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Julia said, "The Eight seemed sympathetic when the Six attacked us."
Viktor said, "But the Eight run the Pluto experiment."
Nobody had anything to say to that.
When Julia ended the session with Wiseguy and
Proserpina, she returned to their quarters. On the wall screen prompt was a
new message from Axelrod. She sighed and punched it in. But after the first
few seconds of identification data there was only hash. She called the bridge.
"Yes, sir, Cap'n," Killings said, brow lined with worry. "Your message got cut
off. We lost transmission with Earthside eighteen minutes ago."
"Why?"
"There's a big solar storm brewing. It's swept past Earth already and is
blocking our lower-frequency links. You want I should send Earth-side a
prompt, saying we want that last vid on higher frequencies?
They're pretty crowded with system telemetry, but I could get some room at 7.8
gigs, if you say, Cap'n."
Julia was tired of endless data. "No, I don't really want to see it. When-"
Viktor said, "So ... we are on our own."
His slow, studied words gave her pause. "How soon will the storm be over?"
"It's a big one-unusual, too-so nobody knows." Killings was apologetic, one
corner of his mouth fretting.
"Not your fault, y'know. Come this far," she said, "you'd think we wouldn't be
worrying about
Earthside's weather."
6
TIP
The torrent of SOLAR wind drew their attention, mostly because it did the same
to the Beings. Of the
Six they had heard nothing but murky signals, probably (the Eight said)
deliberately muffled and shielded. The Eight were like distracted dinner
partners, digging into the main entree and neglecting conversation. For the
first time in a while the crews of both ships had time to stop and think.
Julia, file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20The%20Sunborn.htm
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spent her time looking at the display screens. There, with
High Flyer's antennas turned back toward the inner solar system, she could see
the show.
To live on Earth or even Mars was to give the sun a bit too much importance.
Here it was just the brightest of the stars, not a disk. And now, Julia mused,
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they knew that electricity, not sunlight, fed the distant glow of Pluto.
Solids were deeply cold out here, but the filmy plasmas worked with raging
energies. Their equivalent temperatures were measured in the thousands of
degrees, and there lay the necessity for life to harvest this bounty.
She close-upped the sun and saw there the shadowy speckles that had cast out
such a withering gale.
These were the ruins of solar coronal arches, dark only by contrast with the
brilliance around them, but still hotter than any furnace. Yet these were the
remnants of a fury that had peaked months before. The gout of plasma it
exploded into space had been traveling nearly a year. From there the snarling
knots came climbing up the gravity gradient of the star, through the orbits of
the planets, onward without losing a fraction of their power.
Only when it intersected the tightbeams between
High Flyer and Earth did they know of its arrival. On it came, a roiling smear
now detectable only in the radio, yet glowing with the power of a billion
hydrogen bombs. She could see from the Doppler readings that its speed was now
several hundred kilometers per second, and so it had been plowing outward for
months, undiminished and evolving. It was an oval blob, fraying at the edges
but radiating halos of plasma fizz. She could see it by its own emissions.
As it approached, finer structure appeared in the shorter wavelengths.
Intricate coils bigger than worlds, shattering explosions-all testified to the
recombining energy of the fields. The plasma inside it was the junior partner
now to the festering field energies. Their radars were hopeless, compared with
the bright fountains coming off the blob. It spun, trailing ragged arms bigger
than planets. Julia thought for a moment that it looked like a troubled
hurricane seen from orbit. The next moment it was more like a spiral nebula
shining forth, twisting and changing before her eyes, as if she were suspended
in time like a god of eternity.
She wondered if this mass could do damage to
High Flyer.
The ship was drifting under no thrust, its squat living cylinder rotating to
provide onboard centrifugal gravity, and was running its reactor only for
power. Working with Jordin and Viktor from the emission signatures, she was
able to estimate the density. She gave a dry chuckle. Though it blared with
furious energies in the high microwave frequencies, it was less massive than
the gauzy glows inside neon lights. Its voyage out through the planets had
thinned its anger. If it had struck a slab of Earth's air, the collision would
have crushed it.
The stormy blob was nearly to Pluto, and she thought she could see the
onrushing apparition swell as it spun. Storms fought across it, but the
structure held. By sliding up in frequency she could cut in through the
spiraling arms and see more fine detail toward its core. These frequency bands
showed rivers of flame tracing out their paths, wriggling and flaring in
gleaming drops bigger than Pluto. Shorter wavelengths brought knotty images,
gnarled in tight echoes of the overall structure. Small spirals were
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off a furious, dense core. It was as if the overall structure was making tiny,
incandescent eddies that in their turn evolved into coherent knots.
"Viktor," she called. "Look at the ninety-gigahertz image when you have a
chance."
He was watch officer and had scheduled a detailed interrogation of the ship's
systems, conducted using telepresence from the bridge. So it was several
moments before his voice said in her headphones, "Same shape. Been visible for
minutes. Implies-what?-some nodules hold together, if they have it?"
"You'd think the little ones would get sheared into pieces," Julia said. "Look
at all the turbulence around them."
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"Look small, but are size of Africa."
"What's with the Beings? This might be trouble for them. They apparently live
off the turbulence of the shock, but this is a big storm. Huge energies."
"The Eight. Seem okay. Wiseguy reported they are feasting on the bow shock."
"What about the Six?"
"They seem to be quiet."
Julia asked, "Lying doggo, you think?"
"Means?"
She smiled, pleased that after all these years he didn't know every corner of
her mind. "Aussie slang, or maybe old Brit. 'Playing possum,' I think the
Americans say."
"Yep, that's right." Jordin's voice came on intership comm. "I'm looking at
High Flyer from the side and wonder if you've picked up the magnetic
configuration behind you."
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