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Coroner To The Stars
Area: talk.bizarre Date: 28 Jan 94 22:51:36 From: nikolai kingsley To: all Subj: Coroner to The Stars You could never rely on visual evidence, out here. It moved too slowly. Most of the places we went were so far apart that if someone did something stupid like throwing three neutronium masses in orbit around someone else's sun to make it look triangular, no-one would find out about it until the photons had struggled across the intervening space, which there was usually one fuck of a lot of. Too much to think about, usually. So we didn't. We hitched rides with the NoSanNoOs, and collated reports from our observation centres. Or sometimes, as in this case, we noted the absence of the weekly updates, which were usually wordy missives on the order of 'no change'. It was formerly a two-planet system, neither of them inhabitable by humans. One world a dry, airless rock only marginally larger than Earth's moon; the other, a bloated grey-green gas giant that had a surfeit of muck that no-one had found a profitable way to exploit yet. The sun was ordinary; around fifteen million kilometres in diameter and around four and a half thousand degrees Celsius. According to the records. It was difficult for observers to verify this, because the sun in question was missing. It had been there one week. The next, it wasn't. Whatever had happened to it had also happened to the observation outpost and the innermost of the two planets. There were some pieces of the gas giant left, although from looking at it you couldn't tell that it had been a gas giant. It looked more like a gas midget. That was it. No excess hydrogen, no EM traces, no gravitics, not so much as a goddamn neutrino over the standard count for empty space, which was what we found when the ship arrived. Great. Not a damn thing to go on. I hated cases like this. Just as well they don't crop up that often. |
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