Iron Sunrise

Shuddering, Wednesday shuffled backward, pushing the heavy desk over as she stood up. She looked around wildly. The dog’s hind legs scrabbled at the floor, driving it after her. She could see a glow of rage in its eyes as it struggled with the sticky antiperso

Something cold and wet stubbed itself against the back of her neck, and snuffled damply. She sagged, her knees and stomach turning to sacks of ice water; paw-fingers like bone clamped tight on her shoulders, holding her upright. Her eyelid monitor flickered, then died as the lights came up. The hound on the floor seemed to grin up at her — no, past her. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly human, a deep gravelly growl converging from three directions. “Victoria Strowger, this is emergency police pack four-alpha. By order of Captain Ma

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 12 hours, 38 minutes

Twenty-two minutes past departure time and the dogs had rounded up the last stray lamb, herding her into the service lock. Captain Ma

Twenty-two minutes! More than a thousand seconds overdue! There was room for slippage on the critical path — nobody would be insane enough not to make some allowances — but with five thousand passengers, twenty-two minutes meant all of five person-years of consumables gone just like that, virtually in an eyeblink. The refugee pods had an open-loop life-support system, there being no room for recycling tankage on this relief flight, so the whole exercise was ru

“What’s our criticality profile looking like?” he demanded, leaning over to glare at Gertrude’s station.

“Ah, all nominal, sir.” Gertrude stared fixedly ahead, refusing to meet his eye.

“Then keep it that way,” he snapped. “Misha! That tank of yours!”

“Vented and closed out within tolerances.” Misha gri

“Good.” Ma

The robotically smooth voice of the autopilot rolled across the bridge. “Kerberos unit and final passenger boarding notified two minutes ago and counting. Critical path elements in place. Entry status green, no exceptions raised—”

“Then commence launch cycle immediately.”

“Aye. Launch cycle commencing. Station power and utility disco

“I hate live cargo,” Gertrude muttered. “Live cargo spin-down notification going out.” Fingers tapped invisible cells in the air in front of her face. “Hub lift interlocks to safe—”

Ma

Finally, the ship was ready to depart.

IMPACT: T plus 8 minutes — 1.5 hours

Moscow system died at the speed of light, death rippling outward on a tsunami of radiation.

First to die were the weather satellites, close in on the star, watching for solar flares and prominences. Buoys built to track breezes were ripped adrift by the tornado blast of the artificially induced nova, not so much disabled as evaporated, adding their stripped nuclei to the boiling fury of the iron sunrise.

Seconds later the radiation pulse melted the huge, flimsy solar collectors that glided in stately orbit half an astronomical unit out, feeding power to antimatter generators a hundred kilometers in diameter. Robot factories unattended by humans passed unmourned and u

Eight minutes after detonation, the radiation front reached the i

Half an hour into the nova, the process of planetary disintegration was well under way. On the dayside, Moscow’s atmospheric pressure dropped drastically, and the primary gaseous constituents were hydrogen and oxygen radicals stripped from the boiling fog that had been the boreal ocean. Cloud top temperatures were already in the thousands of degrees, while Mach waves rippled through the turgid troposphere on the nightside, crushing houses like matchwood kindling to become pyres for the dying bodies of their occupants. The night receded before a ghastly daylight, the sullen glare of an exploding star reflected off the planet’s own comet trail of air. To an observer at ground level Moscow Prime would have covered half the sky, a magnesium flare of radiant energy that would still be bright enough to burn out eyeballs tens of trillions of kilometers away. The main shock wave of the explosion was approaching by then, a wave of plasma flash-heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, barely less dense than the dissipated atmosphere and traveling outward at 20 percent of lightspeed. When it arrived, Moscow vanished — swallowed like a watermelon at ground zero in the expanding fireball of an atomic explosion.