Authors: John Koetsier
Explosive weapons would just be a joke, all the way up to and including nuclear and antimatter: the Sunflower coexisted very nicely indeed with a fairly large continuously exploding thermonuclear weapon, thank you very much. A determined enemy could probably damage some of the 150,000 energy collectors. But they were cheap, easily regenerated in an environment of virtually unlimited energy, and very numerous: a prototypical low-value target.
No, if you wanted to destroy the Sunflower, the only kinds of weapons that made any sense at all were electromagnetic generators and inverters. The Sunflower’s chief vulnerability lay in the fact that if enough of the smart nodes and repeaters were knocked out of commission — even for just a few minutes — the entire massive structure would sink into the sun. Each node would almost certainly survive … but almost equally certainly would never again be linked up with its neighbors.
After musing on all this, I turned my attention back to my team.
“The information we have suggests they will be coming on a diplomatic inspection ship, disguised as civilians. Once they’ve taken control of Sunstation, a fake supply ship will rendezvous with their heavy weapons. Then they’ll initiate the attack.”
“We’re now vectoring in on Sunstation — we’ll arrive just a half a day prior to their arrival. We’ll be coming out from the Sun itself, which we hope will keep our presence secret from all: the station and the enemy.”
“But our ship’s signature and our transponder ID, which we’ll turn on when we leave the Sun, will identify us as Terran peacekeepers. This should enable us to dock with the station without too much trouble, as there are fairly regular visits from defense forces. If challenged, we will identify and request docking.”
“We’ll be there in three days. Be ready. And monitor the spy satellites for anything unusual.”
After dismissing the team, my thoughts turned to the events of the past few weeks of slow travel. Livia and I had not seen much of each other beyond the odd awkward moment passing each other in the narrow, confined corridors of the sunship. I wasn’t sure what she thought — whether she considered me crazy or deluded or rebellious. We had all been servants of the gods for … for forty years, or however long we had been alive. For however long we had been soldiers in training.
But my mind continued to wander. In the long sleepless nights I questioned why I, why we, had no past, no history, no … life. No beginning — childhood was the word, I thought. No parents. No families. No lovers either, husbands or wives. Until the Talas mission I had not even guessed at such things. They just had not been part of my consciousness. But I had seen people of different ages, some young, some older. I had seen young women, almost girls really, in Ershud’s tent. Not warriors, most definitely not sisters, but very, very female. And I wondered.
When sleep finally came, dreams accompanied. Dreams that hinted at a life before my current simple, even simplistic kill or be kill warrior’s existence. That suggested, maybe, the city of the gods was my city. That I lived there, or had lived there. Worked there, even in the glass tower in the sky, building … building something. Maybe even building the hall in which I now lived, when at “home.”
Or maybe I was just crazy.
I had no way to know, no reference points to indicate what was true, nothing real or physical or provable beyond the inconstant murmurings of my brain. But being congenitally incapable of willful ignorance, I pushed forward, seeking out the dreams, mulling them over, straining with every ounce of my too-meager mental might to discover more, to understand what I discovered, to connect, and to make sense of all I imagined I was learning.
If I was not, in fact, insane, I was a god. Or, more accurately, perhaps, the gods were human. Just like me.
I looked into the mirror in my bunk/office, wondering what others saw when they looked at me. I saw a tall dark figure with my usual olive skin and black, wavy hair. Either could change, and had changed on some missions. But the features remained the same: broad face with no spare flesh and sharp, almost brutal angles. Thin nose. Grey eyes. Lines around the lips and at the temples where the weight of deadly decisions had been hung.
No real age — the varipods took care of that. But no answers either. No wisdom. No magic. No solutions.
The knock at the door startled me out of my reverie. I turned the knob, and before I could open, Livia pushed in, closing the door behind her. She looked tired, and her face was flushed. Peaks of color highlighted her cheekbones. She looked right into my eyes, a flat, dangerous stare.
“I almost hate you,” she said in an intense almost-whisper. “I almost hate you, you bastard.”
I must have looked startled and uncomprehending. If so, for once my face mirrored my mind. Livia sighed, turned off the laser stare, and half sat, half leaned on my desk.
“I was happy before we talked, that day in the corridor off the hall. I was stupid and ignorant and happy! I knew who I was (or I thought I did) and I knew what I was for. I knew my place in our little bubble in reality, and I knew that you and I were very slowly starting something special. I was happy.”
She stopped, looked down. Starting to understand, I moved closer. I touched her shoulder, gently, then leaned in. Her head dipped into my chest, and I brought my other arm up around her, and stood, and held her, both of us deep in thought but deeper in a new and renewed sense of togetherness, and it felt good.
“Since we talked I’ve been thinking,” she continued, voice muffled. “And dreaming, and remembering. I know that who we are now is not who we have always been. I know there is more. I have seen the city, in my dreams, and I know there is a way there. And answers, once we arrive.”
“And I know,” she said, looking up, “ I know that you and I share something special, something we need to protect. Something that is beautiful, and can be better yet.”
My chest rose and fell more than it ever did on a forced march. More than I ever remembered in the thick of battle. Unfamiliar and unimagined feelings and emotions rose up in me, and, remembering what I had seen in the glass tower, I gently brushed her cheek with the backs of my fingers, then turned my hand and held her face, bent my neck and kissed her on the lips. Gently at first, touching barely like gossamer wisps of early morning fog, then with greater passion and urgency and love. We didn’t come up for air for a long time.
“Livia,” I said when we finally separated. “There’s a story that I remember now. From when I was a kid, somewhere, somewhen. Somehow. There was some woodworker back in the mists of time. He made a fake boy, a puppet, out of wood. Somehow it was alive and intelligent, and it wanted, more than anything else, to be a real boy … a real human being.”
Livia looked skeptical.
“It’s just a story — it’s not true. But it has meaning. Especially now, for me. Somehow I’ve been that wooden boy — all I knew, all I did, was war and violence and action. No emotion, no thought beyond fighting and winning. But now … now I am starting to feel bigger. Deeper. Maybe, colored in, or filled out. I think now I am beginning to be real.”
I could say no more. Swelling emotion filled my body — I felt I would burst from the pressure, from the intensity. But it was good, and Livia put her cool hand on my hot cheek, and I knew she knew, and I knew she was feeling the very same thing. And it was good — very good.
For the next hour we swapped stories, filling in bits and pieces, fragments from dreams. Livia too had memories of the city: living and working there. And something else: a parent.
“I am sure my mother’s favorite color was blue,” Livia said. “I remember mornings in the sun, by the river. We walked and sat and talked for hours, and her dress was always blue.”
“I have no memories of parents,” I answered. “Just the city and the tower, and a project. Most of my dreams are about this project — I think it was the most important thing in my life for a very long time.”
I also suspected that the project that I had tattered remnants of memories of had everything to do with the life we were now living.
“I think I remember constructing the hall. I think we had some kind of enemy, and we are some new kind of soldiers — part of a weapon that can reach through time and fight a battle, win a war … before it even starts.”
“Sort of like destroying your enemies before they become enemies,” said Livia. “Killing the mother of your foe so she isn’t even born — so she never existed.”
“Exactly,” I said, nodding. “The part I don’t get is why we had to have our memories chopped. Why our lives are so partial. I don’t see the need. What is the purpose?”
“But Geno,” Liva started, then faltered. “I don’t think I ever had any relationship with Hermes. I’ve struggled and wrestled with my mind, and I believe I would know. I think that … you seeing me with him, kissing … I think that was a dream, no more.”
I nodded, not really knowing, but willing to accept that my mind had constructed something out of bits of reality and portions of imagination, and after a few more minutes of fruitless speculation, we parted with a brief hug and a lingering kiss. By mutual unspoken agreement, we knew that revealing our new relationship to the others — especially during a mission — was a bad idea. Livia left, quietly. After a few more minutes, I made my way to the bridge.
Tonia and Helo were there, both gazing at the wallscreen that showed a vastly dimmed image of the sun. Paradoxically, this deep in its atmosphere, so close to the gargantuan disc, there was not a lot of detail to be made out. Bright and brighter was the order of the day.
“Making good progress?” I asked Tonia.
“About a third there,” she answered. “Still a long way to go, and we travel fairly slowly, this deep in the sun’s atmosphere. We’ve taken a few detours around magnetic disturbances and the like — nothing serious but better safe than sorry.”
“As long as we get there on time,” I mused. “We’ll get even deeper before we come out … we’ll want to be as hidden as possible before we make our acquaintance with the station. And we don’t want anyone not already on the station knowing that we’re there.”
The next few days we managed a tedious route around the sun. Boring, slow, and necessary. We had varipods on board, and most of us used them to pass the time instantaneously. All of us used them at least once in the last two days, to ensure we were peaking for our absolute best physical and mental performance. All the time, there was nothing from the spy satellites we had scattered in low solar orbit. Nothing extraordinary, and precious little ordinary — they were falling, falling inevitably in the harsh coronal environment. Which was, as we knew, oddly hotter than our current position deeper in the sun.
It was only about five hours prior to our emergence from the deeper atmospheric layers, heading straight up to the station, that we received a message from first one, then two of our eyes in the northern solar sky. A solar flare just south of Sunflower, right above our current location, was making communication difficult, almost impossible. However, we did manage to make out that at least one ship was a day, or possibly a day and a half out from the Sunflower polar station. Almost certainly, it was the ship with the rebels that we had been told to expect. Which meant that we were, just as intended, precisely on schedule.
Not for the first time did I wonder about the gods’ stellar intel. And then wondered idly if that was actually a real live pun dredged up by some recesses of my subconscious mind. If so, I wasn’t going to worry about it. Judging by where I had come from, even having a subconscious was a victory — whether or not it came at the price of bad jokes.
Shaking my head slightly, I focused on the data. The ship currently heading in to dock with the Sunflower was large, two or three times our size at least. It had easily 40 people on it. For safety’s sake we would have to treat all of them as potential enemies. I asked Helo to send a message to all our remaining satellites: move closer to the solar pole. I wanted that area covered well — the worst possible scenario was that a number of following ships or individual fighters in sunsuits like our own would surprise us. Then I alerted everyone to get suited up and ready for action. We would dock in less than an hour.