Quoted By:
“The megastructure encircling Mizar enforces our will using the only language a star can ever know.
Gravity.
Sonorous and grim, it pushes against the photosphere, projected by threshing emitters vast enough to span a lunar orbit. At the contact point, weight-flux forces plasma-spall to spill off the corona in great coruscating waves: giving birth to a new generation of sunspots that dapple Mizar’s sapphired face.
The breach point becomes an indent – then an open wound. The machine does not relent, and it continues to press – through the photon-rich shallows and the plasma-clouded littorals. Through the radiation-rich photopic layer and the magnetized chromosphere. It continues until it reaches the star’s nuclear burning heart, which delights in its ample supply of light hydrogen and sweet helium. Mizar is bright, but it is young - well-removed from the reaction chains that would herald the twilight years of its stellar lifecycle.
But decrepitude has found it still.
The gravity spike wraps around the core and constricts, introducing baryonic impurities designed to poison thermonuclear reactivity. The core tumbles down the elemental table. Sweet helium to salty alkaline metals. Alkaline elements to clumsy chalcogens and acrid halogens.
Compensation. The photosphere balloons outward, cooling from oceanic blue to pale-orange. It races past the gravitational emitters in a tantrum of roiling plasma.
But the emitters have already done their duty, and the core falls further still. Halogens to heavy transition metals. These nuclei fuse slowly, reluctantly – hoarding the nuclear binding energy they had once given charitably.
Bargaining. The photosphere balloons again as the star negotiates with unyielding gravity, bartering for life in the simple currency of density and radiation pressure. The two innermost planets – the closest of Mizar’s planetary children – dissolve into vapor and free ions.
But gravity cannot be negotiated with, and core can fall no further. Transition metals give way to elemental iron. Cold iron. Dead iron.
Failure. The photosphere expands until it envelops the remainder of the inner system – until its outer surface makes a final attempt to clutch at the RAIN’s sun-burnished hull. The ruined spaceships, the moons – the vacuum-burned corpses. The tattered remnants of the Mizarian homeward itself. All it disappears, conjoined to their solar parent as it spirals towards stellar death.
A pause.
