The golden calm of the Star-Forged Crucible Basin vanished beneath the advancing shadow of the deep pit. Across seventy thousand miles of solar space, the sky began to rain mountains.
Drawn down the sun’s steep gravity slope by the dark-matter pulses of the Continental Eclipse Sun-Eater, the leading wave of the asteroid swarm burned into the lower corona. Over three thousand metal planetoids, ranging from dense fifty-meter iron boulders to jagged, multi-half-mile nickel giant pillars, hurtled along the magnetic field lines at sixty-four miles per second. The extreme friction of the sun-fire star-fire stripped their outer crusts. They wrapped each plunging asteroid in a blinding sheath of white-hot spark-charged vapor that trailed millions of miles into the black void.
On the bridge of the Aethelgard, the tactical alarms sounded not with wild shrieks, but with a low, nonstop drone that signaled total saturation.
“First wave crossing the Liquid silver sky-high threshold!” Kira called out, her voice clipped, tense, and steady. Her hands were locked onto the thruster verniers. She maintained the corvette’s orientation relative to the solar prominence. “Radar tracks three thousand four hundred moving targets in the main impact hall! If our vector drifts by even half a degree, the bow will take a direct moving strike from an iron-nickel mass traveling sixty times faster than a rifle bullet!”
