The Murdered Sun - Christie Golden [44]
"I've put together a series of pictures gleaned from the Akerian computers. I'm going to time-lapse them. Watch this."
Janeway obeyed, gazing intently at the image of the concavity the Verunans called Sun-Eater. It shifted, becoming longer, then broader, in a series of fluctuations that would not be abnormal for such a spatial aberration. She leaned her head on her hand, then suddenly her eyes widened. She sat up straighter.
"Good lord," she said softly, "it's... it's shrinking."
"Exactly." He ran a few more images, and it became obvious that it was rapidly growing smaller and smaller. "The concavity existed for thousands of years, doing no harm to anyone in this system. Then it began to close." He straightened up, locked Janeway's eyes with his own dark, almond-shaped ones. "The Akerians could not permit that to happen. The planet had become their cornerstone, the greatest source of information they could hope for. They couldn't let it just vanish."
"So they found a way to keep it open." Janeway's body was taut as a whippet's. She couldn't sit still any longer. Rising, she began to pace, her mind racing at a light-year a minute. "I didn't notice it before, but you're right, Ensign. The draining of hydrogen from the sun has to be artificial. There was no damage until about three centuries ago, when the concavity turned into Sun-Eater. Go back to the earlier images."
Kim obliged. Triumphantly, Janeway banged her fist on the table.
"Look at the concavity in relation to the sun. There is absolutely no indication of a hydrogen drain."
"This new information does a great deal to help explain some of the mysteries of this system, Captain," said Tuvok. "As you will recall, when we first entered this system, there were several things that were not possible, yet the irrefutable proof lay directly in front of us."
Janeway nodded. "So that explains how we got a red giant out of a sun that's only four billion years old."
"Four point two," Tuvok corrected gently. "It also answers the question of how the sun's hydrogen managed to leap across a gap of three trillion miles into the concavity."
Janeway recalled her frustrated summation upon first encountering the mysteries of the Verunan system. We've got a red giant that's too young to be a red giant. We've got a concavity whose gravitational power is too weak for it to be the size that it is.
And we've got hydrogen being pulled across an impossible distance at an impossible rate. Have I got all this right, Tuvok?
Answers. That was what it all came down to. And they'd gotten two of the three mysteries solved. "Do you know how they went about performing this task, Mr. Kim?" she asked.
The young ensign nodded. "Not only do I know, they recorded the event for posterity. I found something that they put together to show the people of Akeras."
His voice and posture were censorious, and Janeway couldn't blame him.
The Akerians had viewed killing the Verunan sun as a great achievement for the glory of the Akerian Empire and had wanted to preserve this finest hour. The fact that two billion innocents along with countless plants and animals were going to die for it seemed to have bothered the Akerians not at all. She was reminded of the old Earth films of Hitler, of the biorecords of the death camps on the twin moons of Kamarica. Some things didn't change.
She shook off her melancholia. "Let's see it, Mr. Kim."
Janeway knew that, unlike the dreadful footage of the death camps of Earth and other planets, what she was about to see would contain no dreadful image of the dying or the dead. This would be only cold space shots; the devastation would come afterward.
Nonetheless, she braced herself. Knowing what she did, she could never watch something like this with detachment.
A face appeared on the viewscreen--or rather, a helmeted head.
It appeared virtually identical to the visage of Linneas.
Apparently, the helmet and the armor were indeed ritual