With a sly grin Wrightwood could not see, Steve led the older man out into the chill of night and relished the shiver as the cold bit in through the silk pajamas and struck at the man. Then they were into the Guardian craft and into space.
"Where—?"
Steve shrugged. "Want to see it?" he asked.
Horrified, Wrightwood nodded.
Eight minutes later they were approaching the scene. Spread out on a shapeless form ten million miles across, tongues and streamers of raw energy flared forward, flaying space before it as it came. At a hundred and seventy thousand miles per second it came toward Sanaron, so near to the velocity of light that the roaring particles of energy had enormous mass.
No need for the great searchlights here, for the coverage of the explosion was so great that there was no need to filter the blackness away.
Instead, Guardians played before the oncoming death and fought it.
With a quiet disregard for death, Steve ran his little ship to within a mile of the raving storm front and matched its velocity.
White-faced and awed, William Wrightwood watched the horror without really knowing how close he was to death. It was too big to be personal, that flaming front. He saw the circling ships fighting first this tongue and then that, saw the planers fencing the streamers in, holding them while coners sucked away the raving energies and spread them too far apart to be tangible. He saw the swampers soar in to chill a raving island of exploding space, and watched with heaving stomach one of the Guardians get touched by a lance of flame—saw it go searing into death to recreate an island of raw fire of itself.
Then the mad attack against the roaring furnace cleared; Wrightwood began to see that there was a pattern to this.