Flare Star
by Paula Downing King[ Science Fiction ]
The Wolf II colony's only sun, the flare star, has been dormant for so long that when it reawakens in one fiery eruption, a destructive radiation bombards the planet. As supply ship Ceti Flad approaches the flare, Jason Roarke witnesses the explosive scene, but he's not a trusted member of the crew, and no one believes his account of the event. In an effort to save the ship, he defies orders and prepares a plan to evacuate the colony's survivors. But Young Magda on the colony's station isn't interested in rescue...she wants revenge.
Prologue
Wolf 359, dwarf star dM8e, position 1056n0710 in Leo, 7.7 light-years from Earth.
Nearly eight light-years from Earth, the red dwarf star named Wolf 359 stirred restlessly. At long intervals in her far longer life, the Wolf star slipped into a deep sleep uncommon to a flare star, temporarily quiescent through a span of centuries, unusually mild in her temperament, almost benign in her solar dangers. In time, however, inevitably, the drowsing star awoke to renewed violence, rivaling the most dangerous of her flare star brethren, UV Ceti. In that awakening, Wolf accelerated her own substance into a delicate wind of atomic particles whipped by her contorted magnetic forces to nearly light-speed. As the flare ruptured the star's magnetic field, Wolf reached out with her gossamer fingers to caress the three planets of her tiny system, bathing their airless and crater-peeked plains, altering rock, changing atomic structures into odd and short-lived primal molecules, warming her children against the cold of space.
Only a tenth of Sol's mass, barely edging the barrier between star and planet, the flare stars lived a life of intense violence, seemingly poised on the verge of self-destruction with each massive flare yet finding stability in that constant release of stresses. In sleep, Wolf touched her children rarely, her caress as light as Sol's touch on Earth. But awake, her flares would inundate near space with a violent wind of heavy particles, intense gamma rays, and the odd unseen tachyons that defied the limits of space and time. Yet throughout human observation the sleeping Wolf's flares had leapt but a single magnitude, unlike the several-hundredfold flash of UV Ceti and other flare stars in Sol's vicinity. And so, when humanity expanded outward to nearby stars early in the twenty-third century and Earth's infant ship technology needed an interim stop on the way to two other small stars beyond Wolf, EuroCom took the risk and founded a colony station on Wolf's second planet.
In the twelfth year of the Wolf colony, a ten-thousand-year cycle completed itself deep in the star's ruby heart. The star stirred uneasily as convection cells lifted high-energy plasma to the formerly impenetrable barrier between interior and surface and pressed for release. As Wolf rotated on her axis, the differential rotation at equator and poles wrapped her magnetic lines into a bewildering confusion, winding Wolf like a top. Starspots, the visible mark of a star's magnetic stress, darkened her ruddy face and spread inexorably from the equator toward the poles. The decompressing flare, inhibited by the rising plasma, became dangerously delayed.
After ten thousand years, a cycle had ended. Deep within Wolf, her forces began building, shuddering upward through the gas layers, rousing the sleeper...
