Chapter 1:

Chapter 1

If Bones Could Talk


A Lords of the Stars Novella

Mattias von Schantz


October 18, 2567 AD, Inner Icy Bodies Belt, Gliese 556

The end did not come swiftly.

On the contrary, the data containing its discovery lay dormant on some astrophysicist's solid-state memory for more than 30 years, gathering digital dust, before any human ever laid eyes on it. When they finally did, what they found there changed the fate of the Terran race forever.

No one knew exactly when the primordial black hole had passed through the core of Solaris. No one even knew for certain if that was what had happened, but it was as plausible a theory as any. Something had disrupted the finely tuned fusion processes in the core of the sun, and its energy output was no longer what it had been before. In essence, the engine of the star had stopped running.

From the outside, you wouldn’t even notice the change—the outer layers were still glowing from the heat released by the thermonuclear fires millennia ago. Perhaps the summers on Mars had grown colder by a degree or two over the past century, but this was Mars, after all—even after centuries of terraforming, cold summers were still the norm. If you looked at the sun, it still seemed to be the same star that had once warmed the primordial seas of Old Earth, the same yellow light that, for eons, had greeted the dinosaurs, and the same disc that had risen in the east over the first empires of Man. Granted, during this time, it had slowly moved along the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, but for all practical purposes, the sun had shone constantly for billions of years.

It would not continue to do so.

For the entirety of its existence, the outward push of the radiation released by the fusion processes in the sun’s core had been equal to the inward pull of the star’s immense gravity. But now, with the fusion engine no longer running at full speed, gravity had taken over, slowly collapsing it. The vast layer of hydrogen was now falling toward the center of the sun, increasing the pressure and temperature in the core every year. Eventually, the conditions would be hot enough for the fusion process to restart.

To the untrained ear, that might have sounded like a good thing. It was anything but—in fact, it was immeasurably worse than the sun just slowly growing cold. The day the core reignited, the fusion engine would not begin to burn slowly over the course of billions of years, as it had previously. Instead, a significant fraction of the hydrogen in the core would ignite all at once. The resulting thermonuclear explosion would throw off the outer layers of the sun into space, essentially swallowing the inner solar system. Mercury, Venus, Terra, and Mars—all would be gone, the racial home of Mankind erased forever; all the places, artifacts, and history of humanity obliterated in the nuclear fire to come.

It wouldn’t be a supernova explosion, of course—nothing so spectacular could ever happen to a simple G-class main-sequence star, not even with the help of a primordial black hole. The astrophysicists simply classified the event as a humble nova, albeit an irregular one. But even a nova is enough to sterilize a solar system, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it from happening. Within a few hundred years, the end would come, no matter what mankind did.

For the second time in half a millennium, the Terran race faced an extinction event. But unlike the Fall of Old Earth, this time it was not a cataclysm of their own making, and now the race was on to move as much of the Terran people and their heritage to other stars before Nova Solaris eventually claimed the sun’s children as its final victims.

Some would say the Terran Federation had grown complacent during the centuries following the Fall. But Pax Lupi—three centuries of unbroken peace, guaranteed by the military might of the Sunguard—had brought with it a period of unprecedented prosperity. After the initial integration of the four races, the Federation had stopped its expansion 23 light-years from Solaris, content with the territory it already controlled. It had then turned its focus inward, improving and strengthening itself without having to spend time and manpower on colonizing the stars.

Now, that was all about to change. In a mad scramble for resources and new worlds, the Armies of the Sunguard had been sent out on expeditions up to 50 light-years from Solaris, charting the often dangerous worlds orbiting distant stars. For the past century, the needs of the other three races had had to take a backseat, allowing the Terrans to grab as much territory as they could before it was too late.

It hadn’t been entirely without downsides, though. Despite its name, of the 70 billion people in the Federation, only 35% were actually Terran. Certain limitations on the way votes were conducted among the non-Terran members had been put into place to ensure the other races didn’t interfere with the prioritized Terran expansion. It was all just temporary, of course. The home worlds of the other three races were still perfectly safe—Alpha Centauri A and B, as well as Tau Ceti, would continue to burn for eons to come. Thus, the Etarians, the Kelar, and the Jerrassians could afford a few centuries of curbed rights—they had all the time in the galaxy to catch up once the whole Nova Solaris business was over. For now, the priority of the Terran Federation had to be the survival of the Terran people.

Despite being Jerrassian himself, Captain Balmar Lok didn’t really mind. What were a few lost civil rights when you had the opportunity to make more money in a year than your parents had been able to acquire in a lifetime? Disasters such as this tended to be virtual money-making machines if you knew how to properly take advantage of the situation.

The Sunguard had sent their expeditions across space to discover new worlds to colonize. But once the colonization process was started, there was more work to be done than the military had the resources to provide. That’s where civilian contractors such as the crew of Peretti's Legacy came into play. Right now, their job was to survey the makeup of the icy bodies orbiting in the inner cometary belt of one of the recently colonized systems. No one claimed it was an exciting job—just days upon days of measuring the ratios of water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia ice in the primordial comets here in the outer Gliese 556 system, 44 light-years from Solaris. The work wasn’t glamorous, but it paid more than well.



Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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