Without a single omen, the wide-aperture optical telescopes orbiting Jupiter detected a rift in the heavens.
The staff at the observation station first noticed a localized, explosive surge in brightness. The duty officer immediately issued remote commands to the telescope, sluing it toward the anomaly while the system rapidly triangulated the coordinates.
The location was so familiar to human astronomers that it was identified instantly.
It was the Alpha Centauri system—the triple-star cluster consisting of Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and Proxima Centauri.
"What’s with this brightness? It’s still intensifying! Too fast—the telescope is going blind!" Anxious shouts rang through the station. They had never encountered a surge of this magnitude.
Indeed, the optical sensors were being overwhelmed. The words had barely left the technician's mouth when the station lost the telescope's signal entirely.
Seconds later, the station was filled with a different sound: the rhythmic, high-pitched scream of alarms.
"That sound..."
"It’s the Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) detectors."
The staff were seasoned professionals. From the pitch alone, they knew the sensors were being bombarded by a density of gamma radiation that shouldn't exist in a peaceful corner of the galaxy.
The station managed two gamma-ray telescopes—one in Callisto's orbit and another in Jupiter’s solar orbit—specifically designed to monitor cosmic rays. With radiation levels skyrocketing, it was certain the source was deep space. Combined with the last optical coordinates, the epicenter was confirmed: Alpha Centauri.
What was happening over there?
The duty officer didn't have time to process the "why." He fired the data off to Callisto Base. But as he hesitated, wondering if he should leave his post to report to his superiors, the detector readings spiked exponentially until they, too, went silent.
Callisto Base
Yue Yuan’s office was crowded with nearly a dozen people. Aside from his ever-present assistant, Zhu Peter, the room was packed with experts: particle physicists, astrophysicists, and a high-ranking administrative official who had arrived in a frantic hurry.
"Commander, it’s a disaster! All external communications are down! We can’t reach the Yinghuo Base on Mars, we’ve lost Guanghan Palace on the Moon, and Earth..." The official came bouncing into the room—the gravity on Callisto was even lower than the Moon’s, making a panicked run look like a series of slow-motion leaps through water. She stopped short, clearly not expecting a full war council.
Yue Yuan actually knew more than anyone in the room. He knew the situation was far worse than "communication failure."
Just moments ago, he had received a transmission from the Yinghuo Base on Mars. It was short, clipped, and unfinished—cut off by whatever was ravaging the system.
Due to current orbital alignments, Mars and Jupiter were on the same side of the Sun, relatively close to one another. Most data from Beijing was being relayed through the Mars station.
The transmission had come in fragments, spaced minutes apart:
[Callisto, Callisto, this is Yinghuo Base. We have received word from Earth. The Xihe Solar Probe has observed a sudden, sharp increase in solar radiation. Cause unknown. Advise all stations to prepare for extreme solar flare activity.]
[Callisto Base, this is Yinghuo. Latest data suggests the Sun is undergoing an unexplained period of hyper-activity. Solar winds are intensifying. Interplanetary communications may fail. Prepare accordingly.]
[Callisto, this is Yinghuo. The Sun is undergoing a violent eruption. Gamma radiation levels have shattered historical records...]
[Oh God, it’s over. The Sun... the Sun... bzzzt—krrr—static—]
In the gaps between those text fragments, Callisto had also received a single processed image from Earth.
The visual, cleaned up by the base computers, showed the surface of the Sun distorting violently. It looked as if a piece of the star had been bitten out. Then, a plume of fire—a prominence hundreds of times larger than anything in recorded history—erupted into the void for hundreds of millions of kilometers. It looked as though a giant had taken a deep breath and sucked the fire from the solar surface. As the flames fell back, the Sun’s luminosity exploded into a blinding white glare.
Then, the feed went dead.
Yue Yuan didn't waste time with pleasantries. He summarized the data in short, punchy sentences, leaving out nothing vital. He scanned the grim faces in the room.
"What’s your assessment?"
The experts began talking over one another. Most were already thinking toward the worst-case scenario, but no one wanted to be the first to say it out loud.
"This is no time for caution," Yue Yuan snapped. "If you have a theory, spit it out."
As he spoke, the door slid open. A man in his fifties walked in, his civilian clothes rumpled and his thinning hair showing patches of white. This was Gan De, Callisto’s resident astronomer and the lead for the base’s telescope arrays.
He had likely seen the anomaly at Alpha Centauri.
Yue Yuan knew that the detection of the Alpha Centauri event had happened slightly after the messages from Mars arrived. If the light from the nearest stars was hitting them now, the catastrophe was already well underway.
Gan De, usually a man of serene calm, looked utterly shaken. He pushed through the crowd toward Yue Yuan. "A supernova! It’s a supernova outbreak!"
"How?" someone whispered. "Alpha Centauri A and B are one thing, but Proxima is a red dwarf. It can't go supernova."
"Under normal physics, no," Gan De explained breathlessly. "Not just Proxima. Neither Alpha Centauri A nor B should be capable of it. This is not a natural event."
He gripped the edge of a desk. "This is an extinction-level catastrophe. The Alpha Centauri system is only 1.3 parsecs away. That’s too close. The Earth’s magnetic field won't be able to deflect a gamma-ray burst of that magnitude. Communications are already gone. We can only pray that they saw the probe data in time to get people underground..."
Gan De’s voice trailed off. He knew that even with warning, most of the life on Earth was doomed.
He was focused on the distant stars. He didn't yet know that the Sun—their own Sun—had already begun to scream.
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