The hydrogue gas planet, dead now for thousands of years, was nothing more than a burned-out scar in space. “No signs of life at all,” said Subcommander Ramirez. After deploying the Klikiss Torch at Ptoro, Tasia had managed to get her navigator and some of the other competent bridge officers promoted one grade. “Residual thermal readings, molecular and heavy-element by-products from nuclear burning, but this obviously started out as a gas supergiant, not a natural star. Must have been Torched a long time ago.”
Chief Scientist Palawu’s analysis had identified twenty-one small, dead stars with anomalous signatures. As her survey ship approached the cold cinder, the sensors verified that this was clearly another remnant of an incinerated hydrogue world. Tasia felt a lingering anger tempered with smugness. “Glad we weren’t the only ones to give the drogue bastards a hotfoot.”
As soon as he learned of Palawu’s discovery, Admiral Stromo had called for an expedition to investigate these old hydrogue graveyards. This was the fourth such burned-out planet her survey team had visited.
As her Manta orbited the dim, lifeless world, Tasia’s crew took volumes of images. She imagined how this planet might have looked before the Torch, an immense ball of pale clouds, the sort of place where Roamers could have operated profitable skymines. Now, after millennia, the artificial sun had burned out all its raw fuel. Some of the exotic materials and supermolecules left behind might have been interesting, but she doubted even eccentric Kotto Okiah would have had the nerve to poke into a place like that.
The EDF hoped that by performing postmortem analyses on these murdered planets they could learn more about the long-term effectiveness of the Torch. Tasia had the sneaking suspicion that General Lanyan simply wanted to gloat over places where the hydrogues had been resoundingly defeated.
In a few thousand years, Ptoro would look similar to this, burning out as all its fuel was exhausted. Oncier, too—if the drogues hadn’t already snuffed that one out, as Tasia had witnessed with her own eyes.
“Log it,” she said after two hours. “We’ve got the rest of this list to confirm.”
At their next stop, Tasia and her crew sat back in awe to see the system’s main star completely under siege. The gas giant itself was dark and cold, burned out long ago. Now the hydrogues were targeting the much larger central sun.
In a furious battle, ellipsoidal faeros fireballs swarmed upward, clashing against literally millions of warglobes that lunged in like piranhas. Bolts of incredible energy lashed back and forth, while the hydrogues drove their diamond spheres through the fringes of the hot corona and skated over the outer layers of plasma, unleashing titanic weapons from above.
Tasia had seen a similar battle at the test site of Oncier, but that ignited gas giant had been only a small dwarf star—this was a full-size sun, a vastly larger battleground on which the hydrogues and faeros fought each other. Giant loops of solar flares rose upward, spewing plasma flames that curled back around, falling into the roiling sun like blood spurting from a severed artery.
Warglobes pressed closer, swarming in space. The faeros defenders crashed into them, fireballs engulfing the diamond spheres so that both were obliterated. Volley after volley of hydrogue ships streamed in from outside the system, enough glinting reinforcements to blot out the star.
“Take your readings and let’s get the hell out of here,” Tasia said. “Shizz, look at those blasts!”
A column of dense ionized gas rocketed up from the surface of the sun to engulf a flurry of warglobes, shattering the enemy vessels. Tasia wondered if the faeros themselves had tinkered with the mechanics of the star, altered its physics to use the flare as a weapon.
“What the hell are we doing in this war?” Sergeant Zizu said, his voice no more than an awed whisper.
More warglobes arrived, unleashing retaliatory strikes. Because a hydrogue gas planet in this system had been snuffed out by the Klikiss Torch long ago, Tasia wondered if the deep-core aliens bore a grudge. Were their memories long enough to harbor revenge for ten thousand years?
Of course they were.
Flares continued to shoot up like cannon blasts. Tasia slumped back in her command chair, once again feeling incredibly small in this enormous and ancient conflict.
“On the bright side,” she muttered, “with the faeros and the hydrogues kicking each other’s butts, they’re too busy to come after us.”