The main command bridge of the Aethelgard was bathed in a dark, pulsating wash of deep amber warning light. Across every console, digital readouts were spiking into the red margin as the ship dropped out of the protected eye of the Star-Forged Crucible Basin and entered the churning, white-hot heat-rising zone surrounding the Continental Eclipse Sun-Eater.
Outside the viewports, the golden sea of the lower corona was no longer peaceful. Huge heat-rising cells—each the size of the Eurasian continent—boiled upward from the solar chromosphere at eight hundred miles per second. Where the Sun-Eater’s forty thousand drain tube roots pierced the star, the sun’s natural magnetic lines were twisted into savage knots. That created nearby micro-flares that whipped across the void like scythes of white-hot lightning.
Chief Szabo scrambled down the iron companionway into the lower building trench, his heavy boots clattering against the metal rungs. “Vance! The external radiator vanes are hitting critical saturation! The heat sink coils can’t dump heat energy fast enough! Surrounding temp outside the hull is hitting three point two million degrees!”
Arthur stood at the outside building console, his fingers flying across the backup cooling controls as he engaged the backup closed-loop radiators. Beside him, Grimm stood with his chest pressed against the tamer’s knee, his lone ear pinned flat against his skull as the hound sensed the rising heat pressure shaking through the silver-steel deck.
