"Light"

The bluish radiance filling the cockpit was enough to put the beginnings of a migraine behind my eyes in seconds. I ducked my head low and shielded my eyes. “Jamie, tone that down.” I yelled at the computer, trying to peek at the controls without putting more of the headache-inducing blue into my head.

“I did, Captain. You’re viewing at 99% opacity. I can’t dim it any more without full opacity.” The prissy voice of the ship’s computer responded.

“Well then give me that.“ I rolled my eyes. For all the intelligence of modern computers, they could be surprisingly dumb. The cockpit viewports hummed, and the blue glow vanished from top to bottom. The cabin lights seemed hopelessly dim by comparison, but they let me see the status indicators. Position was as expected from the last jump, but something had to explain that light. “How’s the hull temperature?”

“Heating on forward planes is significant, but the cooling system is compensating. Aft sections unaffected.” Jamie replied. “No immediate danger.”

I nodded pointlessly. Directional, naturally. So it was something I was still outside of. I pulled up the interpolated system map. According to the data I’d had on departure, I should have come out of slipspace about thirteen A.U. from the primary star, not facing it. “Did the reversion go as planned?”

“No indication otherwise, but sixty percent of sensor equipment is under protective shutdown so that has not been confirmed.” Jamie replied, managing to sound vaguely like it was chiding me for not guessing that myself.

I hit the thrusters to bring the little ship about, angling the prow away from the anomalous light. I always hated flying blind, a holdover from my days flying Tanto interceptors,  but in reality being able to physically see the space in front of me wouldn’t matter much. “Soon as the cockpit’s in shade, take the opacity down as far as it’s safe.” I commanded, watching the status of the thrusters that had been sitting in that hellish light for some minutes.

Ten seconds later, the black panels of the viewports hummed again and the stars peeked in. Some of the sensors came back on automatically, and Jamie spoke up. “Based solely on triangulation to local stars, the insertion was accurate, uncertainty of calculation, eight A.U.”

Eight A.U. was a lot, but it was hard to expect more when the closest point of reference was ten light-years distant. “Okay. So assume we’re there. Give me a heading for the stellar primary.”

The number appeared on one of my displays, and I nudged the thrusters again. The stars swiveled away, then dimmed into darkness as a tiny white-yellow disk crept into view and was compensated for. Even at thirteen times the earth-sun distance, it was impossible to see distant stars when the viewports were compensating for a local one. “That’s the primary?” I asked.

“By all indications it is.” Jamie answered.

“What’s the blue then?”

“I can’t answer that question with the current dataset.” The computer replied simply. Of course not. It couldn’t brainstorm, that’s why there was a human pilot for these survey runs, in this case me.

“Could it be a rogue star?” I asked.

“Unlikely that telescopics didn’t locate a blue star. All known blue-spectrum star types are large enough to be detected by telescope at this range.”

“Maybe it’s new?” I asked. Telescopes of course used light centuries or millennia old to analyze a new system. In stellar life spans, it was essentially immediate, but some things did happen instantaneously.

“There is no known phenomenon possible in the system as we know it capable of generating powerful luminosity on such timescales.” Jamie replied, after a few seconds of delay. I was making it think. That was always a perverse pleasure.

“What if a Jovian went stellar?” I asked. It was theoretically possible, but unheard of.

“An object near minimum stellar mass doesn’t have the energy for short-wavelength blue light to predominate.” Jamie chided me, as if I should have known that.

Hmm. I called up a star chart. “Overlay our current position and facing on this.” I tapped the display, and Jamie complied. A little red arrow appeared on top of a star near the middle. I traced my finger backwards from the arrow, into empty space. Nothing for a hundred light-years even slightly close to that heading. Farther than that... Five hundred light years. At around eight hundred, my finger paused over a bloated blue star with a tiny white companion, surrounded by blobs of gas. The display supplied a name: Eta Carinae. “What if it were coming from there?”

“Current data does not contradict Eta Carinae as source of aberrant luminosity.” Jamie replied I scowled at the computer’s preprogrammed hedging.

“Will spectroscopy work with this brightness?” I asked.

“It should. Shall I bring the nose around to analyze?”

“Yes. Look for iron lines in the spectrum.” I had a bad feeling I knew what this was, and it wasn’t good for anyone.

The ship spun again, and the viewports blacked out. I waited for over a minute before Jamie announced the results. “Spectra contain distinct iron lines. Closest spectra match are to data from SN2141A.”

I took a deep breath. Okay. I was right. Iron in stellar spectra meant either a supernova or an impending one, I remembered that from basic astrophysics. Judging by that blue glare, I guessed that old Eta Carinae had finally popped. “Can we calculate a slipspace insertion?”

“Our mission here isn’t complete.” Jamie reminded me.

“It is now. I’m calling this one in.”

“Aye, Captain.” The computerized voice managed to sound a little miffed, as if it was looking forward to surveying this stellar system. “Re-orienting for insertion. Stand by.”

The possibilities wheeled in my head. A supernova in our galaxy? What would happen when that wave of light hit inhabited worlds? What about the inevitable blast of high-energy particles behind it? I knew enough astrophysics to worry. The blast lasted days, and outshone every other star in the galaxy in that time. Probably irradiated everything for a thousand light-years to boot.

Then I remembered that I wouldn’t be around to see any of that. The blast front would move at the speed of plodding light, crawling across space. Terra was almost seven thousand light-years farther from the exploding star than this system, which I’d never got a look at. The nearest colony, though, wasn't too much farther than here, certainly too close for safety.

Then sense smoothed over my panic. The time frames involved were long. Hundreds of years. Surely humanity would have a solution in time, given such an ample warning.

Right?

 This story is part of my attempt to finish the 100 prompts challenge posted in the short story competition at RPGCrossing.com.