The Aethelgard breached the outer edge of the extraction pylon’s defense envelope. Just then, the solar limb below erupted in a world-ending fury of blinding sun-hot light. A sun-fire mass ejection—a titanic, arching prominence two hundred thousand miles in height—surged off the chromosphere like a tidal wave of molten gold. Millions of tons of white-hot star-fire, trapped within twisted magnetic loops, roared directly into the corvette’s flight path at twelve hundred miles per second.
Klaxons shrieked across every deck. The bridge screens flickered wildly as the magnetic pulse from the flare overwhelmed the ship’s backup sensor arrays. Kira’s voice was nearly lost beneath the ear-splitting roar of the star-fire engines: “Magnetic reconnection detected on the solar surface! The flare is expanding faster than our sub-light burn! In twenty seconds, the leading star-fire wall will wrap us! Even Titus’s shell can’t absorb a direct hit from a Class-X sun-fire mass ejection!”
“Don’t try to outrun it, Kira!” Arthur ordered, his voice cutting through the panic with razor-sharp power. “Turn into the flare! We ride the magnetic slope!”
“Turn into it?!” Szabo screamed over the comms. “That’s suicide, Vance! We’ll be melted into melted rock waste! There’s ten million degrees of raw fusion coming down our throats! If the magnetic holding fails for a heartbeat, the silver-steel will turn to steam!”
