The Unreachable Stars: Book #11 of The Human Chronicles Saga by T.R. Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

in-store. Maybe it’s a special order item.”
    “Your colloquial humor is wasted on me, Adam Cain.”
    “So where do we get this stuff?”
    “As I said, it is C-star core material, and I need about a thousand pound crystal, intact and in one complete mass.”
    “So it’s a crystal?”
    “Yes, that is what the ‘C’ refers to.”
    “For crystal?”
    “No. It refers to the chemical composition of the crystal. Do you not know your chart of elements?”
    “Chemistry wasn’t my strongest subject, so how about a clue?”
    “The ‘C’ refers to the element carbon.”
    “Like in pencil lead?”
    “That is correct, yet in this case it refers to the crystalline version of the element.”
    “Crystalized carbon?” Adam frowned. There was something familiar about the phrase, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He opened his mouth to continue the sarcastic banter, but he gasped instead.
    “ Diamond! You need a thousand pound diamond?”
    “That is correct.”
    “Does something that big even exist? And if it did…it would be worth a friggin’ fortune!”
    “It does exist.”
    “Where?”
    “As I said, in the core of a C-star.”
    “That doesn’t help very much.”
    Exasperation was evident on Panur’s pale face. “This is becoming tedious. If I have to go through this routine for every item on the list, it will take nineteen hours, eight minutes, and forty-two seconds.”
    “Just tell me, what’s a C-star core?”
    “It is the core of cold white dwarf star.”
    “A white dwarf star ? You want us to pull a huge chunk of diamond out from the center of a star?”
    “Yes.”
    Adam fell back in his chair. “And here I thought you were serious about building a portal detector. I didn’t know it was some kind of mutant fantasy. How the hell are we supposed to do that?”
    “It will involve maneuvering a localized singularity into direct contact with an appropriate subject star, and then sifting through the debris for the proper remnant.”
    “Singularity…as in a black hole? That doesn’t sound so hard. Just smash a black hole into a star…and presto, we have our thousand-pound diamond.”
    “You are being sarcastic, yet the theory is sound and quite capable of implementation.”
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    “I don’t kid.”
    Adam stared at the alien for several seconds, waiting for the punchline to his sick cosmic joke. When Panur remained stoic and serious, Adam shook his head. “So where do I begin?” he asked. “First of all, you want us to find some rogue black hole and then crash it into a star. I didn’t even know we were capable of steering black holes. But assuming we can, then you want to create a massive explosion, after which a shitload of massive diamond chunks will be cast into space. Then we just pick up a thousand pound piece and bolt out of the area like nothing happened.”
    “Again, you are being sarcastic. However, you have outlined the proper sequence of events.”
    “Help me out, Panur, but how…exactly…can we pull this off?”
    “I have already located the proper subject star. It is near the Sylox stellar system, and there is already a singularity in close proximity siphoning off exterior gases from the star. All we need to do is nudge the black hole a little and let the combined gravitational attraction of the two bodies do the rest. A fleet of ten starships, using their combined gravity wells, will provide the impetus. However, the angle of the strike will have to be closely controlled to keep the resulting explosion modest and allow the singularity to absorb most of it. There will be no supernova as you’ve intimated. Most of the star material will be absorbed by the black hole, yet a fair amount of ejecta will escape, including core material.”
    “As in huge-ass diamonds.”
    “Yes, huge-ass diamonds.”
    “A lot of them?”
    “Approximately equivalent to eight hundred billion carats, as you measure diamond weight. Yet that is just a fraction of the