For a time, a brief time, the satellite held firm, retained its near-spherical shape. But then the new and violent tidal stresses on it began to take hold.
The core, for billions of years at the focus of Charon’s gravity field, was suddenly at the gravity field’s periphery. Like a ship that has lost its anchor, Charon was suddenly a world cut adrift from the ancient gravity well that had molded it, formed it over all the lonely aeons of its existence. With the loss of gravity’s anchoring effects, the worldlet began to crumble. First the surface matter, and then more and more core material began to fall upward, toward the new gravitic locus.
Ancient crater fields trembled, shuddered, smashed themselves to pieces as impossible landslides slumped sideways over the surface, pounding and tumbling toward the locus. Deep in the interior, layers of frozen gas and rock that had not moved in a billion years began to shift, bulge upward toward the locus on the surface. Heat, caused by compression and friction, warmed ice and rock that had slumbered near absolute zero since long before the first living thing had emerged from Earth’s primordial sea. The heated ice and rock expanded, hissed, boiled, exploded. Vast sheets of the tortured surface suddenly blasted forth, streamers of glowing gas and pulverized rock arcing out into space, then falling down onto the hungry locus of gravity.
The Charonian Landers that had landed on their namesake world began to die, beaten and pummeled by the ever-growing violence that ripped at the frozen landscape.
With each infall of matter, the locus grew stronger, grasping greedily for more and more mass. The Ring monitored the locus, refocusing and amplifying it down to an ever-tighter, smaller, more powerful point source.
Now the Ring began the second phase of the operation, slowly dragging the new locus back down into the center of the dying satellite, twisting the knife in the wound, tearing a deeper hole in the surface, forcing a second wave of compression and heating to start moving back down into the interior, so that the old and new compression waves slammed directly into each other.
The satellite’s surface shuddered and cracked wide open, the heated ices of the interior blasting forth as gases and liquids.
The Ring took hundreds, thousands of minor impacts from the shower of artificial volcanic activity. But it had been built to withstand massive stresses, and Larry’s control program managed to focus most of the convulsions well away from the Ring plane.
The locus of gravity bore down into the center of the little world. By now, a solid pinpoint of matter, already close to the density of a neutron star, had gathered around the locus, and was eagerly sucking more and more matter down into itself. Under Charon’s tortured surface, the volume of infalling matter began to make itself felt. The locus mass swallowed up material and compressed it down into a tiny fraction of its previous volume. With more and more matter compressing into a smaller and smaller space, Charon began to fall in on itself.
The heat of collapse began to increase, even as the mass and volume of matter available for heating started to shrink.
Temperatures began to rise. Chemical bonds that had been stable for billions of years split apart. Hotspots began to glow on the surface, horrid splotches of red and white spreading like some ghastly plague on the land. More and more surface volatiles sublimated away. Gas geysers blasted free, plumes of steam roiled up through vents and from the bubbling cauldrons of the hotspots. Clouds of pink and green, chemical compounds new-formed in the turmoil below, twisted and knotted through the tempestuous air. For the first time in all its long history, Charon’s skies bore an atmosphere.
But not for long.
The chronometers said it took 47.5 hours, but none of those who witnessed it were ever able to believe that. It was far too long, or too short, a time, for a world to vanish utterly.
Larry never slept in all that time, but long passages of that time had the qualities of a nightmare, when the surging, seething storms, the weird sight of a world glowing white-hot with the heat of compression and collapse, the matter of the world relentlessly crushing itself, the world-serpent swallowing its own tail, consuming itself, driven on by the relentless urging of the Ring of Charon, named for a satellite that no longer was.
On and on it went, transfixing him, the moments taking forever, and then no time at all. Charon seemingly locked for all time into one state of its collapse, and then abruptly, seemingly without any transition, Larry would blink to find the satellite shrunk by half, glowing with a fiery light that had not been there before.
Larry watched, utterly unable to act or react, as the drama unfolded. It was something beyond him, outside him. It was utterly inconceivable that this titanic event could have anything to do with him, that anything he could do or say or think could have any effect on such a spectacle.
And yet he had caused it. He had imagined it, planned it, set the program, and pressed the button that caused it.
Explosions, massive electric storms, powerful magnetic eddy currents, auroral displays. Charon in its death throes found every way imaginable to shed the massive energy of position held by all the matter that fell in toward the rapacious center. The shrinking world glowed brighter and brighter, grew hotter and hotter as the spectacle continued.
At last there was nothing left but a sun-bright fleck of light in the sky, the glowing, ionized cloud of debris surrounding the dot of neutronium that late had been a world. The ion glow set the inner rim of the Ring gleaming jewel-bright by reflected light. But soon, all too soon, even that cloud of matter, even now forming into a miniature accretion disk, would vanish as well. Particle by particle, atom by atom, it would smash into the surface of collapsed matter and be absorbed by it. And the neutronium sphere, now spinning at incredible speed as it conserved the satellite’s momentum, kept growing, a particle at a time, letting off a flash of light and hard radiation with every impact.
Charon was no more. In its place, a point of star-hot brilliance, surrounded by a wispy nimbus of gas, thickening into a lumpen disk of dust, debris, and gas at the plane of Charon’s old equator. And the Ring, the Ring of Charon surrounding it all, at right angles to the accretion disk, face-on to the tiny ship hovering at the still-unmoving barycenter. The system’s center of gravity had not shifted appreciably. Charon’s gravity was still there, now captured in a tiny dot of neutronium, a pinpoint of degenerate matter that held all of what had made a world.
Matter so compressed that even the atoms themselves had collapsed in on themselves, the electron shells flattened down to nothing, forcing protons and electrons to bond, forming neutrons, gravity overcoming the weak nuclear force, in effect compressing the satellite down into one giant neutron.
“So now we’ve become what they are,” Webling said, looking through the monitors at the impossible sight. “Become Shiva, destroyer of worlds. We’ve taken a whole world, a satellite four billion years old, crushed it down to nothing, to serve our transient needs.”
“Self-defense, Jane,” Raphael said. It was not explanation enough, but it was all he had. He turned and looked at Larry. “There isn’t any chance that Charon by itself will be enough, is there? No hope that we can leave Pluto alone?”
Larry stared straight ahead, numbingly exhausted, refusing to see anything but the screens full of abstract numbers ahead of him. He could not afford to consider the reality of what they were—no, what he—was doing. “None. I’ve amplified and focused Charon’s gravity enough to form a neutronium sphere, but that’s it. I’ve pulled all the artificial focusing pressure off it. It’s stable, certainly for the present time, and maybe permanently. It shouldn’t be able to reexpand on its own. But I can’t achieve any further compression with so little matter, no matter what tricks I play.