When he glanced back, he saw the dodecahedral transit chamber had vanished, leaving just the platform they stood on. Somehow he wasn’t surprised.
The Ambassador said, ‘Where do you think you are?’
‘In the heart of a star,’ Five said. ‘Where else?’
‘But not just any star.’
‘The Boss,’ Donn said. ‘But that’s impossible. Isn’t it, Ambassador?’
‘How did you phrase it earlier? “Evidently not. Or we wouldn’t be standing here, would we?”’
The Silverman said, ‘I understand your reluctance, Donn Wyman. I am human enough to fear falling. Don’t be afraid. Step to the edge. Look down.’
Five wouldn’t move. She stood there, her hide suit still stained by Ghost blood, bathed in starlight. But Donn stepped to the rim of the floating disc.
And he looked down on a Ghost base in the heart of the star. It was a hollowed-out moon, a rock ball that must have been a thousand kilometres wide, riddled with passages and cavities.
The disc began to descend. The motion was smooth, but now Five lunged forward and grabbed at Donn’s arm.
The moon turned into a complex machined landscape below them. Ghost ships and science platforms swept over the pocked terrain, tangles of shining net. And Ghosts themselves drifted up from the chambers and machine emplacements, bobbing like balloons, shining in the star’s deep light. All over the moon’s surface, vast cylindrical structures gleamed. The Ambassador said these were intra-System drives and hyperdrives, engines that had been used to fling this moon into the body of this star and to hold it here.
And there was quagma down there, the Ambassador said, little packets of the primordial stuff, buried in the pits of ancient planetesimal craters. I knew it, Donn thought.
Meanwhile, behind the moon, Donn saw, there were threads of a more intense brightness, just at the limit of visibility, dead straight.
‘The work here is hard,’ the Ambassador said. ‘Often lethal. We have poured workers into this mine of light endlessly.’ And Donn thought of the stream of Ghosts he had seen filing patiently into the transportation booth on Ghostworld. ‘Not all come back, despite all our precautions. But now the work is nearly done.’
Five asked, ‘So how come we aren’t all burned up? We’re in the middle of a star.’
‘Perhaps you can see those illuminated threads, beyond the moon? Those are refrigeration lasers. By making ourselves hotter even than this star’s core, we can dump our heat into it. Of course all that you are seeing is a representation, heavily processed. Starstuff is in fact very opaque . . .’
Donn said, ‘You are messing with physics again, aren’t you, Ambassador?’ He thought back to the Coalition’s recent observations of the Boss. ‘We’ve been observing flares. Are you trying to mend the star, to stop the flares? No, not that. Sink Ambassador, are you destabilising this star?’
The Ambassador rolled. ‘How would Jack Raoul have put it? “Guilty as charged.” What do you understand of stellar physics?’
‘A little . . .’
Every star was in equilibrium, said the Ghost, with the pressure of the radiation from its fusing core balancing the tendency of its outer layers to fall inwards under gravity. A giant star like the Boss, crushed by its own tremendous weight, needed a lot of radiation to keep from imploding. So it ran through its hydrogen fusion fuel quickly, and a detritus of helium ash collected in its core.
‘But that “ash” can fuse too,’ the Ambassador said. ‘The fusion process produces such elements as carbon, oxygen, silicon, each of which fuses in turn . . . The chain ends in iron, which cannot fuse, for if it did so it would absorb energy, not release it. And so an inner core of iron builds up at the heart of a star like this. A core bigger than most worlds, Donn Wyman!’
Five asked, ‘So how come it doesn’t just collapse?’
‘Its components are already crushed together as far as they will go. This is a property of atomic matter. Humans know it as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Of course, in time, as the dead zone spreads through the heart of the star, the repulsion will finally be overcome. Electrons will be forced to merge with protons, producing neutrons – a neutron star will be born, smaller and denser than the iron core. And then there will be a collapse of the outer layers, a catastrophic one. But not yet, not for a long time; for now this star is stable.’
‘Or it was before you came along,’ Donn said. ‘But now you’re changing things, aren’t you? Planck’s constant again?’
‘Jack Raoul would be proud of you, Donn. Like you, he was a good guesser.’
‘If you were to use your moon-machine to reduce Planck in the star’s core—’
‘Then Pauli repulsion would be reduced. The iron core would collapse prematurely.’
The Ghost showed them a Virtual representation of what would happen next. The implosion would rapidly mutate into an explosion. Shock waves would form and rebound from the inner layers, and a vast pulse of neutrinos would power further expansion.
‘The Boss will be blown apart,’ said Donn, wondering.
‘Yes. A detonation over in seconds, after years of preparation . . . But the explosion will be asymmetrical, because that layer heated by the neutrinos is turbulent. This is the key to such explosions, and it is this turbulence we are hoping to control. For the asymmetry will blast the neutron star out of the debris of the Boss – it will leave with a significant velocity while releasing a pulse of gravitational wave energy which we would hope to tap and—’
‘A supernova,’ Five said. ‘That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? You’re going to turn the Boss into a supernova.’
‘We believe it will be the first artificial detonation of its kind in the evolution of the universe. A supernova used as a cannon to fire out a neutron star, directed as we please! History is watching us, Donn Wyman.’
The Silverman comically raised its stump of an arm. ‘Magnificent!’
Donn paced around. ‘You’re insane.’
‘Now you do sound like Jack Raoul,’ said the Ambassador.
‘You will devastate worlds—’
‘Actually, stars too,’ said the Ambassador. ‘Nearby stars will be boiled away.’
‘And the Reef,’ Donn said grimly. ‘Surely we’re too close to survive.’
Five said, ‘The Reef is a bunch of ships joined up together. Isn’t it? Something like that. You could just fly away.’
‘We don’t have hyperdrive,’ Donn said. ‘Our units were confiscated by the Coalition for their Navy ships. I don’t imagine they will be handing them back.’ He turned on the Ambassador. ‘This is mass murder. Why are you doing this?’
‘Because of the Seer.’ The new voice was a woman’s: Eve Raoul’s. Donn heard her words moments before a cloud of pixels popped into existence, and coalesced into her thin form.
She stepped to the edge of the platform. ‘My. Quite a view. Quite a drop, too . . .’ She reached out absently, but none of them had a Virtual hand to offer her, and she stepped back.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you again,’ Donn said.
‘Well, I didn’t expect to be revived again,’ she said with a trace of bitterness. ‘At least I’m not in any pain this time. I guess it’s good to be useful.’