Death of a Neutron Star - Eric Kotani [29]
She sat and studied the schematic as her crew stood and, without saying a word, filed out of the room. Then, as the door whooshed closed, she picked up her cup of coffee and sipped it, letting the wonderful flavor clear her mind.
There had to be a way to send this neutron-star monster out into empty space between the galaxies.
She took another sip and then stood. A few hours before, she had been as excited as a child to be able to watch the coming explosion of a neutron-star binary. Now she was calling it a monster.
Typical of this galaxy. The most beautiful things were often the most deadly. You just never knew.
She headed for her office, cup in hand. She had work to do, a solution to find.
If there was a solution.
CHAPTER 1O
SEVEN WAS BENT OVER AN ENGINEERING PANEL WHEN Janeway entered. As was typical, Seven didn't look up or even acknowledge that anyone else was in the room, even though Janeway knew that Seven was very aware of everything that went on around her. She just chose not to react to most of it. Janeway often wished she had the same option and control.
On the monitor above the panel was the clear image of the revolving neutron stars. They now were so close, and moving so fast, they looked indistinguishable from each other. Faint whiffs of hot plasma were drifting away from the spinning pair along their equatorial plane. Janeway had gotten to the point over the last forty-five minutes that she didn't want to look at the binary anymore. Yet its deadly beauty kept drawing her to watch it.
"Any ideas?" Janeway asked, taking her gaze off the monitor and moving up beside Seven to see what she was working on.
"If you refer to a solution to directing the neutron star's path, I do not believe a solution is possible. So I have finished the gravitational wave energy containment and tested it. It works within acceptable parameters."
At first Janeway wanted to shout at Seven for disobeying her order to work on finding a solution. But she managed to keep her mouth shut as Seven turned back to the panel. Seven, actually, had been obeying orders. It was clear she had worked on the first problem for as long as it took to find the answer-that there was no solution. Then she had continued with Janeway's first order, to construct an energy containment to harness some of the intense gravitational energy pouring off the neutron star binary in its final hours of life.
Janeway forced herself to take a deep breath and remember why she had come here to talk to Seven in the first place. She had wanted to run some numbers past her, to confirm her own findings.
"Seven," Janeway said.
Seven turned back to face her.
"Let's just say," Janeway said, turning and pacing, "that an explosion set off at the appropriate time and spot could quicken the timing of the explosion. Would it be possible to time that explosion in such a way as to direct the runaway neutron star"
"Theoretically, yes," Seven said.
Janeway nodded. "I came to the same conclusion. And obviously so did the Qavok. But what size explosion would be needed? That's where I got stumped."
"I did not," Seven said, "as you put it, get stumped." She keyed in a few numbers on the console and nodded for Janeway to look.
Janeway could feel her stomach clamping up. That number was even bigger than the one she had first come up with. It would take an extremely powerful explosion to cause any change at all in the neutron binary's normal course of dying. More firepower than all their phaser and torpedo power focused on one spot at the same instant Twenty times as much, at least.
For the first time in a long time, Janeway felt small in comparison with the universe around her. When she'd first gone into space, she'd had that feeling often. But over the last few years they had beaten so many things that she hadn't really been overwhelmed by the universe in some time.
Until this moment.
Outside the ship an event was unfolding that would most likely destroy entire planetary systems and