The descent from the control hub to the black glass floor was a race against falling fire.
As Ren Prime and Vane Vale scrambled down the spiral iron stairs, the Lux Sovereign opened fire. Heavy air-powered giant crossbows mounted on the dreadnought’s flanks discharged volleys of three-foot crystal quarrels that shattered against the quartz canopy above, raining down showers of sparkling glass shrapnel that hissed as it struck the black sand.
Ren hit the black glass floor, his oak staff catching his weight as his sprained knee throbbed.
“Unit! Hold the stairs!” Ren shouted.
“Directive acknowledged,” Unit Ren droned. The seven-foot machine-grafted summon stepped onto the bottom rungs of the iron stairs, his four-jaw chuck spinning with a terrifying clockwork scream, his dorsal exhaust venting blinding clouds of white steam to hidden the approach.
Ren turned and ran across the mirror-polished black glass floor toward the cathedral-sized sphere of the living star.
The heat streaming from the core was staggering.
To an ordinary mortal, standing fifty yards from the unshielded fusion mantle of a sky titan would have been instant death. The surrounding solar heat wave, raw and raw by mountain stone, carried millions of heat units that would have blistered human skin, boiled blood in the veins, and flash-glass-fused the eyes into milky quartz.
