Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) Read Free Page A

reach the necessary depth within the star. Had the
penetration vehicle been using standard combat shields it would have been
destroyed almost instantaneously, but Paul had some quick swapouts done in Sol to replace the shields with the absorption variety. Calibrated
using the data from the Prometheus, the shields were designed to soak up the
energy from this star, taking that power and redeploying it into the shield
matrix. If the calibration was off part of the destructive power would get
through and kill the bomb before it had a chance to detonate, so there was no
way of knowing if the first attempt was going to be successful or not other
than to wait for the bang.
    Paul had brought 15 for a reason, and it wasn’t just
to shake up the surface levels multiple times. If some additional tweaking of
the shield matrixes had to be done, he didn’t want to have to run back to Sol
again to get some more…not that they had that many on hand. The yields were so
great that there wasn’t much cause to build them, though he’d really like the
chance to throw a few against the lizard shipyard rings.
    That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so their
limited supply was just sitting and collecting dust when he dropped by the
vault to pick them up. Hopefully now they could be put to a more productive
use.
    They weren’t all the same make, and the one he’d just
sent down to the star was a concussion model, designed to be detonated within a
medium and use the surrounding material as the destructive force. Had it been
detonated in space it would still do damage at close range, but couldn’t affect
much of anything across a vacuum, for the energy matrix had an expansion
distance of less than a kilometer. It would push through it so fast that
anything hit would be thrown out violently, but beyond that boundary line the
energy fueling the push fizzled.
    That wouldn’t be an issue within the star, for the
density of material surrounding it was more than enough to trigger a huge blast
wave…if it detonated.
    Paul watched the clock ticking off the seconds, not
knowing for sure how fast the penetration vehicle could descend. It had a small
gravity drive to pull it through the stellar matter, but there was no way to
know how it would respond because nothing like this had been tried before. The
only data they had was from the shield columns dipping down into the star, for
research into the internal dynamics was pointless considering the database in
the pyramid.
    That meant to date Star Force hadn’t sent any physical
probes down into any star, nor could they have until the recent development of
the absorption shields. Paul was fairly certain this would work, but there was
no way to know for sure other than chucking one in and seeing what happened.
    The Prometheus was situated 120 kilometers above the surface of the star, but stellar
fluctuations had bits of atmosphere tickling its own absorption shields,
meaning there wasn’t a definitive boundary above the somewhat chaotic
exterior…that became a lot more chaotic when the bomb detonated. It took time
for the shockwave to hit the surface, but when it did a huge bump formed,
rising up several kilometers before breaking and shooting out a shower of
stellar matter halfway up to the Star Forge before gravity started dragging it
back down again.
    Paul watched and waited, seeing a shield column begin
extending down from the Prometheus following the retreat of the glowing stellar material. It punched down inside
it even as it was churning about, then the telemetry feed from Henderson showed
it push down even further, eventually spreading out its tendrils like a growing
tree.
    He saw some of them disappear, snapping under the
strain of the turbulence, but others remained and continued to sprout more
roots. Soon a glowing tendril began to shoot up from the surface, traveling in
the lift column and eventually reaching the Prometheus where it was taken
inside and separated into its constituent