The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (heaven official's blessing novel english .txt) 📗

G, he could not find any common features. The fact that all of them belonged to G was due to himself, because he considered only G-type main sequence stars as candidates. After all, red dwarfs with their possible solar-flare outbursts shone too unreliably, so the spectral class didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the process which extinguished the stars.

But it could. If that were true, who, of all beings, would be targeting sun-like stars? And why?

The spectral-class question still needed to be answered: Numerous planets had been found in the orbit of red dwarfs. But this class of stars had the unpleasant habit of regularly sterilizing the planets orbiting them by means of flares. The sun and its siblings, on the other hand, burned persistently and fairly steadily, which was conducive to the emergence of life.

So if you knocked out sun-like stars, you prevented or destroyed life. Peter had read enough science fiction novels to immediately think of some machine intelligence that had made it its business to wipe out biological life. But of course this was pure speculation. Why waste time on idle speculation?

For the last step today, he had to go downstairs to the living room. The steps creaked under his feet. He had always thought that they would need to have a lift installed at some point if one of them was no longer mobile enough for stairs. But if Franziska now found she preferred to spend her life without him, why would she still need the stairlift? Peter’s laugh echoed in the hallway. These were such completely pointless thoughts he had to shoo them out of his head.

As soon as the astral projector transferred him into the universe, such extraneous thoughts had no room anymore. He was back in the inner solar system. The illusion was so perfect! Once, shortly after he acquired the device, they’d made love among the stars. That had been a completely surreal experience—he hadn’t even felt the carpet on the living room floor. When the simulated, three-dimensional universe started moving, even gravity seemed to suspend momentarily.

The brain can be easily tricked. It has only a limited experience and can do little with the boundlessness of the universe. A pity, actually. Would this change in the future, when humanity would consider a stay in space as normal?

Peter took his cell phone out of his pocket. He had something planned. He quickly copied the data from the tracking app into the control of the astral projector. The image changed. Earth, Mars, and Venus disappeared. Instead, nine quail-egg-sized objects now blinked in space. Peter walked between them. He did not dare to call up the stored spherical shell again, because if the new finds were not on it, he would be at his wit’s end.

No—he couldn’t help it—he pressed the button that brought the stored representation to life. A shell magically erected itself. In the process, it captured one blinking star after another. It worked! Lambda Aurigae was already sitting right. HD 10307 was a bit off. The apparent position in the sky and the spatial position in the universe were just different. The rounded, elegant shining shell worked its way unshakably through space. The sun had long since sunk into it, as had the five stars of the southern sky that Holinger’s team found. And finally, it was HD 10307’s turn.

He was right! All nine lost stars spanned a common spherical shell. Was that still coincidence?

Some would say so. Others, not so. He had to be honest with himself. It might look less like a coincidence, but nine was not a smoking gun. Fifteen would be good. Fifteen would no longer be a coincidence. He just needed to locate more of the lost stars.

March 9, 2026 – Passau

The weather sucked, he was running out of time, and then this news had to arrive before his morning coffee! Peter pounded his fist against the side of his chair until his hand hurt. What could he say about that? He started typing a response, but he couldn’t think of an argument. Frustrated, he scrolled back to her text.

“Dear Mr. Kraemer,” wrote the astronomer from Stockholm, to whom he’d emailed his results yesterday. “I understand your impatience very well. It afflicts us all regularly. It is a part of the researcher’s life. Ideas shoot up quickly and gratuitously from the humus of our thinking, but to let them mature into a flower or to weed them, we need a crazy amount of time, during which new ideas have also been sprouting, which also want to be nurtured.”

She was not a particularly good poet. Holinger probably worked in her garden as a diversion. Peter had never been much for gardening. What he liked best was an enchanted dreamscape like Sleeping Beauty’s.

“On the two additional candidates you have tracked down, I congratulate you. I can confirm that they cannot be found, even via the Institute’s large telescope. So the discovery credit is entirely yours.”

As if that had been his point! But it was probably important to many hobby astronomers.

“Unfortunately, the two new stars do not contribute to an overarching theory, at least as far as I could tell from a brief survey. As before, there were hardly any similarities to be found, and there should be if one were to assume a common cause for the disappearances. Apart from the positions on the spherical shell, of course, which, however, seem to me too insignificant as the only connection.”

Yes, he realized that, too. But how was he supposed to make progress if the weather didn’t cooperate? And if Franziska really did return, he would need to have closed this issue. Otherwise, she’d be gone away again, maybe for good.

“We will include the positions in our next observing cycle. My personal guess is that we will find evidence of dark clouds there as well. Perhaps there is a connection between the formation of sun-like stars and the existence of such dark