Usurper of the Sun Read online

  “Some are now saying that the Ring and the Island are sacred and should not be destroyed because they fear retaliation from the Builders. What are your thoughts?”

  “We will follow what Central Command decides, as always,” Aki responded.

  “Yes, but what’s your personal opinion? Is it wrong to tamper with what isn’t ours?”

  “It is threatening humanity. We have no choice but to dismantle it.”

  “Shiraishi-san, by participating, won’t your life be as expendable as a piece of equipment on that ship?” the reporter asked. “I want your true feelings. The world is placing its hope in you. I think those hopeful people would sleep more soundly if they knew that people with feelings, not robots, were in charge. Don’t you agree?”

  Aki stared at the reporter. She was not from the mainstream media. Judging from her dusty clothes and disheveled appearance, she looked as though she might have been waiting for Aki for days.

  “The Ring could just as easily be going around the sun vertically relative to Earth’s orbit instead of horizontally. Level with the earth, it would have no discernible impact on us. Yet, since they’re building it from metal mined on Mercury, it makes sense that it would be on the same plane as Mercury’s orbit,” the girl said. She cared much more than most of the callous journalists who began pouncing on Aki once she was selected.

  Aki couldn’t help it. This girl wanted truths that were more complicated than her rehearsed script had room for. Choosing her words carefully, Aki began a statement that was not on the list of approved and rehearsed replies.

  “Direct contact with an alien civilization has always been my dream. I regret that it is turning out this way. Everyone regrets that it is turning out this way. But I am participating in this mission because I hope it leads to a face-to-face encounter with the Builders.” Realizing that Aki was now speaking from her heart and not her press script, the reporter’s face went slack. There was an attenuated moment of silence.

  Finally, the girl asked, straying from her own rehearsed questions, “You really want to meet them in person?”

  Aki looked at the confused expression on the reporter’s face and surprised herself by grinning. “Yes. I have to find a way. Just like how I have to figure out how to get there and back without being thrown away like any other piece of junk on that ship.”

  ACT VIII: AUGUST 19, 2021

  THE TRANSPORT CAPSULE to the International Space Station did not have the luxury of a window. It was not until after docking and entering the habitation module that Aki finally got to see the vessel that would carry her and her crewmembers. A chill rushed over her. Motionless, she stared at the irregularly shaped silhouette that obscured the sun. The UNSS Phalanx. Costing over seventy billion dollars and, tragically, thirty-seven lives in the making, the Phalanx had drained precious resources while the rest of the planet froze and starved. She was the first nuclear-powered spaceship built by humankind—and she never would have come into existence if straits had not been dire.

  She measured an immense 130 meters in length and was fitted with twelve round propellant tanks, each stemming out in a different direction, attached by ribs that jutted from the ship’s spine. If the round tanks had been painted purple, the tanks would have looked like grapes on stems floating in space. The bow, which was covered with a silver thermal insulator, contained the unmanned probehound, a parabolic mirror acting as a light shield to protect the ship from solar radiation, and the cramped living quarters. The stern was crowned with the double NERVA III nuclear engines, attached to the hull via a thirty-meter truss.

  For the moment, a tanker, launched into space on a Titan V rocket, was docked alongside the propellant tanks and fueling up the last tons of RP-1, a kerosene fraction. Aki counted five people in space suits dangling from various parts of the ship’s exterior making last-minute adjustments.

  Two guided missiles earned the Phalanx the right to call herself a warship, and each missile had a five-megaton nuclear warhead. Five megatons. A spark of energy that is little more than a match head when compared to the stars, Aki thought. It was just another reminder that concerns on Earth seemed trivial from a sufficiently distant vantage point.

  “Refrain from getting your hopes up. A direct attack on the Ring by the Phalanx would be like trying to keep the ocean tide from rising by shoveling scoops of sand into the sea,” was the kind of comment made by critics. Even Aki was unconvinced that a direct attack would work, if it were even prudent to try.

  UNSDF Central Command, however, had lost any patience for pessimism and responded by saying, “Our most potent weapon is humanity itself. We believe in the crew of the Vulcan Mission without reservation.” After a brief ceremony that struck all four crewmembers as superfluous, the crew entered a long transparent tube and boarded the Phalanx. They floated through the airlock and into the crew area, a twelve-cubic-meter compartment that was the only common space in the habitation module.

  Commander Kindersley chuckled. “That’s one hell of a long trip just to end up in another sardine tin. At least it feels homey.”

  “Long trip? We haven’t even left orbit to hit the deep sky yet,” Mark chided.

  “It feels almost over. After four years of waiting, eleven more months doesn’t seem like much.”

  AFTER PRELIMINARY INSPECTIONS, the crewmembers entered the “cocoons,” their ovular private quarters. The cocoons were as small as coffins but contained everything the crew needed for day-to-day living. They could sleep, conduct meetings through the internal comm system, control the ship, and even answer the call of nature from inside their cocoons. Here was where they would spend most of their time. All information systems were operated from the cocoons using data suits and heads-up displays. They would take meals in the crew area, unless mounting tension among crewmembers (a consideration built into the very architecture of the ship) dictated otherwise, but the rest of their time would be spent within their cocoons.

  Four hours later, the UNSS Phalanx undocked from the International Space Station on schedule. Aki was surprised that they were leaving on time after all the countless delays, but she was ecstatic to finally be taking off. As the ship left its low orbit, she felt no more movement or acceleration than she would have felt if she were riding an elevator.

  “We’re on our own, just the four of us. Let’s do our best to be friendly, but not too friendly,” said Commander Kindersley from his cocoon. Then, clearing his throat, he added, “Mark,” half-jokingly.

  AKI SPENT MOST of her time conferring with Per over the comm system. It was their job as the science team to discuss operational plans and review research sent from Central Command.

  “Hey, Aki. Did you check that article from CERN about the latest theory on energy transfer from the Ring to the Island?”

  His voice bubbled with curiosity, showing no signs of bitterness over the fact that the Ring had rendered his homeland uninhabitable. He tended to view the Ring more as a mechanical device that was causing a nuisance rather than something that had obliterated most of Sweden.

  “The article on how energy might be converted to anti-proton beams that pass through narrow tubes? The energy loss would be too much waste. I think it would be too unconventional, even taking into account the creativity we have seen,” Aki responded.

  “With a clever conversion equation though. Didn’t the math look pretty at least? It would be more efficient than passing the energy down copper wire that wrapped halfway around the sun. I am interested in running this through the onboard database and downloading more info. When we remove a sample of ring material, let’s do a matter-antimatter annihilation response test so that we can see how much energy it really stores.”

  “The omnispectrometer might come in handy. If it is using anti-protons, there must be some built-in mechanism on the Ring that is creating them. If we go on the logic that the Ring behaves like a cellular organism, each unit would contain the fundamental building blocks that provide the basis for its various functions.”<
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  “The cell model is not always the most efficient, you know,” said Per. “One anti-proton plant per square kilometer would be enough. Anti-proton plants could have been overlooked by the probes. Assuming a homogenous structure across the Ring is just the failure mode of that sort of model.”

  “Certainly a possibility. The probes saw little.”

  Her discussions with Per tended to be business oriented and often ended abruptly. They were not close in the sense of being friendly, but their interaction kept Aki’s mind occupied during the long voyage.

  ACT IX: JANUARY 24, 2022

  REACHING PERIHELION, THE UNSS Phalanx fired its engines full thrust in order to decelerate. Planet Earth was over a hundred million kilometers off the ship’s port side. Communications had been clear, with no interference from the sun or the gas clouds blasting up from its surface. The latest news and information was constantly uploaded onto the ship’s mirror server. Aki stayed focused on analyzing the streams of data, but it was impossible to keep from being distracted by news of the tragic and worsening conditions back home.

  Every day seemed to offer new visions of heartbreak. Lately, violent uprisings were more frequent. A few weeks ago it had been hunger strikes. The governments of the Commonwealth of Independent States nations had ceased to function as their citizens fled south. They sought refuge in South Asia, northern Australia and various parts of Africa, even though all of those locations were already overflowing with refugees. With their homelands overrun by glaciers, cut off from the rest of the world that had not yet frozen over, the refugees had little choice but to flee. The problem was that very few places were left unaffected. The environmental and meteorological changes meant that the sheer volume of refugees outnumbered the options for shelter.

  PROPELLANT TANKS 8 and 9 were jettisoned when the tanks ran dry. Gigantic metal balls drifted ahead of the decelerating ship, outlined majestically by the brilliance of the sun behind them as the tanks fell toward it. Shortly after the lengthy deceleration stage of the Phalanx’s arrival ended, the ship spent four hours freefalling toward the Ring, entering its dark shadow from the upper edge.

  “Can we open the shield on the window, Commander?” Aki asked.

  “I suppose so. We are going to have to do it eventually.”

  Aki floated out of her cocoon into the crew area. She dimmed the lights, looked out the ship’s only window, and gasped.

  An endless mountain range of translucent white flames danced in front of her eyes. Staring at the elusive object, the scientist within her tried to make sense of what she was finally getting to see up close. Gazing into it, she started crying, almost hypnotized, reliving the memories of watching her first total solar eclipse when she was nine years old. When she made that connection, she realized that she was looking at the corona of the sun—a crown of plasma burning at over a million degrees.

  The lower part of her view was blocked by an object. The corona towered above, beaming rays in a radial pattern reminiscent of the Japanese military’s ensign from the late nineteenth century. Aki tried to change her angle by moving closer to the window, trying to see beyond whatever was in her way. No matter how she shifted her position, the object did not move. Was it part of the ship? Aki wondered if it was one of the propellant tanks. With a start and a shudder, she realized the visual trap she had fallen into and how she had confused herself.

  The obstruction to her view was not part of the ship—it was what she had spent her life waiting to see. Aki was staring at the blackness of the Ring.

  She had expected shiny silver, but the object she was looking at was as dark as space itself. Aki was mesmerized. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she noticed that the surface was less jet-black that it had originally appeared. There was a modicum of light from the surrounding stars that reflected off the surface, shimmering like an afternoon breeze blowing across a grassy meadow. The flickering of the light was most likely caused by pressure fluctuations from the solar wind that deformed the surface of the ultra-thin material enough to cause the reflecting starlight to twinkle. The view was more breathtaking than Aki could have possibly imagined.

  She drew a connection between the phenomenon she was observing and the aurorae seen in the polar regions when Earth’s magnetosphere acts as a funnel and causes particles carried on solar winds to converge and collide with the upper atmosphere. What she saw was caused by raw and undiluted solar wind. The particles danced on a screen as wide as twenty Earths lined up in a row. Even with such a difference, the shimmering light here appeared, oddly enough, more similar to the aurora borealis than she had expected.

  Aki was pulled from her thoughts by a noise from the other side of the bundles of cables and air ducts. Mark, she thought. By now, she was able to tell which crewmember was coming out of his cocoon by the sound of his footsteps.

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “Not at all. Please come in.”

  Aki pushed herself back to share the tiny twenty-centimeter wide window.

  “I was afraid we took a wrong turn at Venus,” he said, staring out at the Ring. “You wanted this for your wedding band?”

  “I do not think it would fit on my finger, with the flab I have gained in the last six months.”

  Mark laughed heartily. He always tried to encourage witty comebacks from her. After a pause, he returned to staring out the window. She expected him to come on to her because it seemed like the perfect moment, but he did not. If it came to it, Aki was pretty sure a cocoon was large enough for two people. During the past six months, Mark had flirted with her often. Once he was even blunt enough to say, “If it’s a matter of contraception, we have some on board.”

  Mark was always honest, considerate, and even able to show a sensitive side when he wanted. The line about contraception had not been his shining moment, but he did have moments that made Aki wonder about the possibilities. Physically, his face could not have been more handsome if it had been chiseled from marble. No matter how hard Aki looked, she could never find flaws in Mark, even though she wondered if he would give her the time of day if the world had been different, if the era of organic life’s dominance on Earth were not limping to a close.

  Despite all that he offered, Aki had turned Mark down multiple times. She kept her sexual self so bottled up in the name of pursuing her research that she feared what might happen if she were to unleash herself on any man, especially in this environment. She wanted nothing to interfere with the long-awaited encounter with the Ring. The Ring was out there, finally right outside the window. She knew that they talked about her behind her back—man talk—saying that she was “married to the Ring.”

  Neither Aki nor Mark could turn away from the window.

  “Looking after nuclear subs with missiles, I was in charge of enough power to torch the world,” Mark said. “Now I’m on this ship. It’s my job to deal with these reactors, but my work always seems linked to the end of the world.”

  “It hasn’t ended yet, Mark. We are not here to end the world.”

  “If we destroy the Ring, humanity gets to live. Unlike any war we’ve ever faced or simulated in doomsday scenarios, this one isn’t humanity turning against itself. There has never been a war with such clear-cut objectives and there has never been a war with such perfect moral clarity. We win at all costs.” Mark attempted a comforting smile.

  She knew that his last sentence could have included the phrase, “even if we end up martyrs,” but they shared that sentiment without saying it. For a second, they both looked away from the window.

  “That’s why I applied,” Mark said. “I thought, ‘Here’s a job where I can finally use the craziest thoughts that run through my head. All I need is to figure out how to destroy that thing.’”

  “Our mission’s about that for you—the joy of morally acceptable mass destruction?” Aki asked.

  Mark gazed at Aki for a moment. “I love what goes through that pretty little head of yours.”

  “If you were at
war with Italy, could you bring yourself to bomb Florence, to ruin the Uffizi Museum?”

  “If the artwork inside it were a threat to me and mine? Then, yeah, I could bomb it to hell and sleep like a baby.”

  “I guess you are lucky that your head can overrule your heart.”

  Aki felt her excitement for the Ring drain out through her pores. She was surprised by how bitter they both sounded. She was doing the one thing the crew had been advised to avoid—starting a heated debate in cramped quarters.

  “Tell me, Aki, what can I do to see the Ring like you do, like a masterpiece in the Uffizi that deserves protection?”

  “The problem is that you do not know anything about it. What you need is to try to understand the Ring. You have to want to understand. It is like how you feel when you look at a painting or a sculpture. It is here for us to understand, to interpret, not just to annihilate. You look at beauty because it is one of the few profound things that humans can do. To destroy without even trying to understand is the impulse of instinct, not a result of cognition.” Aki looked away, frustrated and angry. “Finding joy in annihilation is fundamentally inhuman.”

  SEVENTY-TWO HOURS later one of the probehounds was launched. The hound’s propulsion jet nozzle could be seen in the lower part of the monitoring screen. In front of that was the small reflection of the faithful dog going out to sever the Ring. The probe dropped in freefall to a point about twenty meters away from the Ring’s outer surface. When its small NERVA IV fired, there was a flash of light that whited out the screen until the automatic brightness control adjusted to the new level of input.