An Alternative End to Romulus

So got my future history knowledge mixed up earlier today and was musing on the end of the Romulan homeworld when The Burn was something else entirely.

Still got some interesting thoughts I'd like opinions on.

So currently Romulus canonically gets destroyed by a supernova in a neighboring star system... maybe. And a clandestine series of events led to a ban on artificial life, Old Spock got dropped into an alternate reality, romulan society crumbled, etc.

The thought I had was for an alternative version to serve as something akin to an interplanetary Chernobyl situation.

Using captured Borg technology and information the Romulans were trying to covertly build their own Transwarp Hub using a star as a power source. Its a massive investment of resources but having a functional Hub even if its far more simplistic then the Borg version is a massive asset. Control over a local Hub allows the Romulans to set the flow, direction, etc of their own transwarp corridors to cross over strategically important locations across the alpha and beta quadrant thars all bit undetectable including close orbit of Romulus.

But like a lot of authoritain regimes tend to do politics got wrapped up in this endeavor. Too many careers ended up on the line based on the success of thos project so scientists that started to question whether this was feasible got reassigned, exiled, or executed. So very real physics based problems got ignored, funds and equipment embezzlement, construction done improperly. And the result was a device that didn't work right.

When it started up it seemed fine and they began setting up the flow rate... only the subspace corridor didn't properly submerge. Instead it started warping and contorting normal space as subspace started violently pushing anything in its path at many time the speed of light toward the first stop on the path they'd defined, the Romulan homeworld. Worse still they choose a star as a power source so this mess started picking up stellar material carrying it toward Romulus.

The Romulans tried to hide how bad they messed up by not properly disclosing the nature of the accident when they requested aid, writing it off as a Supernova. As a result the Federation and Old Spock didn't realize the phenomena was going to accelerate with time.