Aftermath by Charles Sheffield

as her children. And maybe they liked that. They had lots of respect for each other, but of all possible losses Zoe's would be the hardest for everyone to take.
    The personality types were varied in one other way that was hard to define, although Celine had pondered it often enough. Zoe was certainly the authority figure. Reza was the class clown and cut-up king, sometimes far-out enough to make Celine wonder how he had passed the psychological tests. But what were the rest? She could never decide, with one exception: Celine herself was the expedition's worrywart, a Cassandra who could always imagine a dozen ways that things might go wrong. Unlike Cassandra's, though, her own dire predictions had never come to pass.
    Yet.
    And that, she suspected, was why she remained in the observation chamber with Wilmer, and stared at Alpha Centauri. She was worried, and not sure why. He hardly seemed to know that she was there, until she said, "Wilmer, we talked about what the supernova might do to Earth. Could it do anything to the rest of the solar system?"
    "Nothing to worry us. It will melt the ice surfaces on the moons of the outer planets, but as Alpha Centauri dims they'll freeze over again."
    "What about the sun? There will be a lot of extra heat, all pouring into one side of it."
    "It's a lot by terrestrial standards. In solar terms, it's nothing."
    "It couldn't cause big solar flares, or anything like that?"
    "I doubt it. Even if it did, Section Two of the Schiaparelli is well shielded against that sort of thing. We'll have plenty of notice, we'll just retreat there for as long as necessary. We're safer here on the ship than we would be down on Earth."
    Celine could see why Wilmer was so good as a partner for her. No matter what happened, he stayed calm. And he could usually give her a sound, logical reason why her worries were groundless.
    This time, though, she had the awful conviction that she would be right, and he would be wrong.
    * * *
    Supernova Alpha brightened and brightened. The crew of the Schiaparelli was in the best possible position to observe it. Four weeks after the first brightening—and one week before the change—the expanding gas shell around the star was big enough to show a visible disk to the on-board telescopes. From the second day, Celine had tuned their communications antennae to receive images from the DOS in Earth orbit. They all watched the fiery sphere pulsate and shiver under the force of explosions deep inside it. Wilmer did inverse calculations to determine the energy release from the observations. The numbers he quoted, in his dry, matter-of-fact way, were enough to make Celine shiver.
    "If there were planets orbiting Alpha Centauri . . ." Alta said gloomily, when she, Celine, and Wilmer were together in the main galley of the Schiaparelli. She was the expedition's number two pessimist, right after Celine.
    "Then you would be quite right to employ the past tense." Wilmer nodded to a display, where Alpha Centauri was now constantly displayed. "If they were ever there, they're cinders."
    Celine didn't say anything. But after they had finished eating she went again to Section Two. There she checked that the quarters they would retreat to in case of a big solar storm were fully furnished with supplies. Then she did what she had done every day since the first blossoming of Supernova Alpha; she examined sequences of visible-wavelength images of both Alpha Centauri and of Sol, looking for changes in either.
    Of course, she didn't see anything. The huge pulse of gamma rays from Supernova Alpha, when it finally came, was invisible to human eyes.
    The instruments, however, had sensitivity to everything from hard X rays to long radio waves. They caught the leap in the ambient gamma-ray level in the first fraction of a second, extrapolated the upward curve, and sent a warning bellow through the whole ship.
    The crew had been well trained. Better to overreact than underreact. They headed at maximum speed