At the apex of the solar corona, Pip spread his five-hundred-meter golden wings until they blocked the black void of space behind him.
The young Golden Crow didn’t merely summon fire. He assumed complete, royal sovereignty over the star itself. Across a radius of two million miles, the churning rising heat currents of the sun responded to his will. Millions of tons of white-hot helium star-fire rose from the lower chromosphere. It spiraled upward along the magnetic field lines like molten golden silk, drawn inexorably toward Pip’s majestic dark shape.
Around his golden crown, the nine tiny suns began their final, relativistic posture.
Each of the fifty-meter solar orbs sped up to three-quarters the speed of light, weaving a fine, detailed, braided halo of sun-hot bright glare. The humming deep ring of the nine spinning spheres reached a pitch so pure and intense that it shook through the core lattice of the Aethelgard’s silver-steel hull, sounding like the chime of a billion golden bells ringing all at once.
Through the zero-latency soul-channel, Arthur stood side-by-side with Pip’s mind.
“Align the sky-high focal points along the polar magnetic axis, Pip,” Arthur spoke, his voice ringing with total certainty. “Target the heart of the star-core where the dark matter is densest. We don’t leave a single spore to drift into the Kuiper Belt. Burn it down to pure hydrogen.”
