels remain constant,” Paula added, hearing the note of relief in her voice. If the probe’s power systems had failed, the best that would happen would be a complete failure. The worst would be a supernova as the warp field collapsed and destabilised the star. “We’re in business.”
There was a long pause. “The probe is now entering the star,” she said, finally. She had a sudden mental image of a needle penetrating a balloon and fought down the urge to giggle. God alone knew what would happen if this entered the Community’s standard procedures. The Technical Factions had all kinds of ideas. They could use the process to create rare elements, elements unobtainable outside a supernova, or even mine the gas once it had cooled off after being blown out of a star. It was industrial work on a grand scale, a sign of what humanity could do, after the Killers were defeated. “The warp field is remaining consistent and stable.”
Chris was suddenly beside her, peering over her shoulder. “How are you still getting a signal from it?”
“Quantum entanglement,” Paula said, slowly. “There’s nothing else that will work in such conditions, even gravity-wave transmissions. If the probe is lost, we’ll have the telemetry to tell us what happened to it.”
The mass of the probe was steadily increasing as it flew deeper into the star. “And even if the probe is lost after another forty minutes, the process should be impossible to reverse, or even to destabilise and create a supernova,” she added. On impulse, she reached out and gave him a hug. He pulled her into his arms and they shared a long embrace. “And now…”
Deep within the star, the probe was slowly falling towards the stellar core. It was cool, as stars went, but a human or even a Killer starship would have vaporised instantly. The probe, wrapped in its protective warp field, barely noticed the heat; it was too busy creating a gravity field at the core. As it sucked in atoms from the star, its gravity field grew stronger, pulling in more and more atoms. The process was accelerating even as Paula broke the embrace and checked the console. The star was on the verge of collapsing, either into a supernova or a black hole.
“We’re picking up gravity waves,” Paula said, as the starship rocked slightly. “The star is being compressed into a ball.”
A supernova bomb would have released all the energy, triggering a supernova, but the black hole probe couldn’t let go of a single particle of energy. Instead, the gravity field grew stronger, compressing the captured material down towards a ball and drawing in more matter, which in turn added to the compression. The cycle was unbreakable. As the probe came to rest at the centre of the star, the process picked up speed, adding the planet’s natural gravity field to the artificial one created by the probe. Nothing, even light itself, would be allowed to escape. The star’s mass was being compressed into a tiny area…
The process started to speed up as the probe was finally crushed out of existence, it’s tiny life coming to an end, but it was already too late. The new core was sucking in the remaining matter without any need for a midwife and the star was dying rapidly, massive eruptions of stellar material bursting up from its surface before being pulled back down towards the surface and down towards the growing gravity well. The core just grew hungrier and hungrier, and, as it consumed more of its parent material, its hunger only grew. Paula checked the warp field quickly, knowing that if the warp field failed the starship would die, but there was no need to worry. They were safe.
“He’s dying,” Chris breathed, from beside her. Paula understood what he meant. The star was no longer fighting for its life, but was just collapsing into a black hole. The reports from the sensor platforms confirmed that the gravity quakes were fading away as the black hole stabilised, drawing out the remaining death of the star into a sadistic orgy. The remaining stellar matter flattened out into a funnel, pouring into the black hole, as if water was being let out of a bath. “What about the planets?”
“They’re slightly destabilised in their orbits,” Paula said, after a moment. The effect was still too small to be easy to predict, but the MassMind calculated that one of the planets would eventually fall into the black hole and the other would be tossed into interstellar space. Perhaps it would be converted into a Community settlement as it drifted out of the galaxy, or maybe it would just remain a hazard to navigation. It would be years before anyone had to take any substantial decision about it. “If one of them falls into the black hole, it will release more gravity waves as it dies.”
The black hole was almost invisible now, even though it was easy to make out where it had to be, amid the glowing waste of the star. It was tiny, yet it was so massive that its mere presence warped space and time. She allowed her imagination to plot out the location of the event horizon, where nothing could escape, even light. A million works of fiction discussed what might be waiting at the other side of a black hole — a new universe, or perhaps even a white hole in the original universe — but she knew that anyone who dived into that black hole would be crushed out of existence. They hadn’t managed to link it to any other black holes yet, let alone the Killer communications network.
And the gravity waves would be racing out across the galaxy. The closest known Killer system was over three thousand light years away, but they would be already aware of the black hole, if they cared. There was no way to know for sure — despite her words, Paula wasn’t as certain as she claimed that the Killers would come to investigate, even after the Cinder had burned one of their settlements out of existence. The entire fleet could be standing by… for nothing.
She checked the chronometer and was surprised to find that hours had passed as the black hole came into existence. It had felt like minutes, perhaps less. Her eyes felt gritty and she summoned her nanites to wash them and relieve her tiredness. She had just made history.
“Now all we have to do is take control of it,” she said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “I’ll start configuring the gravity generators now and…”
An alarm sounded as new gravity waves flickered into existence, far too close for comfort.
“What’s that?” Chris demanded. “That’s the near-space alert system!”
“That’s the Killers, right on time,” Paula said. She wanted to make a jaunty comment, but the words stuck in her throat as wormhole after wormhole shimmered into existence, disgorged a Killer starship, and then faded back into nothing. “I’m reading… thirty-three Killer starships, advancing on a direct intercept course.”
“I see,” Chris said. She didn’t know how he could remain so calm when she wanted to panic, or hit the warp drive and flee. A single Killer starship was daunting enough, but an entire fleet…? “I think they’re pissed.”
Paula gave him an icy look as the new icons advanced towards the starship. They were pacing themselves, as if they were cats hunting a tiny and very isolated mouse. Paula knew that the Defence Force had new weapons, perhaps even new tactics, but all of a sudden she had no confidence in them. It wouldn’t be long before the Killers overran their position and blew her starship apart.