Look at it! Look at it!” she called through his suitcom. “Something’s wrong with the Sun!”

20

Wish Upon a Star

Anjin guessed that they could have seen the sunstorm from as far away as Miranda. He was certain that on Ceres, if people still lived there, they could have seen it without aid of telescopes or binoculars.

The detonation had come within a hair’s breadth of setting up a rimaway chain reaction. It reached down toward the very core, simultaneously increasing the Sun’s mass and freezing a large expanse of its surface. Sargenti-Peterson outran the disappearing chromosphere, just barely, and only temporarily. Behind them, as the refugees watched, an area as wide as the orbit of Earth’s moon fell into itself, and the scene aft resembled a crater as vast as Copernicus viewed from its rim. The temperatures and the darkness reached out to the universe, signaling dangers to Sargenti-Peterson that could only be guessed at, but which to the despair of all aboard were bound to be met head-on.

Anjin spent the next two hours rebuilding the ship’s sensors and magnetic lenses. Two hours was all he had, for even if the thrusters were not destroyed, Sargenti-Peterson could never hope to make the radical shifts of orbit necessary to avoid so large a storm. For as long as the ship-comet existed, it would circumnavigate the Sun and pass near ground zero approximately every three hours. When he had done all he could, and his pad told him that the edge of the storm lay only two minutes ahead, he dropped his head into his hands and broke into a cold sweat. During those final moments before contact, Tam lifted him from his station and he took her wordlessly in his arms.

Throughout the ship, others had spent the hours building makeshift restraints and harnessing themselves in; but if they entered the kind of shockwave Anjin was expecting, the comet might all but stop short, converting everyone inside instantly into red mist. *So Anjin had simply prepared his machines to manage as well as possible, and prepared his mind to receive a shockwave he would probably not live long enough to hear or feel.

He was both puzzled and elated, therefore, when the shockwave never came. The ship simply seemed to bound over what gave the appearance of being a crater wall, beyond which the chromosphere gave way to the open spaces of the corona. Sargenti-Peterson merely adjusted its magnetic trim and bobbed up and down a few times, as if sailing through nothing more extraordinary than a solar flare.

But there was nothing ordinary about the absorbic crater. It was more than ninety-eight thousand kilometers deep—three times deeper than the largest known decrease of the Sun’s diameter during its eighty-year cycle of expansions and contractions. And all this damage had required the time it took Anjin to draw and expel a single breath. Walls of bright plasma hovered four hundred thousand kilometers from the center, edging inward as thousands of glowing columns broke through the crater floor, bringing heat from the solar depths. The colors were impossible reds and greens and violets bursting through a crust of black gas; and some were colors Anjin had never seen before.