339 – Starkiller

Stars, especially the bigger ones or the super-dense neutron stars, were rather challenging to move. At least if you wanted to be quick, and wasn’t willing to wait centuries to see any results for your efforts. Who would have fucking thought. I don’t know why I halfway expected to just be able to tug them around like a shopping cart or a car trailer. Maybe that was a touch arrogant of me; being able to destroy planets and dance with some of the worst things this galaxy could throw at me may have gotten to my head. Just a little. 

I floated there in the void, staring at the massive ball of frothing plasma and heat that filled my vision as arcs of star-matter wide enough to swallow the Earth whole and longer than the moon was from the Earth rose and fell around me. I felt the extreme heat, the stellar radiation and the immense electromagnetic forces all try to unmake my body, but I shrugged it all off with little effort.

It was only with the help of my aura that I could even begin to comprehend the sheer size of this thing. Human minds were never meant to grasp distances that went beyond ‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘over there beyond the horizon’. This was a star that made even supergiants look like toddlers, a star that could have swallowed the Earth’s sun whole. It wasn’t merely gigantic, it was everywhere around me, it wasn’t just filling the horizon as much as it was the horizon all around me.

This obnoxious ball of fire was probably one of the primary anchor-points of that ancient celestial alignment that had facilitated the birth of the Hadex Anomaly. I had nothing other than my gut feelings and obscure, ancient star charts that Amberly claimed she found in an Inquisitorial database to go off of. I wasn’t sure that even if I was right and it was indeed one such anchor-point, that destroying it would do anything at all.

As I said before, the celestial alignment only facilitated the birth of that tumour, mainly by weakening the Veil that separated what was from what might be. It was perfectly possible that this star held absolutely no importance to the Anomaly anymore. Heck, maybe tugging it around wouldn’t do anything either. I was … somewhat certain that I could cause it to go supernova if I cut loose, but that was a last resort. I didn’t like the idea of destroying stars and further hastening the heat-death of the universe. The ancient Necrons had done a fine enough job destroying a good portion of everything that once existed in the galaxy over the span of the War in Heaven. 

Although their imprisonment of the star-eating C’tan might have been a feat evening the scales of karmic balance on that front in the long run. Those things would have kept eating stars for eternity had they been allowed to … and not been given bodies, then the opportunity to develop a taste for mortal souls.

Annoying. This is so annoying. Perhaps for the first time in my new life, I was presented with a foe I couldn’t strike back against, a foe I couldn’t just kill with brute force. Sure, the Chaos Gods had been the same, sending their minions at me, but then I’d been able to kill those minions, and since those minions were actually parts of the Gods, well, I did hurt them in a very real way for their attempts to harm me and mine. This was different. Harming the Limitless Grasp could have been enough to trigger that weird curse and grant the Hadex Anomaly some measure of control over me through whatever weird metaphysical Warp fuckery it was using. 

I just had to sit there and take it. It was infuriating. But … if tugging or even blowing up this one star wasn’t going to do any substantial damage to the Hadex Anomaly, then that was exactly what I knew I would have to do. My lessons with Trazyn’s Crypteks were still in their early stages, and I was far from sufficiently knowledgeable about Blackstone to erect a structure akin to the Pariah Nexus. Those two ancient rustbuckets didn’t really like me, but they were very serious about their jobs and had made a lesson plan more than four decades long. If you asked them, then they’d probably say I was still learning the absolute basics and used my Blackstone like a cavewoman brutishly waving around a big cudgel.

Sure, my personally designed fractal arrays worked, but I was apparently just reusing existing designs like an amateur without even altering them to make use of the existing celestial environmental currents I was placing them in. Whatever those were. They claimed every array was designed for a specific region of space, each a custom job, a masterpiece of Necron high science. Something I was defiling just by touching. They were cranky old assholes, but then again, what did I expect from a pair of sixty million year old tin-cans.

But back to the topic at hand: playing God to soothe my wounded ego- 

I mean, to destroy this gigantic star for scientific purposes, to either prove or disprove my theory. Yes, that. That was what I was doing. Totally. 

There was also the side-benefit of this star I was experimenting on being smack dab in the middle of Stigmartus space. Those Chaos cultists still had a significant presence in the Sector despite, or maybe because, most of their planets got eaten by the expansion of the Hadex Anomaly and the Great Rift itself. Fuck those guys. Having this region of space wiped clean of life by an exploding stellar supergiant would do wonders for the safety of my domain. I’d calculated everything, and even if I managed to trigger the largest theoretically possible explosion, it wouldn’t reach any of my planets. They would be on the fringes, but at best they’d get a shower of intense stellar radiation that’d get swallowed up by the planets’ electromagnetic fields.

Besides, it wasn’t like most of my new citizens who still lived on ex-Imperial worlds had the lifespan to have to worry about increased chances of cancer a few decades down the line. 

Within 4 Lightyears of this star, everything would die in a few weeks of the stellar tsunami of death reaching them, their planetary surfaces quite literally getting cooked and their ozone layers ravaged so utterly no life would remain on them. 

Within 25 light-years, a mass-extinction event was guaranteed. Intense climate changes, wildfires, instant cancer if anyone went out during the day, what with the planets getting a shower of extremely radioactive cosmic rays for a few millennia that their half-destroyed ozone layer would do little to protect them from. That sort of thing. 

Within 100 Lightyears, a mass extinction event was just … pretty likely. They’d have to deal with climate disruptions, probably an ice age or a massive global warming, and the inability to send astronauts into space due to the radiation they were left unprotected from beyond the ozone layer. Life wouldn’t die out, probably, but human civilisation was very likely to collapse within a few years, and they’d still get instant late-stage cancer or some other mutation if they went out during the day.

It’s been theorised that a supernova within 65 Lightyears of Earth might have been what caused the devonian mass extinction 350 million years ago, for example, and an ice age roughly 2.5 million years ago had also been blamed on a more distant supernova.

Beyond that, it was pretty mild. Being within 150 Lightyears would suck for a bit, they too would probably get trapped on their planets if they didn’t have proper radiation shielding on all their void ships. I had a planet or two in that range, but they’d be fine. Besides, even the first wave would take centuries to reach those planets with the quite literally astronomical distance between the two points in space. 

I already had ten different experiments and theoretical angles to make this star go boom written out like the good little scientist I was. Honestly, I might not have bothered, but it pleased me immensely in some stupidly childish way to do things right after having had to waddle around in the minds of so many tech priests. 

The arrogance of those cretins, to think Mankind had already discovered everything there was to know about the universe and its nebulous laws during its Golden Age. I doubted even the Necrons at their height understood everything there was to know about the universe; I doubted any mortal mind would ever truly grasp it. Our sciences were mere models, mathematical frameworks modelled after observed phenomena in nature. Many of the greatest scientists I knew had quotes comparing mankind’s understanding of nature and its laws to a child’s grasping attempts at trying to understand the laws that govern the world of adults. 

I had seven different tests to run, one for each avenue of approach towards nudging this star closer to going supernova. I had all of them already written out in a neat little list with detailed objectives, methods and success criteria all professional-like. 

The first one was simple, one I named ‘Artificial Core Compression’, and what it did was … squeeze the star and see what happens, basically. I knew for certain that if I managed it and managed it while exerting sufficient force across the entire stellar surface, then it would work. 

But let me reassert one little fact: stars were really fucking big, and really fucking dense, and this was a supergiant, so it was even more so than the average main sequence stars. It was lingering at the upper edge of the category as it was. How much force would I need to exert? I didn't know. I was powerful, I’d fought Greater Daemons, I could wrestle with Primarchs — probably — and I’d danced an army of Necrons who wanted me dead. But what were they compared to a star? Specks of dust. 

Still, I did my best, gripping Atiesh in my hands for support as I wrapped my aura around the star like a cloak and pushed. All my senses were watching, and my aura tasted the star’s every quality to quantify the result of my efforts. Fusion rate ticked up dramatically, the core eating through its fuel at an accelerated pace. Then, based on that, I calculated how long I would have to keep this up to cause anything approaching a stellar collapse.

The answer was, disappointingly but perhaps expectably: millions of years. Considering the star shouldn’t have naturally gone supernova for billions of years yet, that was still impressive. To the star, that would be a mere blink of time, but for me it was too long. Far too long to be useful. 

I let up, and continued on with my experiments. Test 02 attempted to see whether manipulating the inflow of plasma to the core was possible, or if it could be achieved to deprive it of fuel altogether. If I could put a barrier between the core and the outer segments, or distance — lift the plasma away from the core then let it drop back down. I wasn’t strong enough. Not nearly strong enough to lift that much plasma. It wasn’t a surprise, really. Still, if I kept fiddling with it, playing with the stellar currents, diverting fuel and exacerbating instabilities, it might get the star to blow in a span of time somewhere between decades and thousands of years.

Test 03 traded brute force for extreme precision, attempting to see whether I could render the core inert by messing with the nuclear fusion reactions going on in there. I swiftly found that the answer was I couldn’t. That was molecular level stuff further away from my avatar than the Earth was from the Sun, and done across the entire stellar core. Which was under extreme gravitational pressure too. Still, I made a note to myself to hone the precision of my telekinesis. There was promise in trying to make it work on the molecular, or even atomic level. I liked the idea of being a one-woman nanoforge quite a bit. 

Test 04 was … well, perhaps the most human of my ideas. Laziness was often the cradle of brilliance, and simplistic solutions often vastly outperformed overly complicated stuff. So I started tugging asteroids over to the star and chucking them in. Then I managed to divert the closest dwarf planet from its orbit and threw it in too. Sooner or later, the star’s mass would grow too large too fast for it to maintain cohesion. If I could pull in a planet every month, it would take mere years to cause a supernova, but there were only two more in the system and they were far away. I’d have to resort to chucking asteroids, which pushed the timeframe back to thousands of years. 

Test 05 was stupid, and only worked on white dwarves, but I included it all the same for later reference even though I passed over it without testing it out in this instance. 

Test 06 wasn’t a standalone thing, but a supporting technique. Altering neutrino flow directly and energy transportation during a collapse could make a halfhearted nova into a cataclysmic supernova if I played it right.

That left me with Test 07, the most promising one out of the bunch. For extremely massive stars the core could become so energetic that gamma rays convert into electron-positron pairs. This only happened in truly titanic stars that were on the very edge of how large physics allowed a star to get, and this also meant they were rather unstable by nature. Stars were considered supergiants from 8 solar masses upwards, but this phenomenon only occurred within stars between 100 and 300 solar masses. Luckily, the one before me was roughly at 150 solar masses.

Less gamma rays means less radiation pressure, a force which was crucial for keeping the star from collapsing under its own immense weight and gravitational force, so its removal was very likely to cause catastrophic collapse and explosive oxygen burning.

What I was going to do was simple: Raise core temperature and density — only the core itself, not the star as a whole like in the failed previous Test — until radiation pressure weakens, through Psychokinetic means. Impart slowly rising telekinetic force on the stellar core, or increase heat directly if it’s feasible possible. Observe the resulting instability and exacerbate it if possible through the use of the Method from Test 06.

If all went to plan, the star would go kaboom so hard that not even a neutron star or black hole would be born from its ashes. 

I was only minutes into testing, slowly ramping up the force I was exerting on the core over the duration, when I felt it start to work. The core was already extremely energetic, which was expected for a star of this size, but now it was growing unstable. I leaned into it, doing my best to exacerbate the instability as I put my substantial multitasking capabilities to work. I had tens of thousands of thoughtstreams running at the same time, powered by mind-cores spread through my realm. 

I exerted the pressure on the core, willed it to grow hotter, and I even dedicated a sliver of my focus to willing it to grow unstable. Maybe it was Atiesh’s minor reality warping capabilities lending me the ability, but it seemed to work. Over the course of the next ten minutes, the instability grew and I sensed exactly what I’d been wanting to see: gamma rays rapidly diminishing in number and the radiation pressure keeping the core intact faltering.

Then it broke. The stellar core went CRUNCH and the entire star seemed to take in a very deep breath as its electromagnetic field ran haywire.