The sky above Ring 1 of the Grand Colosseum had ceased to be an arena. It had become the epicenter of an impending sun-hot disaster.
One thousand feet above the arena floor, Sol-Invictus hung suspended in mid-air, its golden wings thrashing wildly in uncoordinated, spastic tremors. The one-ton beast was no longer a living animal responding to tamer commands. It was a dying living reactor undergoing uncontrolled heat runaway. The massive overdose of Prometheus-9 had burned out its nerve inhibitors. That forced its heart to pump at three hundred and forty beats per minute against a blood-vessel bed that had fully collapsed from blood-starved shock.
From the man-made light-glands bolted behind the griffin’s collar bones poured blinding torrents of blazing bright, five-thousand-degree white star-fire.
The star-fire didn’t form a clear beam. It swelled in a swirling, churning sphere of raw solar heat wave that grew larger with every passing second. The quartz dome of the Colosseum groaned under the intense heat shock, spiderweb fractures spreading across the six-inch-thick pre-Cataclysm glass panels as the surrounding heat inside the stadium climbed toward fifty degrees.
In the spectator tiers, complete pandemonium erupted.
One hundred and twenty thousand citizens scrambled desperately toward the emergency exit tunnels, trampling banners and knocking over iron chairs in their haste to escape the impending blast. In the patrician skyboxes, noble senators and corporate directors screamed for their private security escorts, abandoning their champagne glasses and velvet seats to flee into the underground bunkers.
