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 e
xpands 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.
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 be
en 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.”
No Other Gods Page 12