Gas Giants, seeds of stars that never were. Star stuff that missed the chance to ignite, collects, swells, and settles into bodies hundreds or thousands of times the mass of a standard world, wrapped in layered clouds and violent winds. Their radiation belts cook unshielded electronics and flesh to cinder if one does not take care in their presence.
RF6T-8VII lies in the ragged reaches of Immensea. Once thought beyond the Empire’s reach, its roiling magnetosphere hid almost anything from sensors. Pirates learned that first; they learned to live in the orange-red bands of ammonia and toxic gases, drifting bases that could be moved and relit, like coal fires in a fog impossible to find.
Not anymore; today we burn those fires out forever.
Something blooms beneath those clouds. A catalyst heats a pocket of compressed metallic hydrogen into a forge. Fusion that should have been the heart of a star, propagates across the surface of that dormant metallic ocean. In the place where pressure makes metals of gas, our seed begins to burn. Plumes of furious heat slam subduction seams and spread.
In minutes it is visible to all. A luminous ring widening, a buried flame burning in a place it was never supposed to be. The fusion front rides the planet’s currents, sending up superheated jets of hellfire to tear at the clouds. For weeks these scars glow and scour at the sky like hellish fingers trying to reach up and touch the face of god.
We did not drop a bomb to break a world. We lit a forge to purge it. The ring will not forgive, or forget, the sins of our enemies.
And if we must, we will light it again.