A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [222]
Anna Pasternak bit her lower lip. “Well, they’ll have to fend for themselves. I don’t have any Band-Aids left.” She looked up, suddenly startled. “Shizz, hold on!” A deadly flare hurtled toward them, moving faster than Pasternak’s engines could carry the ship. “Too much debris in the neighborhood. I can’t use the stardrive yet or we’ll be flattened into a pancake by a piece of gravel.”
“Or one of our wayward alloy ingots,” Kotto suggested. “That’s actually more likely.”
The communication outbursts increased in urgency. “Look at the star! Look at the star!”
Wrestling to keep control of her ship, Pasternak continued inching away from the danger zone. But Kotto scanned the fiery chromosphere behind them, amazed to see gigantic ovoid projectiles like hot, misshapen cannonballs shooting out from the stellar surface. The blazing objects hurtled along the tracks of the deadly flares, rushing to intercept the fleeing Roamer ships.
“What are those things?” Kotto said. “They’ve got to be artificial.”
“Just what I need,” Pasternak snapped, “hydrogues with heartburn.”
“Not hydrogues,” Kotto said. “The configuration is different, more ellipsoidal. The spectrum peaks are much more intense.”
The Roamer rescue vessels were already at their top velocities. Eleven fireballs roared toward them at amazing speed. Each one was the size of a moonlet, large enough to engulf half a dozen EDF Juggernauts. The sight was so incredible that it took Kotto a long moment to shift his awe into outright fear. As bad as their situation already was, the egg-shaped fiery things from the furious star could only make it worse.
“If I had some decent weapons, I’d take a few potshots,” Pasternak said. “Maybe start throwing ice cubes at them.”
Then the flaming cannonballs clustered together behind the fleeing Roamer ships so that their fuzzy edges overlapped. They formed an impenetrable barrier, blindingly bright and terrifying—but better than the roaring flarestorm from the sun of Isperos.
Kotto glanced at the rescue ship’s systems, saw to his surprise that the dangerous heat and radiation levels were dropping dramatically. “Captain, they’re…blocking the solar flux! Look, the readings are within tolerable levels now.”
The Roamer vessels kept fleeing, and the ominous fireballs hovered at a safe distance, clustered together to form a dazzling shield.
“They’re…protecting us from the flares. How’d they know we were here? Why…Why should they care what happens to us?”
Pasternak switched to the ship-to-ship channel again. “Don’t ask questions. Just keep moving.”
“Hey, I’m not about to complain,” somebody said.
“My engines are dropping back from overload,” came a second captain’s voice. “What the hell are those things?”
Kotto’s heart pounded, and he couldn’t stop staring. They had been saved by these astonishing…vessels? creatures? entities?—that lived in the plasma depths of a sun.
Somehow, the fiery things had understood that the solar flares would harm the humans. The incandescent ellipsoids continued to block the worst of the sunstorm from the flotilla of crowded ships until the Roamers had reached a safe distance.
Then, without a word, the capricious fireballs separated again, flitting about like planet-size fireflies. They swooped through the magnetic loops of solar flares and danced along the corona waves until they plunged like extinguished embers back into the superhot star itself.
“Well, that’s a pleasant surprise—aliens who don’t want to smash the crap out of us for a change,” Anna Pasternak said. Wiping her brow, she set a course back for Rendezvous.
115
QUEEN ESTARRA
When Estarra retreated to her Palace rooms, where she could meditate away from the constant attention and silly obligations, she walked in on a private shouting match between her husband and Chairman Wenceslas. She stood at the doorway, listening in shocked silence.
“You had no right to spring this on me or on the people,” Peter said. “They