The home system of the Siohonin was busy. Even after the war, when the temporal entity known as Sebreac Tharr had led the Siohonin on an ill-advised campaign of conquest, the population of the Dolsulca system numbered in the hundreds of billions. On the displays, Kuthis could see the myriad dots of space freighters and passenger liners travelling between the inhabited worlds and the many, many spaceborne arcologies. The Empire had taken over the government, was instituting reforms to the Siohonin social system - but it was taking time, and there was an immense amount of work still to do. And, in the meantime, KDF vessels like Kuthis's Vor'cha cruiser were tasked with patrolling the system, keeping the traffic in some sort of order, and watching for outbreaks of trouble. The Siohonin had made no friends in the galaxy with their brutal invasion... but there were always troublemakers, somewhere....
Today, though, everything seemed to be normal enough. Kuthis scowled at the main screen. He was Klingon, he felt the need for action - any kind of action. System patrols were necessary, he knew, but they were dull -
"Sensor contact, grid sixteen." The Orion science officer, Sesvedba, spoke in her musical voice. Kuthis turned towards her.
"What is it?" he demanded.
"Unknown. Whatever it is...." Her perfect jade brow wrinkled in a frown. "That can't be right. Closed to grid twelve already... it must be moving at high transwarp speed. Very high."
"Bring the ship to alert," Kuthis ordered. "Come about. Is this - whatever it is - coming out of warp?"
"Warp signature shows deceleration. But these readings - I've never seen anything like it." Sesvedba bit her lip. "Triangulating now -"
The display on the main screen flickered, broke up into static for a moment, then reformed. "What was that?" Kuthis snapped.
"Energy surge. Whatever it was, it came out of subspace at high speed. Equivalent of - that can't be right." Sesvedba shook her head. "It says, at least warp fifty."
"Get me a long-range scan. What is it?"
"Working." Sesvedba tapped busily at her console. "Well, it's a ship... configuration not registered... small, maybe around corvette sized...."
Kuthis strode back to his command chair. "Feed me the details. I have heard of something like this -" He sat down heavily, and engaged his command console. He was trying to think. Something about a renegade with a very fast ship - an intelligence briefing -
"It's powering up drives. We are still well outside effective combat range," said Sesvedba. "Warp field established - the parameters look very strange. Engaging -" She shook her head. "It's away. Same super-fast speed. We can't possibly pursue it, and the warp contrail will diffuse to nothing in a few minutes -"
"Got it." Kuthis snapped his fingers. "Combination subtranswarp and asynchronous warp field. Used by the renegade Kalevar Thrang - I have the intel files here. But why -?"
"What would Thrang want here?" Sesvedba asked. "And he was here less than a minute -"
"We do not know it was Thrang. He might have sold on that technology to others." Kuthis was thinking hard. "Here less than a minute. Time to make a pickup, perhaps, if there was a vessel close by - but there was not. Or time to launch something - Scan. Tachyon detection for cloaks, and check all exotic frequency ranges. He might have dropped a package for some passing freighter to pick up. Or a guided delivery drone -"
"Engaging full scan mode. Tachyon detection online." The displays shifted and changed, showing the input from the Chisaro's sensor suite. Kuthis was glaring at his console, watching as it flashed up further intelligence briefings.
"I have something," Sesvedba reported. "Cloaked - travelling at high velocity - no life signs." She turned towards the captain. "I don't understand. It's moving directly towards the sun. Exotic energy signature - on the screen now -"
Kuthis's eyes widened. "Plot an intercept!" he roared.
"Sir, there's no way - it's outstripping our best impulse speed -"
"Get me within weapons range!" Kuthis jumped to his feet and ran to the comms console, brushing the communications officer out of the way. His hand slammed down on the controls. "All vessels! All vessels in the Dolsulca system! This is the Chisaro! Emergency evacuation! There is a trilithium warhead inbound towards the sun! Warp out! Warp out now!"
---
Trilithium began as an academic curiosity.
The development of dilithium crystal technology led, inevitably, to further research, into how the crystals manipulated and focused energy, and how they might be developed to do it better. Trilithium, a variant compound with a triple enfolding of the crystalline structure, seemed to show promise - except that, in practice, it seemed to negate the generation of energy completely, at least for brief moments of time. And it was horrifically difficult to produce, hellishly unstable, prone to explode at the slightest provocation. For a while, its only practical application was as an explosive -
Then Dr. Tolian Soran worked out how to apply it, and trilithium stopped being a curiosity, and became a weapon of mass destruction.
The complex enfolding of trilithium's crystals did not negate energy, but transported it, moving it outside normal space-time, into subspace - for a few moments. When that energy returned to normal space, it was as a momentary, and often explosive, flash. Soran's contribution was to stabilize and extend the trilithium reaction, so that a small quantity of the material could transform all energy in a globe several light-seconds across -
The trilithium warhead that struck the star Dolsulca sucked the energy out of the entire star. A chromospheric research station, heavily shielded in the star's corona, was caught in the radius, and everyone aboard died instantly, their temperature reduced to absolute zero. They were the first.
A star is a complex balancing act, between the force of gravity dragging everything inwards, and the pressure of heat and radiation forcing everything outwards. When Dolsulca was robbed of its radiation output, gravity won the battle: the star began to collapse. Almost immediately, though, compression and friction in the core of the sun began to re-ignite it. Under the immense force of gravity, atoms crashed together and fused: hydrogen to helium, helium to beryllium, helium and beryllium to carbon, higher and higher up the periodic table... and the star began to glow again.
Then the stolen energy came back out of subspace and flooded into the star once more. Randomized, the radiation pressure worked as much inwards as outwards, further squeezing and compressing the core, promoting yet more fusion into yet more exotic elements, unstable heavy nuclei that disintegrated almost at once, yielding yet more energy... and the seesaw swung back, with a vengeance.
To observers in the system, the star appeared to go completely dark for a second or so - and then glowed again, glowed with an ever-increasing light, flaring with a blinding intensity, reaching a peak of more than fifty thousand times its normal luminosity... unleashing a hail of hard radiation, x-rays and gamma rays and cosmic rays, that no material object within several AUs could hope to withstand.
The massive Siohonin space colonies vanished like snowflakes in the mouth of a blast furnace. The inner planets boiled.
Some of the gas giants in the outer system survived the radiation flare - and some space habitats, orbiting on the night sides of those planets, were shielded from the flare and lived. It made no difference. The immense energy liberated at the star's core threw its outer layers into space, blasting outwards as a globe of ionized plasma, expanding at a respectable fraction of the speed of light. Nothing in the system could stand before that blast wave.
The Klingon governor's residence was on the day side of the Siohonin homeworld when the star flared. It, and the people in it, and the continent it stood on, simply boiled away in the killing glare. And somewhere, in a computer memory - in a stack of messages long since disregarded as mere crank calls and empty threats - a counter reached 00:00:00:00.
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