The Unreachable Stars: Book #11 of The Human Chronicles Saga (19 page)

Riyad was prepared for this. He walked over to the stunned alien and placed something in Trimen’s hand. When the alien opened his palm, he frowned, looking up at Riyad with even more confusion than before.

“They’re called ball bearings.”

“They appear to be made of metal.”

“That’s right, steel. And you just released about a billion of these little buggers on a collision course with the Juirean ships.”

“They carry no charge, so they passed through the shields unobstructed,” Trimen said, understanding dawning on him. “And as I can testify, they are too small to notice on threat screens.”

“Mass detectors would have picked them up, but then with dispersal over such a wide area, even those readings would have been misleading.”

“And at the speed with which they impacted the Juirean vessels, they would carry an incredible amount of kinetic energy.”

Riyad turned to Regina. “By Jove, I think he gets it!” He turned back to Trimen. “The most basic of weapons, with devastating effect.”

“It’s like throwing a shitload of rocks at them, all traveling at thousands of miles per hour,” Regina added. And then her tone shifted. “There’s still five ships—plus the two from before.” She brought the
Crescent Star
back around for another run.

By now the Juireans had studied the attack and knew they had fallen victim to a nearly invisible yet deadly force. They wouldn’t let that happen again. Plasma bolts were adjusted, widening their energy fields so they would spread out quicker when fired. The range and force of the bolts would be greatly diminished, yet they would be strong enough to vaporize any incoming metal balls.

“Shall I launch more of your missiles?” Trimen asked, once Regina had explained the Juirean’s new defensive posture.

“That would be a great idea,” Riyad stated, “if we had any more aboard. I used up ten of the missiles during demonstrations, and after taking out that other battlecruiser, we’re all out.”

“Any other secret weapons you can reveal?”

“Nothing except standard plasma bolts. We do have standard projectile machinegun batteries, but they’re ineffective at this range and used mainly for surface strafing. But the Juireans have lined up, exposing only one of their ships to us at a time, and according to Panur’s timetable, we only have six minutes to fight our way through five battlecruisers.”

“Anyone need a hero?”

Everyone aboard the
Crescent Star
turned their heads to the main view screen. There, an oversized head of Adam Cain was staring into the pilothouse.

“Where are you?” Riyad asked.

“Just entering the fray.”

“What about the other Juireans?”

“I’ll tell you later. Right now, let’s take out the rest of these pesky party crashers”

********

After the last battlecruiser had been destroyed, the
Pegasus II
slipped in next to the
Crescent Star
. With Adam’s DPS engine, he’d help make short work of the remaining Juirean force, popping into and out of the battlefield with deadly results.

Now everyone’s attention was focused on the drama taking place at the center of the star system.

“How much longer, Panur?” Adam asked the mutant.

“Two minutes.”

On extreme magnification, the crew of both starships could see the white dwarf going through some radical changes. The entire left upper quadrant of the star was a tumultuous wreck, deformed and spitting out massive solar flares the size of planets. The black hole wasn’t visible any longer, yet its effects were obvious. Huge bolts of stellar lightning were lashing out into space, only to arc over and return to the surface. The flaming surface was also experiencing starquakes, and each time one struck, a hazy shockwave raced away into space.

On the main screen, Adam also saw that the intense gravity influence surrounding the colliding pair was in flux, shifting unpredictably as matter was jockeyed about within the massive bodies. Two of the ships in the gravity line had been caught up in the gravity maelstrom.

Adam reached over and tapped Panur’s screen. “What about them? Are they going to make it?”

Panur stared at the point on the screen for two seconds before answering. “No, they will not.”

“Then let them engage their gravity drives. Two ships can’t make that big of a difference, not now.”

“Unfortunately, they still can.”

The forward screen had switched views, this time to the bridge of one of the pirate marauders.  Her captain was screaming into the comm: “Give us back control! We cannot fight this attraction. We need the gravity drive!”

Panur remained passive and unreadable.

Adam checked the locations of the
FS-475
and Angar’s ship. They were at the center and leading edge of the line respectively, and appeared to be safe from danger. The last two ships in the line weren’t fairing that well. Now both the captains shared the split screen.

“Cut the control, you mutant
raineic
,” screamed one of them. Adam had never heard the word
raineic
before, but he was pretty sure he didn’t need to query the translation bug for a definition.

Panur remained stoic.

Adam looked over at Arieel and Lila. They were strapped in on the other side of the pilothouse, watching him and Panur. They remained silent—as did Adam—as the two ships on the screen began to fall back from the others, being sucked in toward the swirling mass of the white dwarf, their captains still frantically yelling in the now-muted images on the view screen.

Adam reached up and switched the screen view to the bridges of the
FS-475
and Angar’s ship. Even with the sound restored, there was a deathly silence in both scenes, with all eyes of the bridge crews either staring forward or down at their workstations. No one raised a protest. They knew what was at stake, and that sacrifices had to be made.

Moments later, the two pirate ships disappeared from the mass screen.

“How much longer until the fireworks?” Adam asked the mutant, breaking the silence.

“Forty-two seconds, approximately.”

“Kaylor, Angar, prepare yourselves. Under forty seconds now.”

Panur put the nav image of the main view screen. At this range, it was hard to see anything other than the fiery brilliance of the now active star. Where once its surface barely reached three thousand degrees, it was now experiencing a sudden rebirth of its nuclear fire. This would be short-lived however, as this new energy source was being drawn from the passing black hole. Once it was gone, the cold star would once again wink out.

A brilliant light flared up, cancelling out the view screen before being dampened by the near-instantaneous polarizing of the exterior viewport.

Something had hit the white dwarf, something small yet powerful. And now a huge plume of yellow fire shot out from the star, as if a stick had punctured the surface of a balloon full of fire and allowed the contents to escape into space.

And there was more.

Adam could see—or thought he could see—a hazy line radiating out from the point of impact, causing background objects, mainly stars, to turn blurry for a moment until the ripple passed. This was much more intense than the other starquake shockwaves. And it was coming their way.

“Detecting a shockwave,” Panur announced. “Those closest to the star should prepare for its impact.”

“You heard him. Everyone hold on,” Adam said.

“I do not know how we can hold on any tighter than we already are,” cried Jym from the
FS-475
. Then the image on the screen turned to static a moment later, as did the view of Angar’s bridge.

“Status, Panur. Are they still there?”

“Yes, but transmission waves have been disrupted. It should clear in a moment.”

Chapter 18

In the lull of the passing shockwave, and as the white dwarf continued to rumble and roil, Riyad opened a channel to the
Pegasus II
.

“So answer me now, what happened to the other Juireans?”

Adam laughed. “Well, since you asked, Panur’s DPS engines worked to perfection, at least once I got a hang of how to use them in close quarters combat. I found I was able to pop in and out of the battlefield at will, kind of like in a galactic game of whack-a-mole, although I was doing the whacking, not them. I was taking out their units left and right, and if there’s one thing to be said about the mane-heads, they’re a pragmatic bunch of assholes. After a while they were bolting out of the area in a wholesale retreat. In the immortal words of M.C. Hammer, they must have realized…
You can’t touch this!”

“Captain Cain, I didn’t know you were into rap music?” Regina said over the comm, her dimpled face displaying a wide smile.

“Couldn’t help it, especially with a song like that. It had a pretty contagious beat… and damn, my homeboy sure could dance.”

A moment later, a music track began to blare from the speakers aboard all the ships in Adam’s tiny fleet, both Human and alien.

“You can’t touch this…You can’t touch this…!”

“How the hell?”

“You can thank the wonders of the galactic Library,” Regina replied. “Just think of all the music piracy taking place these days across the entire galaxy.”

“Like that, like that. Cold on a mission so fall them back. Let ‘em know that you’re too much. And this is a beat, uh, they can’t touch.”

As the song continued to play, Trimen turned to Riyad with a frown. “I do not understand?”

Riyad laughed. “About forty years ago back on Earth, that was the universal sentiment of millions of parents.”

His comment didn’t remove the frown from the alien’s tan forehead.

“Actually, Reggie, I was more into Sir Mix-A-Lot’s classic one-hit wonder,” Adam corrected.

“Oh. My. God!” she exclaimed. “You like big butts?”

“I cannot lie.”

“I should have known.”

Adam looked over to where Arieel and Lila were sitting, curious as to how the two of them were reacting to the pulsating music filling the pilothouse of the
Pegasus II
. Although they, too, wore frowns on their faces, he laughed out loud when he noticed both of them tapping their smooth, delicate hands on the console, in time with the infectious beat.

All-in-all, Adam was feeling pretty content right about then, more than he’d felt in nearly a month, before this whole adventure had begun. The Juireans were in full scale retreat from the area, the cold white dwarf still roiled with vibrations caused by its
glancing
encounter with the black hole, and the singularity itself was now racing away from the star, leaving behind it a trail of huge star diamonds worth untold riches.

At that moment, Adam Cain thought he could see a dim light at the end of the tunnel.

“Everyone form up on me,” he commanded over the soundtrack. “Let’s go do some diamond hunting,”

The eleven remaining ships formed a wide phalanx—with the
Pegasus II
at the apex—and sped off past the star and after the fleeing black hole.

All the while, eighteen thousand light-years from Earth, a primal form of hypnotic music radiated into space, all the way from here to Sylox, confusing to some who may have been listening, yet a nostalgic reminder of home to others.

“It’s Hammer time…
”

********

The black hole was streaking away from the white dwarf at a respectable one-half light speed, and had already reacquired a thin disk of gas, giving definition to the hole itself. A new river of raging star material was connected to it as well, though more chaotic and disjointed than before.

With the Humans’ torturous obsession with rap music now over, Riyad’s image came over the comm-link aboard the
Pegasus II
. “I owe you an apology, Mister Panur,” he said. “Looks like you did it.”

“Yes, the objects did collide, and at just the right angle. Now we should find a trail of core remnants following behind the black hole. However, please allow me a first look at them since my needs are specific. I would not want one of your pirates to abscond with my perfect specimen.”

For his part, Adam was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a river of glittering diamonds lighting up space behind the singularity. In fact, all he could see was a thick, hot cloud of gas.

“So where are all the diamonds?”

“They’re here,” said Panur. “I’ve been detecting the occasional dense object within the gas cloud, yet have failed to find one of the proper size and composition to attempt a recovery.”

“I mean, I thought there’d be a lot more.”

“There is just as much as I said there would be. You must remember we are talking about interstellar distances here. The fragments are spread over a vast swath of space.”

It was another four hours before Panur instructed Adam to change course to a specific point in space. During that time, Adam had to fight off the pirates’ demand to recover what they were detecting. At first, eight hundred billion carats of diamonds had sounded like a lot, until Lila informed everyone that the total carat weight of the white dwarf was approximately
ten billion trillion, trillion carats!
A meager eight hundred billion was only a sliver of the total, and as Panur said, the debris field was spread across an ever-expanding region of space.

Adam couldn’t see the remnant Panur had selected; it was just a point in space with a higher-than-normal density reading. In addition, the crystal was essentially as clear as glass, allowing the light of the galaxy to pass through it, so even as they got closer, he still couldn’t pick it up visually.

He cut the internal gravity aboard the ship and opened the rear bay doors. Next he executed a delicate process of slowing down within the path of the tumbling stone, allowing it to move into the bay unassisted. Then he closed the doors and slowly restored the gravity. The crystal banged against the metal deck a few times as its rotational motion was dissipated, and then it came to a rest in the center of the bay.

Adam couldn’t wait to see a thousand pound diamond, so he placed the ship on autopilot and joined the others as they all raced back to the landing bay for a look.

The moment he opened the pressure door he felt the heat still radiating from the fragment. Adam and Panur, along with Arieel and Lila, stood a good twenty feet from the glowing crystal—as close as they could get—gawking at the huge chunk of glassy material. Adam didn’t know what the others were thinking, but he was marveling at the thought that only a few short hours ago this object had been part of a star.

“I would suggest we leave the bay and open it back up to the cold of space,” Panur said. “The crystal should cool naturally. I don’t want to risk it cracking.”

“That is larger than one thousand pounds,” Lila announced.

Adam and Arieel looked at the large, oblong hunk of opaque glass and couldn’t tell whether she was right or not. After all, how big is a thousand pound diamond?

“You are correct,” Panur confirmed. “It is over two thousand five hundred pounds.”

Adam’s jaw fell open. He had done some research through the Library on the largest diamonds ever found. On Earth, the record was slightly over one-and-a-half pounds.
Just a pound and a half.
On a planet called Oonius Dome, a diamond had been discovered weighing eighty-four pounds, while the largest space diamond ever recovered was around five hundred.

Adam looked over the
ton
of diamond, and all in one piece.
Imagine the ring stone that could be cut from that?
he thought. And then for some odd reason, the name Kim Kardashian came to mind, dredged up from a distant memory. He shrugged it off, attributing the disjointed association to his recent recollection of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s
I Like Big Butts.

But now Panur was talking: “I need the crystal to be of a particular shape and purity, so it will have to be cut down. This piece should work, once I remove the outer layer. The interior appears to be of perfect uniformity.”

“You know how to cut a diamond?” Adam blurted, feeling a little stupid after asking.

“Of course I do. It is basic mathematics.”

“May I observe the cutting?” Lila asked.

Arieel turned to her daughter. “I am sure he will need to concentrate—”

“Of course you may,” Panur interrupted. “I sense that you have an understanding of the theory behind the operation.”

“As you said, it is basic mathematics—geometry, to be precise—along with an understanding of crystalline symmetry.”

“Adam, please procced with the cooling,” said Panur. “I am anxious to get to work on the crystal, and on my detector. Please recall Mister Tarazi. I have need of his ship.”