Methodically the Guardians were isolating the forward-reaching tongues of energy from the main mass; cutting them off, and swamping them. From behind, as Steve circled the scene, planers and swampers were closing in on the trailing flame, chopping it off bit by bit and chilling it out of existence.
Sanaron was no longer a star lost in the stellar field. It was a flaming disc that could be seen, but to look at it hurt the eyes. Steve knew; Sanaron was not too far away.
He hurled his ship to the front again.
And then, as though it were a wave hitting a breakwater, the coruscating front dashed against the massed warp-planes of a whole squadron of Guardians, braced, planted, ready and waiting. The planes buckled and the squadron was forced back but the raving front flattened against the planes and was washed aside; turned back, spread to curl around the edges like tongues of doom reaching for the prey that lurked behind the wall. The squadron retreated, forming its shape as it went, until firm pressor rays behind the out-flung planes felt for and caught the core of Sanaron's outermost planet. With planetary mass behind, the squadron held a parabolic shield in space, ploughing a hole in the racing field of exploding energy.
Fire and flame enveloped the planet, passed around it, held from it by the warp-planes of the Guardians. A ship crumpled and died; its place was refilled by a spare. Another ship ran out of power abruptly and it was replaced until it could drop into the planet and recharge.
Then, as abruptly as the passing of an ocean wave, the roaring furnace in space was passed. The swampers and coners that fought the rear guard of the flaming death appeared in the tortured sky, scurrying around to wipe out the isolated trailers that the passage of the holocaust had left behind.
Another squadron came out of the blackness, a group from a distant sector that plunged past the planet and hit the flame from the rear. Steve circled the field of horror again and Wrightwood, his face pressed against the viewplate, watched the arrival of three more squadrons that hit Sanaron, formed a plate-to-plate shield while fighting for position, and established their protection for the next planet with a matter of seconds to spare.
One streamer leaked through a crevasse in the hastily-made shield, and the inside of the paraboloid was filled with swampers that fought the flame right to the atmosphere of the planet before it died.
And as the sun itself came under attack, the bulk of the racing squadrons came circling in from distant sectors. Men and sentient beings coming prepared to fight a supernova, to stand in there while a sun explodes, fighting space to hold a tenuous barrier in place to save the fragments of humanity that lived on the eight planets of Sanaron.