Redemption Ark

‘No,’ he said. ‘What you showed me was some data in a projection device. I still have no objective evidence that the machines are real.’

Vuilleumier looked at him imploringly. ‘Dear God, Thorn. How much more have we got to show you?’

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Enough that I can believe it completely. How you do that is entirely your problem.’

‘There isn’t time for this, Thorn.’

He wondered, then. She said it with such urgency that it almost cut through his doubts. He could hear the fear in her voice.

Whatever else was going on, she was truly scared about something…

Thorn looked back towards the hangar bay. ‘Could one of those ships get us closer to the giant?’

* * *

The Dawn War had been about metal.

Almost all the heavy elements in the observable universe had been brewed in the cores of stars. The Big Bang itself had made little except hydrogen, helium and lithium, but each successive generation of stars had enriched the palette of elements available to the cosmos. Massive suns assembled the elements lighter than iron in delicately balanced fusion reactions, block by block, cascading through increasingly desperate reactions as lighter elements were depleted. But once stars started burning silicon, the end was in sight. The end-stage of silicon fusion was a shell of iron imprisoning the star’s core, but iron itself could not be fused. Barely a day after the onset of silicon fusion, the star would become catastrophically and suddenly unstable, collapsing under its own gravity. Rebounding Shockwaves from the collapse would lip: the star’s carcass into space, outshining all other stars in the galaxy. The supernova itself would create new elements, pumping cobalt, nickel, iron and a stew of radioactive decay products back into the tenuous clouds of gas that lay between all stars. It was this interstellar medium that would provide the raw material for the next generation of stars and worlds. Nearby, a clump of gas that had until then been stable against collapse would ripple with the Shockwave of the supernova, forming knots and whorls of enhanced density. The clump, which had already been metal-enriched by earlier supernovae, would begin to collapse under its own ghostly gravity. It would form hot, dense stellar nurseries, birthing places of eager young stars. Some were cool dwarves that would consume their star fuel so slowly that they would outlast the galaxy itself. But others were faster burners, supermassive suns that lived and died in a galactic eyeblink. In their death throes they strewed more metals into the vacuum and triggered yet more cycles of stellar birth.