Redemption Ark

‘No,’ the Triumvir replied. ‘We can rule that out, I think. They may have a technology that can do it, but it would only work on heavy stars, the kind that are already predestined to blow up. That would be a formidable weapon, I admit. You could sterilise a volume of space dozens of light-years wide if you could trigger a premature supernova. I don’t know how you would do it — maybe by tuning the nuclear cross sections to prohibit fusion for elements lighter than iron, thereby shifting the peak in the curve of binding energy. The star would suddenly have nothing to fuse, no means to support its outer envelope against collapse. They may have done it once, you know. Earth’s sun is in the middle of a bubble in the interstellar medium, blown open by a recent supernova. It intersects other structures right out to the Aquila Rift. They may have been natural events, or we might be seeing the scars left behind by Inhibitor sterilisation events millions of years before the Amarantin xenocide. Or the bubbles might have been blown open by the weapons of fleeing species. We’ll probably never know, no matter how hard we look. But that won’t happen here. There are no supergiant stars in this part of the galaxy now, nothing capable of undergoing a supernova. They must have evolved different weapons for dealing with lower-mass stars like Delta Pavonis. Less spectacular — no use for sterilising more than a solar system — but perfectly effective on that level.’

‘How would you kill a star like Pavonis?’ Thorn asked.

‘There are several ways one might go about it,’ the Triumvir said thoughtfully. ‘It would depend on the resources available, and the time. The Inhibitors could assemble a ring around the star, just like they did with the gas giant. Something larger this time, of course, and perhaps functioning differently. There’s no solid surface to a star, not even a solid core. But they might encircle the star with a ring of particle accelerators, perhaps. If they established a particle-beam flux through the ring, they could create a vast magnetic force by tightening and loosening the ring in waves. The field from the ring would strangle the star like a constricting snake, pumping chromospheric material away from the star’s equator towards the poles. That’s the only place it could go, and the only place it could escape. Hot plasma would ram away from the star’s north and south poles. You might even be able to use those plasma jets as weapons in their own right, turning the whole star into a flame-thrower — all you’d need is more machinery above and below the poles to direct and focus the jets where you wanted them. You could incinerate every world in a solar system with a weapon like that, stripping atmosphere and ocean. You wouldn’t even need to dismantle the entire star. Once you’d removed enough of its outer envelope, its core would adjust its fusion rate and the whole star would become cooler and much longer-lived. That might suit their longer-term plans, I suppose.’

‘That sounds as if it would take a long time,’ Khouri said. ‘And if all you’re going to do is incinerate the worlds, why waste half a star doing it?’

‘They could dismantle the whole thing, if they wished. I’m merely pointing out the possibilities. There’s another method they might consider, too. They dismantled the gas giant by spinning it until it flew apart. They could do that to a sun, too: wrap accelerators around it again, this time in pole-to-pole loops, and start rotating them. They’d couple with the star’s magnetosphere and start dragging the whole thing along with them, until it was spinning faster than its own centrifugal break-up speed. Matter would lift off the star’s surface. It would come apart like an onion.’

‘Sounds slow, too.’

Volyova nodded. ‘Perhaps. And there’s another thing we need to consider. The machinery that’s being assembled out there isn’t ringlike, and there’s no sign of any preparatory activity around the sun itself. The Inhibitors are going to use a different method again, I think.’

‘How else do you destroy a star, if pumping or spinning it won’t work?’ Khouri asked.

‘I don’t know. Let’s assume they can manipulate gravity to some extent. If that’s the case, they might be able to make a planet-mass black hole from the matter they’ve already accumulated. Say ten Earth masses, perhaps.’ She held her hands slightly apart, as if weaving an invisible cat’s cradle. ‘This big, that’s all. At most, they might have the resources to make a black hole ten or twenty times larger — a few hundred Earth masses.’

‘And if they dropped it into the star?’