We were but a handful of black diamonds flung at the stars. Only three bombers emerged from null-space: Corrupt, Liar, and myself. Murderess and Addict had drifted into the fringe. Their remains would litter our path for an aeon. Our objective was ahead. At this distance, it was only a centimeter in diameter. Until this moment, I hadn’t truly believed this could be our mission. It was too insane. Now, there was no denying it.

We were flying directly into a star.

Into a star!

Instinct compelled me to turn around, fire my reactor and retreat. To resist it, I peered ahead at the white dwarf and tried to identify our target. My canopy darkened as it lensed forward, protecting my eyes. Even at this great distance, the star could damage them. I was frail. I was insignificant. I was nothing. The star was enormous beyond comprehension. The only thing vaster was Tsuros’ hubris for dreaming we could destroy it.

I couldn’t yet see the Starmine. During approach, our orders were to fly quenched-and-clenched, with our reactors at nil output and no maneuvering. It was a tremendous effort of faith. Our path had been manually calculated by a Hezo navigator on the ringship. He had to hit a tiny mark on a rotating sphere more than a million kilometers in diameter from a distance of light years.

How many light years?

There was ample time to wonder. It would take many hours to reach the star. For a year in the dark, I had been trying to identify our target. Now that we had arrived at the system, there was more data I could use to try and solve the puzzle. I didn’t know what multiple of C we’d accelerated to. If it was less than ten times the speed of light, I think the Hezo wouldn’t have risked using the irreplaceable ringships. It would have been a carrier jump.

The squadron had performed forty-five alignments at two hundred hours per, so we’d been in flight for just over a year. Ten light years from our origin point, minimum. I started by considering the closest possible stars and figured up from there.

The drills never told us what system Ananke Station was hidden in, and I would have been executed for asking. I had to figure it out myself. During our training missions, I could sometimes make out stellar flares from a nearby star, a particularly cantankerous red dwarf. By itself, that hardly narrowed the possibilities. But during one training session, I saw two simultaneous flares. Our main star had a smaller, less luminous companion. That was the key to figuring it out.

My guess is those two red dwarfs were Andromedae GX and GQ. If I was right, it meant Ananke Station was in Groombridge 34. A system so remote and irrelevant the Hezo hadn’t bothered to change its ancient vanity designation. It made perfect sense. Groombridge 34 was at the very limits of Hezo-controlled space, as far from the front as possible. Even in that utter backwater, they were still falling apart.

The power to change that was in my hands, the spur controls of my Yama 10 Bomber. I loosened my grip, careful not to activate the thrusters and give us away. My arms felt strong and awake. The anti-atrophy agents had done their work.

My legs weren’t as solid. They were a cramping mess of pins and needles. As I stretched them out, my left big toe came in contact with something hard and unyielding amidst the ship-flesh. I ignored the sensation. I didn’t trust myself to think about that yet.

I craned my head around the canopy, looking for more clues. If this was Rigel Kentarus, where were Toliman and Proxima Centauri? I felt a strange déjà vu. There was something oddly familiar about this system.

Then as I twisted my body to look behind us, I had my answer. A glittering silver disc, too bright to be a star. It was surrounded by the gossamer threads of an orbital lattice. Ship traffic made them appear to shimmer.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The Messenger!

The monster in my sights was Sol. Tsuros had sent us to destroy the sun.

For the long hours of approach, the revelation burned in my mind like stellar fusion. Mercury! Old Earth! Phobos! Europa, Cassini Station! The skeleton system, our depleted, forgotten homeland. A graveyard of barren rock, where every molecule of useful material had been stripped away and cast into the stars. With every bone picked, the Collaborators must have turned their gaze inward. They devoured Sol itself.

This Starmine was our target. The Collaborators had developed technology that allowed them to tunnel into stars so they could mine vast quantities of exotic materials at the moment of creation. During the briefing, we learned the Clabs had poured resources into this pilot Starmine for decades, stripping worlds and beggaring entire systems.

But the payoff!

Once the first Starmine was online, it would enable the construction of countless others. In a few short centuries, the Collaborators would be a Type II civilization. The Hezo Collective Prosperity Sphere would be as irrelevant to them as bacteria.

But the Collaborators had bet everything on this first Starmine. It seemed a safe bet. Who would dream the backward Hezo could invent a weapon capable of destroying a star? Tsuros told us if we could destroy the Starmine completely, the Collaborators would be ruined. In the chaos that followed, Hezo loyalists would rise from the ashes and overwhelm them.

One empire would fall, another would rise. I was riding on top of the bomb that could decide it all.

The power!

I felt it thrumming through my arms, resonating through my symbiotic husk of corybantic phase-diamond. The power to destroy a star if I could only make it to the target depth. It wasn’t enough to simply fling bombs at the sun. We had to sneak inside the mine and detonate as deep as possible. If I wanted to bring the giant down, I needed to reach the tachocline.

Sol dominated my attention over the long approach, growing larger by the second. I became aware of a silvery thread running almost parallel to my flight path. At first, I thought perhaps it was a piece of debris from Addict or Murderess. As I squinted into the darkness, the canopy assisted my vision until I could resolve the links in the chain. They were individual ships.

The strand was a line made of thousands of freighters. Most were long, silvery cargo cylinders. There were also pill-shaped tankers, reefers bulging with cryo-machinery, and bony ore boats laden with unprocessed asteroids.

The freighters flew nose-to-tail in such perfect synchronization I thought they must be a star-train, with a linkage between each ship. But there was none, just a narrow gap between each vessel. I scanned along the line as it disappeared into the darkness. There was no beginning or end that I could see.

Holding my fist to the canopy as a reference, I guessed I was still more than ten million kilometers out from Sol. Surely, the line couldn’t possibly stretch all the way to the Starmine, but I never saw a break in the chain.

As Sol swelled to occupy more and more of my canopy, I noticed more silver filaments. Each was another line of freighters. Soon, I could see a great vortex of strands converging on the Starmine. I tried to calculate how many there were and how much cargo they might be carrying. The numbers were simply too big for me to hold in my head. I could only imagine hollowed-out moons and siphoned-up seas, a great dusty desert where the asteroid belt had once been.

As I gazed at this incredible display of organization, I was reminded of my time on Ananke Station. Tripping over tangled pneumatic lines and huddling with the others as we slowly froze to death in the dark. How did we ever dream we could fight this?

Ahead of me, the closest line of freighters had a subtle arc that crossed my path a hundred kilometers beneath me. I got a feel for the incredible speed of insertion as I passed seven or eight ships each second. We were coming in so hot! A shudder of excitement ran through my shoulders. I would suffer tremendously during deceleration.

Ahead, a dark shape eclipsed the sun. My breath caught as I recognized it from our silhouette training. A Collaborator Kulan B-type destroyer, moving into an intercept course.

I tightened my grip on the spurs. The reactor blazed, and my Yama pulsed to life around me.

Time to die.