Chang wondered if she'd been had once more. The thing was tricky, there was always a feint.

Except that she had the words Rhem Kerwillig said it had used. That man wasn't making this up, no chance, he'd been through hell and back, no reason to make anything up.

What if it didn't suicide? What if it tried to run?

And then the Fleet battleships Tiberius and Sennacherzb opened fire with their main armament.

The Wu twitched and was gone. Frantically probes sought her destination and measured the energy dump.

Then equally frantic calls for Baada initiation ran through the fleet.

The dim, red primary wobbled.

The grav waves hit first, and every ship insystem knew immediately what was coming.

One by one they initiated drive and spun outsystem on emergency jump trajectories that would scatter the fleet over a cubic parsec or more.

Essex was one of the first and thus carried her contents to safety. But for the largest vessels this was a problem. To reach Baada point might take them minutes.

Aboard the flagship Eisenhower Admiral Careno bellowed for immediate drive initiation. Fingers stabbed in codes, computer systems delivered progress in state-of-the-art speeds, and minutes crawled by with a dreadful finality.

The primary flashed and then exploded into a small supernova, consuming much of its remaining mass in a last brilliant display against the backdrop of the jeweled, uncaring universe.

A huge tide of superheated plasma and gas came surging out of the system's center, crisping and annihilating everything in its path. The inner planet went first, devoured in less than a minute; the second planet went, too, scorched by the flash and now dismembered in tremendous violence as its rocks returned to dust and hot gas and flowed on, outward to the void.

END.