Empress of Starlight
Empress of Starlight G. David Nordley Somebody was stealing stars. “A star eight times the mass of the Sun doesn’t just suddenly disappear,” Dr. Amber Cloud said, quietly, from her office at the rim of Shackleton Crater, Luna. “It isn’t completely gone. There’s a coincident infrared source,” Tony M’tonka replied three seconds later, bringing up a display of IC 2602, with the vanishing star’s location marked. “And a pair of very faint polar jets. So something’s still there.” “Uh-huh.” Amber said. Even in the twenty-third century, graduate students should be kept guessing as to what their professors were thinking. “Not only that,” Tony continued. “But the Galactic Library files show this has happened be - fore, at roughly twenty-million-year intervals. A new high mass star fades away just after it settles down to the main sequence. But it isn’t gone. Ten million years later or so it shows up again, ready to expand into a subgiant, as if nothing had happened. Then, after another million years or so, it happens again.” “Uh-huh,” Amber said. “My best guess is that it’s a Dyson swarm moving from star to star built by a Kardeshev class two civilization at work on something.” “Uh-huh.” A teaching moment. “Tony, how do you define Kardeshev class two civilization?” He frowned. “Okay, I’ll bite. A classic Kardeshev class two civilization used all the energy of a star; hence a Dyson sphere, almost by definition.” “Uh-huh. But, human beings, and every other star-traveling civilization known, use a small part of the energy of many different stars.
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