Pip’s sky battle cry echoed across the solar corona. Then, the deepest physical constants within a hundred thousand miles of the Aethelgard underwent an instant phase-shift.
The violent, chaotic rough churning of the solar wind—which had been battering the corvette with gigajoules of magnetic shear—suddenly died to a calm breeze. The towering star-fire prominences arched over the ship not as destructive tidal waves. But as a protective, vaulted cathedral of living golden fire. Even more astonishingly, the internal heat of the Aethelgard’s silver-steel hull, which had been creeping toward the total fourteen-hundred-degree creep limit, plummeted back into the green safety zone within eight seconds.
“Arthur, look at the outside tracking data!” Chief Szabo yelled from the companionway, staring at his analog pressure dials in utter confusion. “The radiator loop pressure is zero! The surrounding heat outside the hull just dropped to twenty-two degrees! There’s two million degrees of star-fire out there. Our hull thinks we’re parked in a spring meadow in New Baiko!”
“That’s Pip’s Sovereign Domain,” Arthur explained, his voice calm, cold, and resonating with total clarity. “A Divine Mythic Jinwu doesn’t merely resist heat. He’s the heat-powered judge of the star. To the solar star-fire, Pip is the emperor. At his command, the heat obeys. He has declared this sector of the corona a safe hall for his pack.”
