Since Crenna was just a farming colony, its people did not own much scientific, analytical, or technical equipment. Davlin had little to work with as he attempted to understand the recent storm of warglobes that had passed overhead.
Fortunately, one of the settlement’s architects was an amateur astronomer by hobby. He owned a fairly sophisticated telescope with which he’d intended to study the night skies of Crenna, though his avocation had largely been foiled by the planet’s bright moon, which washed out most stars and nebulae. When the recent sunspot activity had grown bad enough to disrupt local communications, the architect had converted the device to a solar telescope, occasionally focusing the eyepiece on the sun and projecting its image onto a screen. But he had not used it in months.
“I need to see what’s going on up there,” Davlin told Mayor Ruis when he learned of the telescope. “I should have understood when Rlinda Kett told me she’d sighted hydrogues in this system a year ago. I didn’t connect it with the sunspots and the ion storms. Something’s happening there, something bad.”
Because he’d read many confidential Hansa briefings that related to the hydrogue war, Davlin felt a growing dread about what might be happening here. The warglobes had not attacked the colony—yet their actual purpose might prove even more sinister in the long run.
He and the mayor waited while the astronomer took his telescope out of its shed and positioned it so they could observe the sun at noon. As he focused the eyepiece and held up the projection screen, the architect said, “The sunspots were humongous before, and judging from the static on our radios, I bet they’re even worse now.”
“I don’t believe that ‘worse’ is an adequate word to describe it,” Davlin said as the wavering image came into focus. Not long ago, Crenna’s star had been a stable yellow-orange sun; now it was an absolute battleground.
Faeros fireballs and hydrogue warglobes swarmed about like sparks flying from a disturbed campfire and battered each other. The sun itself had become a boiling cauldron.
Davlin turned quickly to the mayor. “Is there a ship I can use? Does this colony have a vessel that’ll reach orbit? I need to get closer to investigate.”
Ruis and the astronomer didn’t entirely understand what they were seeing, but Davlin was obviously agitated. They looked at each other. “Since Branson Roberts took the Blind Faith, we’ve been without any ready transport, not even to Relleker—which isn’t very far away.”
“Well, there’s one ship, a single-passenger craft,” the astronomer pointed out. “It’s old and doesn’t run very well, and there’s not much ekti in its tanks, certainly not enough for a round trip anywhere.”
“Let me tinker with the engines and see. I don’t need the stardrive. I’m just going to use it in-system.” Before he left, Davlin turned back to the two men. “Better not tell anyone else about this until I come back. If it’s what I’m afraid of, there’ll be plenty of time for us all to panic.”
Reluctantly, the ship hauled him out of Crenna’s gravity well. Davlin had spent a day working on its engines and systems. There seemed no point in maintaining a ship that didn’t have enough fuel to fly, so its previous owner hadn’t taken care of the vessel since the ekti shortage.
But standard rocket propellant carried it away from the planet and closer to the stirred beehive of the sun. Luckily, the single-passenger craft was designed as a tourist vessel, outfitted with image-capturing equipment and enhanced sensors—not for any scientific purpose, but just to take souvenir pictures.
Davlin used the imagers to focus in on the star’s surface, already feeling his heart sink. Masking out the central sphere with an eclipse circle allowed him to discern the tattered remnants of the furious corona. “This is bad. Very bad.”
The faeros and hydrogues were causing damage deep in the stellar core, churning the nuclear fires. The EDF had already reported such all-out brawls of elemental superbeings in numerous uninhabited systems. Now, though, it was happening here, at Crenna.
When Davlin’s instruments analyzed the solar flux, he was astounded at how low the energy output had already dropped. The sunspots were large, dark blotches like bruises and bloodstains spreading across the surface of the sun.
He activated his communications system and sent a transmission back to the colony, where Mayor Ruis waited for him in the town’s receiving station. His answering transmission was full of static, the words torn apart and fuzzed. “Yes, Davlin. What’s your report?”
A huge flare erupted from the solar surface, an early death throe of the sun, and Davlin watched the hydrogues sweep in like piranhas. “My God, it’s already started.”
Crenna was in terrible trouble, and the people there did not yet understand. Davlin delivered the harsh news as clearly as he could. “They’re going to extinguish the sun.”