With the asteroid bombardment broken and the alien signal intercepted, the Aethelgard slipped deeper into the silent, golden maze of the lower solar corona. Kira used the natural magnetic shielding of an arching sun-fire prominence. He held the corvette in a stable observational holding pattern three thousand miles off the Eclipse Sun-Eater’s eastern flank.
Inside the tactical briefing room, Arthur stood before the hololithic projector table. Floating in the air between the crew was a high-resolution, three-space-folding living rendering of the Continental Parasite. He was compiled from the multi-spectral tracking data Arthur had gathered through his magnifying glass.
The image was terrifying in its body complexity.
The entity spanned five thousand two hundred miles across. A living landmass the size of mainland Australia, anchored directly into the heat-rising granules of the sun’s chromosphere. From its ventral underbelly, forty thousand main drain tube roots plunged over twenty thousand miles into the solar inside, branching into tiny cellular tendrils that drank the star’s fusion energy.
“To kill an organism of this scale,” Arthur began, his voice carrying the calm, didactic power of a professor lecturing in a body tiered arena, “you can’t rely on indiscriminate moving bombardment. A nuclear warhead or an anti-matter torpedo would be like a needle prick to an elephant. It would absorb the explosive energy with its heat-drawing hard shell and heal the wound in ten minutes. We must perform a systemic living cutting out.”
