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his ninety-dollar basketball shoes on the cheap carpet. ES2’s money had gone into the array. Roell grunted in disapproval at the cramped lounge with its faded couch, but he lingeredin front of three Coke and snack machines rigged to dispense their goods for free. Janet had allowed him to develop a craving for sugar and caffeine loaded with chemicals that would rot his bones.
    “Take two,” Marcus said generously.
    Roell was caught off guard. He’d expected an argument. Instead, he grinned and selected two cans of Mountain Dew.
    Marcus led him into the control room, where Steve had been joined by the postdoctoral astronomers who worked on site. The four of them were gathered around one computer, murmuring together. To Marcus, their nervous energy was palpable.
    “S’up,” Roell asked Kym Vang, a round Laotian girl in her twenties.
    Marcus intervened before Roell could embarrass them further. He sat at another computer and Roell took the chair beside him. “We’re sharing our feeds with Space Command,” Marcus said. “Last night I talked with an Air Force general.”
    “That’d be a cool job,” Roell said, allowing the faintest glimpse of the wide-eyed little boy Marcus remembered. He bumped Marcus’s leg with his knee, leaving Marcus pleased by the casual contact. Those few seconds were a victory. It was progress. Roell might be poking fun, but he was also proud of his awkward old genius dad.
    One of ES2’s primary investors was AFSPC, the United States Air Force Space Command. AFSPC and NORAD were interested in phased array technology for tracking foreign satellites. Military involvement was off-putting to some of their other supporters, like academics, but they needed the funding and gleaned new expertise from the arrangement.
    To Roell, this meant Marcus was working with the most awesome of the awesome—the guys with missiles and laser beams.
    “What are they saying?” Roell asked.
    “Nothing yet. No one knows how to classify some of the activity we’re recording. Gamma radiation is up, X-rays, ultraviolet.”
    “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this?”
    “It depends who you ask,” Marcus said, downplaying his concern. “When I was your age, everyone would have said G-class stars were quiet and stable. Then twenty years ago, they found nine that regularly produce superflares.”
    “Like how big?”
    “Like as much as a hundred million times larger than the worst flares we’ve seen, which is good.”
    “What would happen?”
    “It won’t. If superflares had occurred in our solar system, we’d see flood plains on Jupiter’s moons where the ice melted and refroze again.”
    Marcus didn’t add that closer to the sun, Earth’s atmosphere would have been ripped away. No one believed there was life more complex than microbes on the planets orbiting S Fornacis or Groombridge 1830, two of the main sequence yellow stars known to produce superflares. Something had gone wrong inside those stars—something Marcus was afraid was occurring to a lesser degree within Earth’s sun—yet he pretended he wasn’t worried.
    “This is just a particularly bad solar max. It will alter a lot of our assumptions, but let me tell you a secret. We don’t know as much as we like to think we do.”
    “That’s for sure,” Roell said, never missing an opportunity to assert himself.
    Marcus smiled ruefully. People had been counting sunspots since Kepler’s and Galileo’s first observations in 1607 and 1612. Since then, nearly forty cycles from solar max to solar min had been well-documented, and yet their oldest records barely established a pattern over four centuries.
    Four centuries were a blink in the lifespan of a sun. Increases in the velocity and particle density of the solar wind might be normal occurrences.
    “Right now our array is working double-time,” Marcus said. “We’re listening to the sun, too. We can’t avoid it. But if we can confirm the same activity in other G-class stars, we’ll have