The singularity bomb left its guide rail and accelerated along a force-field beam from the ship toward its target star. It arrived in short order, a dusty black hole that quickly plunged into the star’s fiery exterior. Stellar matter rushed from all directions in a turbulent arc toward the center of the black hole, where it disappeared. Copious radiation poured from the black hole, which appeared now as a blinding ball of light on the surface of the star, a diamond on the ring of the star’s circumference.

As the black hole sank into the star’s interior, the radiant orb grew dimmer, revealing the enormous, hundred-million-mile-wide vortex that encircled the orb. The rotating vortex scattered the orb’s light in a kaleidoscopic display that looked, from the vantage of the ship, like a hideous, prismatic face. A moment later, the orb disappeared, as did the vortex, though more slowly; the star appeared to have returned to its original color and luminosity. This was the eye of the storm, the final moment of silence before annihilation.

The voracious black hole sank toward the dense center of the star, devouring everything in its path. In less than a second, it swallowed a mass of stellar material greater than the mass of a hundred medium-sized planets. Super-strong radiation spread out from the black hole toward the surface of the star. Some of it escaped, but most of it was blocked by stellar material, adding enough energy to the star to disrupt its convection and knock it out of equilibrium. The star’s color began to shift, first from red to bright yellow, then to bright green, then to a deep, sapphire blue, and then to a forbidding violet. The radiation from the black hole by now was orders of magnitude more intense than the radiation from the star itself, and as more energy flowed out of the star in the form of nonvisible light, its violet color intensified—a spirit in agony, floating in the vastness of space. Within an hour, the star’s billion-year journey had come to a close.

There was a flash of light that seemed to swallow the whole universe, then faded slowly away. Where the star had been, there was now a thin, spherical layer of material expanding rapidly, like a balloon being blown up. This was the surface of the star, swept outward in the explosion. As it expanded, it became transparent, and a second hollow sphere grew in its center, followed by a third. These waves of material were like exquisitely painted glass orbs, one inside another, and even the smallest of them had a surface area tens of thousands times larger than the original surface area of the star. The first wave vaporized the orange planet in an instant, though it was impossible to see its destruction against such a magnificent background. Compared to the size of the expanding stellar layer, the planet was a speck of dust, not even a dot on the surface of the orb.