The crushed-star core of an aging star collapses. Then, it doesn’t do so quietly, nor does it pay the slightest polite deference to load-bearing building tolerances.
Matter falling inward under gravity’s grip accelerates to a quarter the speed of light. Under billions of sea-weights of pressure, ordinary core structures get crushed out of existence. Sky-high electrons slam into core nuclei, merging with protons in wild runaway reactions. That process transforms ordinary matter into pure, dense neutrons while shedding a huge flood of high-energy neutrinos.
When that infalling mountain of nuclear matter slams into the unbending, incompressible quantum wall of neutron crush-limit pressure, it behaves exactly like a solid rubber ball dropped onto a hardened cast-iron anvil from orbit.
It stops dead in its tracks. And then, with terrifying, sky-high violence, it rebounds.
Austin was standing in the boarding airlock of Dreadnought 01, checking the battery charge on his heavy cordless back-and-forth saw with his thumb resting on the four-bar LED indicator, when that rebound struck his dantian.
It felt less like a spiritual breakthrough and more like being struck squarely in the solar nerve web by a runaway sixty-ton diesel locomotive hauling thirty carloads of wet concrete.
THUUUUUUMP-KRAAAAA.
A deep, sub-heard blast wave pulsed through his ribs. His boots, clamped magnetically to the diamond-plate deck, groaned as the heavy silver-steel deck plates beneath his feet bowed downward by a visible three-quarters of an inch. Austin let out a sharp, ragged gasp of air, dropping the back-and-forth saw to the deck…
