Authors: John Koetsier
She lay a hand on mine. “Give me some time, OK?”
I nodded, dumbly, and she got up and walked down the corridor, turning at the end. I sat on the hard floor for a long time, thinking.
The next morning I woke early. Most of the others would have aching heads and blurry vision when they did actually manage to pull themselves out of their bunks. Or pods. Or floors, depending on where they happened to pass out last night.
But before I had properly attacked a heaping plate, the bell that signaled Hermes’ imminent arrive sounded. A little shocked given that he had promised some R&R, I sat up and awaited the stragglers. Finally, after they dragged themselves into the hall, Hermes began to manifest. Without explanation or apology he jumped right in.
“You will have a new mission three days from today, in a high-tech milieu. Since you’ve been on a low-tech mission for a week, and haven’t done HT training for a month, you need some prep time. Training starts today. Be ready in 30 minutes.”
Message delivered, Hermes disappeared with no further ceremony. No ceremony at all, actually.
After that rapid-fire delivery, there were more than a few shocked looks on my team’s faces.
“What happened to a few days downtime?” muttered Drago.
“Down the drain with the rest of last night’s supper,” I said, as if I had known all along that there would be no break. The first requirement of command is to appear to be in command.
“Do whatever you need to do to wake up, but don’t eat. Zero G is 30 minutes away and I don’t want to be wearing your breakfast. Move, move, move!”
Of course, I had no idea if we’d be plunged into space battle sims, but it wouldn’t shock me. And the last thing this hung-over crew needed was any G force other than one on a recently full stomach.
The next three days were a blur of suit and exoskeleton work, particle beam weapons check-out, and a variety of null-gee re-acclimatization exercises. We had all fought in space before, done missions there together, but it had been some time since we had done focused training on systems, tech, strategy, and coms. Everything in space was both more deliberate and more immediate: days, weeks, even months of tedious travel interspersed by nanoseconds of gone-in-a-flash computer-assisted battle. It was something you forgot at lower levels of battle tech, where everything was guts and glory: your enemy was right in front of you, and it was kill or be killed in the simplest, most animalistic sense imaginable. Getting the rhythm and the feel back took time.
Four days later we were in space. Realspace. And I had not yet talked to Livia again.
And we all shine on … like the moon and the stars and the sun.
- John Lennon
Hell was our destination. Or heaven — the difference was perhaps academic.
The universe had been slashed into two realities. Before, an endless plane of pure light and heat and energy. Behind, deep velvet utter black, an endless featureless carpet of nothing. Any faraway stars and planets were invisible, lost in the glare, taken only on faith. We were quite literally travelling from dark to light.
A few days ago, the sun had filled our field of vision. Within a day or two, it was our vision. For weeks we had watched it grow from a bright pinpoint of light to a star, then to a sun, and then to an angry roiling massive disc. As we came closer and closer it became half our universe: a wall of light and heat that extended up and down and left and right as far as we could see. It was not circular. It was not round. It was a flat endless plain of light and heat and furious boiling.
I opted for hell.
Vast prominences and solar flares, as yet untamed by the solar power station they named Sunflower, reached out to grasp us. The million-degree temperatures of the sun’s outer atmosphere attempted to render us with casual violence into our component subatomic particles and fling us into an equally uncaring universe. The light that flooded up in uncountable quadrillions of photons threatened to push our craft away, and the unified gravitic forces of a sun-load of tightly packed ions attempted to suck us down into its depths to merge our minuscule matter with its massive self.
We had approached slowly from the solar south pole, ninety degrees to the angle of the ecliptic — the narrow band in which the planets and 99.9% of the solar system’s non-Sun mass resides. It was a high-energy approach, but the Sunflower was at the north pole, and we were using the bulk of the star to mask our arrival. While feverishly hoping that it was working, mostly worrying it probably wasn’t, and partly questioning the entire extreme bother.
It’s fairly obvious, but bears repeating: the sun is large. Extremely large. Mind-bogglingly large.
Take diameter. If the earth is one, the sun is 100. That’s big enough, but surface area is another matter entirely. Surface area is twelve times the radius — squared — giving the sun ten thousand times the surface of the earth. And that’s assuming that a seething mass of gas and magnetic force fields has any kind of definable edge you could call a “surface.”
A bad assumption, actually.
On this mission, we would be, by any standard definition, operating within the actual body of the sun. Certainly within its lower atmosphere. This, more than approaching from solar south, was going to hide us ... if anything was. Finding anything against this roaring behemoth would be challenging at best and next to impossible at worst, a fact that worked against us as much as it worked for us.
During our approach, we had scattered several thousand mini spy satellites into low solar orbit — a pitiful number for such an enormous area … something like having three or four satellites to monitor the entire earth. Tiny, operating entirely on passive sensors, and emitting signals only when their puny brains thought they spotted something within a narrow band of interestingness, they should go unnoticed in the chaotic, energetic upper atmosphere of the sun. However, they would have to work fast: here in the overheated corona our fleet of spies had a half-life of only a week, so we were already losing eyes and ears at a tremendous rate. Nothing had been spotted yet: we had perhaps two days left with something approximating full coverage. Of the north pole.
It was time to talk. I called the team together.
"The enemy will be approaching the Sunflower shortly. They'll be coming in at least two ships, but we have to be prepared for them EVAing in solar singlesuits when they get close. Their objective is to destroy; ours to protect.”
Destroying something like the Sunflower that was designed to survive in the almost unimaginably intense environment of low solar orbit was not an easy or obvious task, I considered as I remembered what I had been told. Or preloaded with.
The surface of the sun is cool — only 6000 kelvins or so — compared to the core, at ten millions or more. But even that would melt any common artifacts made of natural materials. And a solar station also needed to survive solar flares: gigatons of solar material ejected from the sun in violent explosions at solar system escape velocities. Comparing them to a hydrogen bomb exploding was like comparing a blade of grass to a 400-foot sequoia: they were both plants … but at slightly different scale.
Even a solar flare, however, was a walk in the park compared to the temperatures in the outer solar atmosphere, the corona. Blasted by radiative heat from below and insulated by ionized helium above, the corona was hotter in places than the very core of the sun itself, where nuclear fusion was consuming almost a billion tons of matter each and every second. Up to 20 million kelvins in places and filled with high-energy particles that wanted to tear our flesh to pieces with a trillion tiny cuts, the corona was a hellish place.
It was where we were right now, I remembered with an involuntary shiver. In perfect comfort, too, in our solar sphere, our sunship.
Built with advanced materials not even imagined in the early days of chemistry and physics in the 19th and 20th centuries, composed of super-heavy atoms in islands of non-radioactive stability high up in an atomic table no 20th century physicist would recognize, the hull stopped almost all cosmic rays dead, preventing energetic particles from tearing through our flesh and bone. In addition, it had an albedo of almost 100 percent, blocking most electromagnetic radiation, including x-rays and gamma rays. Five nines, I remembered: 99.999 percent, if its godlike designers were to be believed. The almost, however, was the killer. With gigajoules of energy bombarding the structure every second, even a small increase in temperature, a kelvin or two an hour, would inevitably lead to cooking. That was fine for the ship — it could withstand pressures and temperatures normal to the inner reaches of a star without sweating, so to speak. Our bodies, however, had a peculiar aversion to broiling.
So the craft had coolers and transducers that could convert heat into energy. Part of this energy could be used to power the ship. But far too much was available, so a large proportion needed to be essentially ejected, tossed overboard, by means of a powerful laser. The idea was that wherever the heat flow was the least — perhaps the rear of the ship, if you were traveling sunward — we could beam out excess energy. But it was two steps forward, one step back, since opening a port reduced our albedo far more. So the best we could hope for was a reduced rate: the slow cooker.
Hence the full electromagnetic spectrum shield that surrounded our vessel — our true protection from the hell just a few short meters away. FESS was a 100% efficient blocker of all electromagnetic radiation, from infrared to visible light to high-energy gamma rays — just the sort of stuff for those trillion tiny cuts that would, unshielded, give us a life expectancy of a just few agony-filled days.
The fly in that little ointment was a little different than the one inflicting our magnificent albedo: FESS depended on power. A lot of it. Enough, in fact, to power a medium-sized city. No power, no shield. No shield, no hope. That was the reason for the triple redundancy of our power source: a direct matter to energy converter. In goes matter — any matter — out comes energy ... and lots of it. Standard doctrine for near-solar space battle was to run and flee if even one of the power plants was knocked out. I wasn’t so sure that would be happening if we ran into really heavy static. A little ironic, actually: in the neighborhood of the biggest power source in our little corner of the universe we could run out of energy for the shields that could save our lives … or we could kill the shields, use solar energy, and slowly cook or quickly die, as the vagaries of battle decided. Our individual sunsuits — essentially three-meter tall self-contained ambulatory spaceships — would only prolong our lives for a few days.
Temperature and radiation were just two of the many threats to our lives in close solar proximity, however. Crushing gravity was quite possibly even worse.
The sun’s huge mass gave it almost thirty times the surface gravity of earth. Even though we wouldn’t be standing on the surface — there was no surface to stand on, of course, just gradually denser gases — even travelling in the sun’s vicinity in non-orbital vectors would expose us, at times, to the full power of that awesome crush. It was like taking off in an early 20th century rocket or shuttle to space, continuously, then multiplied by a factor of four or five. In other words, enough to reduce ordinary unmodified humans to screaming mush on the floor, and sufficient to kill us in a slightly longer period of time as bones cracked and lung muscles struggled to lift a chest that suddenly weighed almost a ton. So our grav generator was another critical piece of technology in the complex web of machinery keeping us alive. It could give us normal gravity while hanging in the microgravity of deep space, and it would moderate the 30G pull of our star down to a comfortable single G. It could moderate much more than that, actually, which was going to come in extremely handy if we intended any significant acceleration in the solar environment.
In short, our solar sphere was an amazing, incredible, almost magical craft. However, the Sunflower was another order of magnitude more magnificent in scope, imagination, and sheer cosmic chutzpah.
Imagine a spider’s web, beautiful and deadly in the morning mist. Curve it with unseen forces into an orb, and reinforce it at thousands of potential stress points. Spin it in space, in the shade of Mercury, and place smart nodes, control points, almost right next to each other, only a few tens of meters apart. After two or three decades of Von Neumann-style self-replicating construction, power up your control nodes, which are repeater stations, and initiate directional, shaped magnetic force field lines of incredible power, connecting all half million of them together. Now you are running out of room in the shade of the innermost planet, but it doesn’t matter. Initiate the start-up sequence, and the meshed web expands like God’s own Hoberman sphere, to just a fraction larger than the diameter of the sun itself. A very finely calculated fraction.
Now give it a shove sunward.
Some of your control nodes might rip through Mercury, although not many. They are now between a hundred and a thousand kilometers apart, and if they intersect the planet, they will rip through without really noticing. Your giant Hoberman will spiral sunward, pulled by gravity and guided with solar sails and ion engine thrusters where necessary. In a year or so, milliseconds in the solar lifetime, your sphere will impact the surface of the sun, drastically reducing speed and angular momentum, and beginning the months-long process of sinking through on one side while maintaining shape and tidally locking to the sun’s gravity field, which helpfully destroys any spin you might have picked up on the long journey in. Once the impinging side of your sphere pokes through the far surface of the sun, there will be some more months or years of oscillation, swinging out and back like a pendulum, slowly dampened by friction and the clever strategic use of extremely small, extremely tough solar sails.
Four or more decades later, you have a completed solar mesh, or web. Now, in the presence of unlimited energy, grow energy inverters from the stuff of the solar wind itself, from exotic atoms created by the galaxy’s largest super-collider, the mesh itself, and from a very small quantity of judiciously chosen shipped-in raw materials. Instruct your mesh to only grow inverters not in the plane of the planets’ orbit, so no solar energy to the earth or other planets (some of which are now thriving civilizations in their own right) is diminished. 150,000 inverters later, you have a completed Sunflower: all the energy your civilization can handle, and more, essentially for free, essentially forever. And along the way you’ve built the largest structure in human history: biggest, heaviest, most expensive, most useful, and soon, the most depended upon.
In other words, the perfect terrorist target.
The question was: how would the enemy attempt to destroy it? In spite of all its weight, for most of it, there was no there, there. Almost all of the Sunflower was as insubstantial — and as powerful — as gravity itself. Composed almost entirely of magnetic force lines linking the smart nodes in a sun-circling grid, the Sunflower was invulnerable to light weapons. Lasers would just pass right through it. Kinetic weapons were even more useless, unless you could contrive a Jupiter-sized mass cannoning into the Sun. Which would be like slitting your own throat to bleed on an enemy, since virtually everything in the inner solar system would be crisped as a result, and electronics out to the Oort Cloud would be fried.