There are explosions that shatter stone, explosions that level cities, and explosions that split world-size continents along earth-shaking faults.
And then there is the explosive spreading of fifty quintillion tons of white-hot stellar star-fire bouncing off an incompressible, crushed-star neutron core at twenty thousand miles per second.
When Austin’s core flashed, the universe ceased to possess shadows.
A dome of pure, blinding white light erupted from behind his chest bone. It surged through his heavy denim work shirt and his padded void-suit, tearing outward into the empty pocket of space at the speed of light. This blast was no ordinary fire. It hit like a solid wall of pure heat wave pressure—five hundred sun-blasts of raw sun-hot fury. The heat stripped electrons from heavy elements, shattered core bonds, and turned iron into a swirling, white-hot soup of naked nuclei and high-speed specks.
Austin stood on the central watching narrow high walkway of the Geosynchronous Ring. He didn’t close his eyes.
Behind the dark glass of his Shade-14 welding goggles, the hundred-gigakelvin core bounce looked like the sudden opening of a blast fire door in the heart of creation. High-speed beta specks tore through the thin leftover gases of the exosphere, bathing his five-foot, twenty-pound Stellar-Steel pipe wrench in a fierce electric-cobalt glare.
