Authors: John Koetsier
Taking control of the station itself was supposed to be child’s play. Trailing wisps of hydrogen and helium plasma, we surfaced the ship and accelerated to the station, just 500 kilometers above, with our transponder squawking a Terran Defense force signal for all in the station to hear.
Receiving no challenge or response, we docked unconventionally over a port on the solar-facing hull where probes and maintenance craft were launched. We mated our gravity field with the station’s and prepared to go in hot. Clinging to the station like a remora on a whale shark, we opened the tiny hatch from the outside and burst in at full speed, wearing our heavy, almost invulnerable sunsuits.
I went in second behind German, who had begged for the lead. He took a running start, timed it perfectly as the hatch irised open, and leaped through hands and head first through the narrow portal. I was only a step behind him as we burst through the hatch into the station.
A step behind death, as it turned out.
Even before we cleared the hatch we were blasted by some powerful weapon. An intense actinic glare, impossibly brighter than the nearby sun, filled all my vision, and my visor darkened almost to coal black to protect my eyes. Instinctively, I kept moving, hit the floor, rolled, and charged even faster. Blinded, I bashed into walls and objects, perhaps people, and did my best to thrash around and spread confusion, destruction, and general havoc.
By the time I could see again, perhaps two seconds later, it was all over. And the sight made me wish my vision away. I saw it all in an instant, like a gestalt, a frame frozen in my mind. Five or six bodies strewed the floor, with the wreckage of a solar drill. Civilians or workers. Livia and Drago prowled the corridor left and right, and more sunsuited figures were coming through the hatch, just opposite me. But the focus of the frame was a gaping hole in Sunstation’s hull, just to the left of the hatch. Through it I could see our ship still docked, the sun a wall of flame, and a tiny swiftly dwindling dark dot that I instinctively knew was German, falling away. Falling away into the sun.
He must have taken the brunt of the blast and been blown clear out of the station. Already a force field had snapped into place, preventing atmospheric loss. I waited for German to activate thrusters and stop the fall, but either he was dead, or improbably, his almost invulnerable suit was damaged. Even as I looked German disappeared, and Livia called me.
“G! Get over here.”
I dragged my attention away from the gaping hole. Sunstation’s own FESS would protect us from the Sun, and automated procedures and robots would almost certainly be working within seconds to close it. German was gone, and we had a base to secure. There would be time later to think, and to mourn.
Wondering why we had met such a lethal response from supposedly civilian scientific staff, and starting to mentally explore the possibilities that the enemy had gotten here first, I followed the sound of Livia’s voice and we charged through the rest of the station. Intentionally, we had docked only a few dozens of meters away from an access port that led straight to the control center. Sending Sama, Helo, and Livia to block other known ingress/egress points, I led the rest directly towards Sunstation’s bridge.
After German I was in no mood for either parley or patience, and seeing the armored door ahead I accelerated into a run and simultaneously selected and loosed a small self-propelled AM grenade from my shoulder launcher. Small was not the right word; almost invisible might have been more accurate. But powerful — the resulting explosion would weaken the door while not damaging the rest of the station. I hoped ... antimatter/matter interactions are
intense
. I would personally do the rest.
The grenade impacted, throwing blazing sparks to all sides and splintering the heavy hatch. Not two seconds later I hit it running full out. The nearly three ton sunsuit smashed through the remaining shreds of armored door and I staggered inside, rolling and automatically triggering a few non-fatal flash-bangs to soften up any potential resistance.
Mostly non-fatal — direct impact would not be pretty, though.
When the smoke cleared and I got to my feet Drago and Tonia and Kin already had the entire room secured and seven or eight staff under control at gunpoint. There was little additional resistance. Very likely we had surprised them, coming up from out of the sun, and they had only a few minutes to arrange the nasty surprise for us when they determined where we were docking. I still wanted to know why they met what should have appeared to be friendly forces with deadly force.
We rounded up all personnel in a communal eating area and I found and isolated the station chief. Tall, middle-aged, looked like he was accustomed to a life of command. Graying hair, and odd vestiges of facial hair trailing down the sides of his face. He looked shocked but was recovering his equilibrium. For now. Temporarily.
I removed my helmet, folding it back into the shoulder plates, but did not step out of the suit. Looking down at him from half a meter more than my already-tall natural height, I stared in his eyes for long seconds before speaking, very gently, very softly.
“On my ship is a transponder,” I said, almost conversationally, as if I was explaining something rather dull and unimportant. “The standard kind, that, like most, transponder emits a signal. And that signal identifies my ship as Terran Defense Force property.”
I paused, turned my head as if thinking, then started again, still quietly.
“That means that my men are TDF. I am TDF. TDF protects this station and these” — I waved my hand at the others in the refectory — “scientists, engineers.”
Now I paused again, even longer. The station chief looked like he was about to pass a kidney stone, but he kept his mouth shut.
“So it is a bit of a shock to me,” I said just a tiny a bit louder now, “to be met by an industrial solar laser. It’s an unfriendly reception,” I mused. “Perhaps you could explain it to me.”
At this I stopped talking entirely and took a long step right up to the now trembling man, all traces of his self-composure visibly vanishing. Bending to shove my face right up against his, I dialed the volume up to eleven.
“AND PERHAPS YOU CAN TELL ME WHY I HAVE A TROOPER SINKING INTO THE SUN AT THIS VERY MOMENT!”
He sank to the floor and a stain appeared at his crotch. He covered his face with his hands, and started to babble. I stepped back, told him to slow down, and listened. When he finally became coherent, the story emerged.
“We received a message — a warning. Yesterday, late. The message was incomplete — unclear. There was interference.” He sobbed.
“What did the message say,” I said flatly, back to my quiet voice, but filling the tone with plenty of menace.
“It said that we were in danger. That there was going to be an attack. And then, then it said something about ‘disguised.’ We couldn’t make it out, didn’t understand, but …”
“Go on,” I prodded.
“When we saw your ship come out of the sun a few hours ago, we thought it was unusual. The message was never confirmed — we couldn’t get a re-send. We saw your signal, but we’ve never been approached by TDF forces from sunside before. So we were on edge, and we … prepared.”
“AJ wasn’t supposed to fire!” he almost screamed. “We were just preparing, being ready, just in case. But there was some accident — AJ was startled or, or nervous. He must have pulled the trigger when he saw your trooper come through, before asking any questions.”
Drawing himself up, recovering part of the tatters of his dignity, he looked in my eye.
“I am sorry. We made a mistake.”
I stood there for a moment, trying to take it in. I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not, and I wasn’t sure if that mattered. While I was thinking about it, Livia drew me aside.
“The ship with the terrorists on it is inbound NOW,” she said intensely. “They’ll be docking in about three hours. We need to prepare.”
She was right. I turned back to the station manager, scientists, and engineers.
“We are Terran Defense Forces. A plot to destroy the Sunflower is underway, and we believe that there is a ship inbound now with terrorists onboard.”
The scientists erupted into a buzz of exclamations and questions, including a few that sounded suspiciously like “so we were right.” I shut them down and continued.
“We need to prepare for them to come, and we need to be aware that some or all of the passengers are armed and dangerous, and that the ship itself may be weaponized.”
We herded command and communications crew to the bridge, then escorted nonessential personnel to their rooms. Broadcasting over the station’s internal coms, I informed them that for their safety they were confined to quarters for the next few hours, then used the station’s security protocols to lock their doors. Each door was as strong as the one we had shattered to enter the station command center, so unless they had AM grenades, that’s where they were staying.
Kin, Drago, and Tonia went to the conventional docking facilities to prepare for our soon-to-be guests, and I planned to some more time with the station manager. First though, I took a moment to lean against a doorway, catch my breath, and think.
German was a solid, dependable warrior. Unremarkable, perhaps, but yet unique and individual. He was probably still alive inside his sunsuit — the blast that had knocked him out of the station probably wouldn’t have killed him outright — and he might have another day to live as he sunk through the outer layers of the sun. I took a deep breath, whispered what might have been a prayer, or benediction, and almost physically wrenched my thoughts away from that image. There was a job to be done here, and we would remember him later.
The manager was recovering, somewhat, as you would expect for someone with the ability to get and keep the post of running humanity’s biggest and most expensive project. But he was essentially a bureaucrat, a paper-pusher, and he was out of his element. We circled up with a group of engineers whose job it was to monitor the control nodes and repeaters.
“So, if you were going to defend the Sunflower against an attacker, what would you do?”
“There’s nothing to do,” one answered. “We have no weapons of any kind, and no shield beyond what is necessary to protect us from the Sun itself.”
Another chimed in. “Is there anything that actually needs to be done? I don’t see how they’re going to destroy the Sunflower … even if they have nuclear weapons or antimatter, how will they do more than damage a few nodes?”
I explained the plan of attack that we were expecting: nuclear-powered EMP generating bombs, perhaps several thousand of them, simultaneously impacting connected nodes in two or three quadrants. If a big enough gap opened up, the overall system would not be able to maintain structural integrity, and the Sunflower would collapse, with component parts sinking into the sun. At this, the techs paled — they saw the danger immediately. I asked again: what would you do if you needed to protect the Sunflower? How could you do it?
“What if we used shaped attractor fields to drown the bombs deep in the sun?” It was the original tech who had claimed there were no weapons at all on or in the entire sun-girdling system.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. Each node is locked in place by attractor fields with at least two and up to four other nodes, and is an average of 500 kilometers away from its nearest repeaters. But the design specs allow for up to 1500 kilometers of distance.”
“And the point is ...?” One of the other techs wasn’t putting the pieces together either.
“Well, it’s simple really. The implication is,
we have extra power
. Extra power in nodes that are designed to attract or anchor to specific, designated, metallic objects. Last I checked, spacecraft and missiles and bombs all are metallic objects … which means that we can use that extra power to draw the missiles or bombs down into the depths of the sun, where they can explode harmlessly. All we need to do is to shape the attractor fields in each cluster of nodes to equally attract the missiles — to lock onto them and drag them down into the sun through the gaps between nodes.”