The Graveyard

“Let me get this straight in my head, you’re the reason why we were brought here?” Abby glowered angrily at the alien, who was cowering before the three Space Boomers, who were not happy their ship, which had been exploring the Outer Rim of the Milky Way galaxy, had been yanked out of their control by a wormhole, manipulated and controlled by said aliens’ ship, which had suffered from some kind of disaster. 

None of the boomers were bothered. They had a general rule; if any alien attacks, then beat the living piss out of it. 

The alien gurgled in pain, one of its tentacles twitching, it clearly wanted to rub its aching, bulging baggy sac of a head. “Y-yes,” it spoke in a pitched voice which rose, fell, shouted, and whispered. The alien had not been able to understand human language at first, but it had learnt quickly, even if it was a long way from being fluent. 

“And you’ve been yanking ships from different corners of the universe for….how long?” Erin glared pointedly at the alien while she felt sick to her stomach. Despite the zero g training all astronauts went through, which was considered child’s play to later generations who were born and raised in space, Erin had never liked being in zero g too long. The alien was essentially a octopus, with the arms with little sucker cups and because it could float in the low gravity without any trouble, its people clearly hadn’t considered aliens boarding their ships like this, so the boomers had no choice but to use magnetic boots and thruster packs to keep themselves steady. 

“I…do not….know,” the alien enunciated carefully, terrified of making a mistake. The last one had resulted in three of its friends being shot by plasma blasts. “I….no….know…..timescale you can….understand.”

“Try us!”

“No, Erin,” Jackie interrupted, ignoring her friend’s returning glare. “It might take too long or we might not understand it. After all, this is an alien. We can’t understand it, and it can barely understand us. So why bother?” Jackie turned to the alien. “Your wormholes, how do they work?” Humanity had long since given up on finding and using wormholes. They didn’t need them. Ever since the many world’s interpretation showing parallel worlds was correct, humans could slip sideways through dimensional space and travel either through time or through space in the blink of an eye. 

That was the reason why space boomers and other space explorers had been going on multiple year missions. Time travel had allowed humans to travel to hundreds of worlds, and was the reason why the Milky Way galaxy was being opened up all the time. It was the reason why space boomers like Jackie’s brother was on 9 year missions, jumping to other galaxies like Andromeda, and even beyond to explore with colonist ships being sent out and expanding the empire from there. Humans had outgrown the need for warp drive and wormholes, they both needed techniques to twist the laws of the universe like a pretzel, but now humans could use parallel worlds to slip into, bypassing all of those boring laws that had held them back for years. 

But clearly other races hadn’t taken the same approach and they had succeeded, like this one had. 

Jackie wondered if they would have discovered natural wormholes eventually. She had a feeling they would, knowledge of modern physics was accelerating with every day. 

This was one thing the alien could understand. “They….natural….holes. No artificial ones.”

“You’ve discovered natural wormholes?” There were theories on Earth where natural wormholes could be lying in wait, a natural collection of spaghetti like strings, wormholes stabilised by cosmic strings, looping through the universe, but nobody had been able to find them. If they could take this aliens’ knowledge back then they would make their 5-year mission really count beyond everything they’d done. And what about those other alien ships they had seen? They could board many of them, take some of their technologies, their secrets, and the already advancing wave of the Earth Empire would advance even more. 

“Y-Y-yes,” the alien gurgled. “We…discovered them long ago. Learnt how to manipulate them.”

Abby had seen the same possibilities as Jackie had, but she had another concern. “What happened, why did the wormhole bring us here?” She demanded. 

The octopus quailed at the very visible anger coming from the aliens who’d boarded its ship, killed its crew and bond friends. “The engine failed. Power source broke down, caused overload into the Navi-navigational programmers. Now random wormholes are being opened up as they’re unlocked.”

“Unlocked, what do you mean?” Erin asked. 

“My…race discovered the wormholes could be manipulated, each one could be unlocked with a specific key frequency.”

“If we could access it, could we find a way back to our own galaxy?”

“Yes. But the drive is damaged. We were….never….able to repair…it,” the octopus alien explained, relaxing as its sensitive tentacles sensed the hostility was ebbing away. “We tried repairing it, but the unit’s power source was leaked…and we could not repair it.”

“What about the other aliens?”

“Their ships were too different. Some were….primitive. Some did not have the technology to travel beyond what you call lightspeed. Others had similar technologies, but we killed them, only to discover we couldn’t use their technologies. When you arrived….we believed your technology, different as it was, would mean we no longer needed this ship. But you fought back,” something like real anger bubbled in the aliens’ bubbling, gurgling voice, “you were our only hope of returning home, and your ship would have yielded its secrets, you had achieved faster than light differently from us, who spent many cycles seeking a way…”

The alien wasn’t able to gurgle, shriek, or cry as Erin shot it in the bulging head sac. 

“Erin, why would you do that?” Jackie demanded angrily. 

“I was getting tired of its voice. Besides, it hadn’t really told us anything,” Erin retorted as she lowered her blaster. 

“But we needed its help to find the wormhole drive,” Abby said. 

“Oh, come on, it wasn’t going to say anything,” Erin was starting to ask herself if she had made a mistake, but it was too late for that now, “they were going to kill us and steal our ship. Besides, we can find our own way back using this ship’s navigational database. They must have used the wormholes to make a course.”

“But what if they didn’t? We could get lost, and we don’t have enough supplies for a long trip,” Abby argued. 

Erin sagged. “Oh, sorry guys.”

“But we were going to kill it soon,” Abby conceded. 

A light went up in Erin’s brain. “What’s going to happen to the alien ships out there?” She asked. “There are hundreds of them. And since the dampening field from the wormhole drive was switched off, they’ll be leaving. Do you think they’d give us some of their star charts to help us plot a course back to the Milky Way if we can’t get the wormholes to work for us?”

“Why don’t we check the wormhole device and see if we can get it to work?” Jackie suggested. 

-8- 

The wormhole device was alien, and while Jackie was their engineer and understood their own FTL drive, she was absolutely flummoxed by the alien technology. But she tried for hours to understand it, but no matter what she tried she couldn’t even try to understand it. Jackie looked up, glad to see her friends as they walked in. Her brain was aching. 

“Any luck?” Abby asked, seeing the answer was a resounding no already. 

“None, and I’ve been working for hours in zero g,” Jackie winced as she moved and her stomach shifted in a very uncomfortable way; even their genetic modifications couldn’t fix everything in zero g. 

Erin saw her wince. “Gravity bad?”

“Very. Anyway, I can’t make this work. I don’t get it. The circuitry, if it can be called that,” Jackie hefted up a bunch of slimy translucent tentacles which were filled with different coloured fluids, “is organic. There’s little to no metals. Forget engineers, we need geneticists. This is organic tech.”

“Organic technology?” Abby repeated. 

“Yeah.”

“Organic technology. Its only been theorised back home.”

“Yeah, but we can’t use it. I’d had my doubts I could make it work, but this clinches it,” Jackie threw away the tentacles and took off the gloves she’d used to protect her hands, and she left them floating around and gathered her tool box. “We might as well find our own way back. Did you have any luck with the navigational database?”

Abby and Erin shared a quick look and then back. “We told them the wormhole drive was off and they could all go, but only a few of them sent over their star charts.”

“Cool, where are they?” Jackie disengaged her magnetic boots and floated over, once she was close to them she re-engaged the magnets and stuck to the ground. 

“They were eager to help after learning we’d killed the aliens,” Abby said. “They’d tried for years, but they lacked our savagery, their words.”

“Charming.”

“They transmitted the charts to the ship’s computer - don’t worry, we’re getting a virus check done, and we made sure the computer was disconnected from the main one,” Erin said. “I’ve gone through some of them; one of the ships has been travelling for 50,000 years and they’ve crossed several galaxies. That’s going to be gold dust, but I haven’t checked it against our own almanacs.”

“Let’s do that now, and then we can get back home. I dunno about you, but I’ve had enough of this ship,” Jackie said. 

The three space boomers gladly left the alien ship, and they returned to their own. 

-8- 

Floating around the system were hundreds of space ships. Some were big, some were small. Some were shaped like rubbish bins. Some were shaped like giant golf balls. There were space stations, and ships. 

“Hey, I’ve managed to get a fix; according to these charts, we can reach galaxy M97,” Erin cheered. 

“Galaxy M87?” Abby repeated thoughtfully. “We have a few outposts there, right?”

“Yeah. We just have to plot the course, and then we can get back,” Erin smiled. 

Jackie saw a nasty and worrying flaw in the plan. “Are you sure those charts are accurate, Erin? I mean, they are alien charts.”

Erin pouted at the negative waves. “I have checked, Jackie. Believe me. I’ve checked against our own charts. They’re accurate.”

Jackie tapped Abby on the shoulder, hoping that was true. “Okay, then.” 

-8- 

The ship glowed and disappeared, jumping. 

 Robots must always fight Robots. 

“Eighteen new hacker cases,” DI Bailey and DCI Murray, of the Manchester Met police heard as they sat in silence and listened to the report being given to the Chief Constable. “The rise of cybercrime is going up. Three days ago, a doorbell camera failed to pick up a robbery because it had been hacked by an expert, and the houses’ security detected nothing.”

“That’s not all; a home computer cloned its users’ voice, and someone used it to speak to someone in a totally unrelated kidnapping case to use to make a ransom demand.”

Murray didn’t recognise the speaker and guessed she was someone new. That was the problem with the police; there were so many people that it was hard to keep track of, and more kept appearing every day. But as her experienced mind went over what she had just heard, she had a horrible and sneaking feeling about what happened in the kidnapping case. 

“What happened?” The Chief Constables’ assistant’s face and tone was grim; he’d likely guessed it, too. 

“The original speaker’s voice was identified, and he was arrested and questioned for nine hours while a search party checked his home. He’s a doctor, for god’s sake. And he had been working on his computer. One of our specialists checked the computer and discovered his microphone had been hacked, and his voice taken. After that, he was ruled out, but he’s been left shaken.”

Murray wasn’t surprised by that. It sometimes ruined lives whenever the police suddenly appeared and took you in for questioning. 

“This can’t go on,” the Chief constable said at last, “its like crime is evolving, and we need to keep pace-.”

“It is evolving, sir. That’s the problem. And we can’t stop it. And we’re not alone; I spoke to a friend of mine who works for the police force in Newcastle; a bank was hacked into, and half of its electronic savings were stolen.”

“Jesus.”

“The good news about that particular case was the hacker wasn’t experienced, and they were tracked quickly, but that was the last straw. The government is preparing something big to tackle all of this.”

“How?” DCI Murray demanded, already feeling her age; damn it, she had joined the police force to catch criminals, real living criminals. On the streets; she’d had a romantic view of the police force catching burglars and robbers, but it wasn’t until she had actually joined and saw the many variants of crimes that she realised kids' books always drew the line between what was acceptable. She was too old to deal with the constant evolutions of technology, and newer methods of communicating were becoming more and more common every day. She was too old for one of those brain implant things, and she didn’t think she could stomach an operation necessary to have one put in her head. “The only way we can catch these hackers is to use hackers themselves. What about the robots that were programmed to break into that jewellery shop a week ago? What’s going to happen with that?”

Both DI Bailey and DCI Murray had been involved in the case. The robots used hadn’t been those cute, innocent commercial toys you found. No, these were a bit more high-tech and appeared homemade. Their builder had been just a kid, but he had at his house many weapons. Several of her team had been hospitalised. She would never get out of her mind the surprised and pain-filled screams of pain as they were hit by nails, of all things. 

The sight had terrified her. 

But one of the clearest things about the whole mess was lines were being blurred. 

The Chief Constable blinked in surprise at her question. “I’m sorry…DCI Murray?” He asked as he struggled to place her face. A part of her wanted to punch him. They’d known each other for 23 and a half years now. “What do you find hard to believe?”

Inwardly wondering where he got the logic to ask her that, Murray went on, “How is the government planning on tackling this problem? We can barely handle it ourselves, and I think I speak for 99% of the country.”

Several people nodded and mumbled in agreement. 

The Chief Constable smiled. “Robots,” he said simply. 

-8- 

When someone pictures a robot, you picture something in the shape of a man, a human being. But robots actually have dozens of shapes and sizes. The robots unleashed on the general public to solve the problems of cybercrime and security came in dozens of shapes and sizes. Police drones, like mini police helicopters, overflew the cities and towns of the country. 

Powered by a power cell the size of a hand, with an uplink to the secure police intranet, these drones were forever flying overhead, awaiting calls and snapping dozens of videos and shots, narrowing down on speeding offences and drug deals, which led to a crackdown on dealers, who were hit quickly. In the past decade, the police of the United Kingdom had been made slowly and steadily toothless, but now with new leadership, the government decided to crack down on it, seeing the new evidence gleaned as an opportunity. Likewise in the London Underground, the Glasgow Subway, and the Tyne and Wear metro, pickpocket offences dropped radically. 

Add the presence of robots, full-size robots, and escorting the ordinary police made many other forms of crime drop. A terrorist act in London was quickly identified, and an AI software that was put into the intranet activated and without authorisation, sent a squad of armed police and robots. The robots overpowered the terrorists and took them and the evidence into custody. 

The AI was questioned and reprimanded, but the AI, proving its intelligence provided a strong argument. 

I AM PROGRAMMED TO CATCH CRIMINALS. THE PEOPLE DETECTED AND ARRESTED WERE IN THE PROCESS OF PLANNING DELIBERATE ACTS OF DESTRUCTION, AND YET NOBODY IN THE SECURITY SERVICES SEEMED PREPARED TO APPREHEND THEM. IT IS MY PURPOSE, WHY DO YOU QUESTION THAT?

The genuine puzzlement of the AI had left everyone baffled, and it had forced many to accept the fact they needed to be proactive, and so they began giving the AI greater autonomy, to the alarm of many who believed it was perhaps too dangerous since AI was still new. But as more and more robots were churned out in Britain, many other countries observed and decided to follow Britain’s example, and they were left spellbound by the results, as more and more crimes were solved and potential ones averted. 

AI systems were given the permission they needed to seek out and discover the dangerous hackers on the internet, and slowly and quietly monitored the ones who were not interested in causing death and destruction in some manner. It was thanks to the AI many of the hackers were caught. They were hit with the force of an atomic

bomb, and while many of them did go to the ground, the majority of them were arrested, and the AI simply hacked the internet to find them, and provided plenty of evidence of their crimes. 

I have a BrainChip Now. 

The moment Sandra woke up, something felt wrong, but she groaned in agony. It felt as if her head had been split open like a watermelon, and she grimaced at the 30 tons which felt as if they’d been shoved on her head, and she let out a groan. 

God, her head hurt, and it made it extremely hard for her to remember anything before the time she had woken up. Blinking rapidly in hopes of getting rid of the worst of the pain, Sandra looked around the room she was in, but her head ached so much that her vision was blurry. It took a moment to pass, and sadly it took her a second to realise she was seeing everything so perfectly, so crystal clear once the blurry images faded. 

Suddenly -WHAM! - She jumped. 

In the corner of the hospital ward, he could see everything with crystal clear 3D 20/20 vision. Sandra lifted her hand, blinking again…and it seemed like her eyes….zoomed out. Then they compensated, and they zoomed back in. 

Really, really close. 

So close in fact she could see the follicles of the really fine hairs covering her arm until they appeared to be like trees in a dense forest. Sandra jolted back. 

Now she remembered. She and her friends had been bungee jumping…and then…the ground was rushing towards her, and she felt a blinding pain in her head, which made the rest of the pain she felt in other parts of her body seem like nothing. Slowly, Sandra sat up and looked at herself. She could see her legs, but why couldn’t she feel them? 

Blinking in fear, Sandra gently ran her hands through her hair, or at least she tried to do so; there was a really thick bandage wrapped around her head.

“What the hell?” She gently massaged her throat, it felt dry, like there was a bucket of gravel down there. “Hello?” She tried to call, but it came out as a barely audible croak, but she tried again. “Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there?” She tried swallowing, hoping that would work, but it didn’t. To her left there was a jug of water and a glass, but she couldn’t reach the glass. But she was able, with a bit of work, to get her fingers curled around the jug and she pulled it towards herself. Sandra gurgled and spluttered as some of the water spilt over herself, soaking her hospital gown, but it was worth it. 

Sandra’s voice was much clearer now. “Hello, is someone there? I think something’s wrong.” 

The door opened and a woman stepped in with a smile. “I am so sorry that no one was here to be there when you woke up, sweetie,” the doctor - or nurse; it was hard to tell - said, and she stepped closer to Sandra and saw the water spill. “You’ve had an accident, too. How are you feeling?”

Sandra looked up at her, blinking stupidly at the questions. Her head ached, her eyes felt odd, and she couldn’t feel her legs or one of her arms, now she came to think about it. “Weird,” she decided to say at last. “My headaches and my eyes just seemed to, like, zoom in on my hand and I could see the hairs really close up, and I can’t feel my legs and arm.”

The doctor listened to her silently. “Which arm?”

“My left.”

“That fits, considering what’s happened to it, and to the rest of you,” the doctor commented, ignoring Sandra’s look of worry. “Do you remember anything?”

It hurt for Sandra to even think back too far. “I remember bungee jumping, but something happened. I felt a blinding pain in my head, and I think the rest of me was hurt… Why?” Suddenly she was suspicious. “What happened?”

The doctor sighed. “I don’t know myself, but something happened to your bungee cord, and it snapped. Your head was split open on impact with the ground, both of your legs were badly damaged, and your left arm was snapped. When you were brought into the hospital, it was discovered your eyes had been sliced open.”

“WHAT??” Sandra yelled, now remembering there had been a terrible pain in her eyes, but she had been in so much pain it had merged all together. 

The doctor flinched a little at the volume, but she carried on. “Your eyes had been sliced open. We’ve had to give you replacements, with bionic eyes, and you’ve now got a plate in your skull, but you’ve got a brain chip inserted to help regulate your new prosthetics. When you woke up, how did you feel?”

Sandra shuddered as she remembered how she’d felt upon waking up. “Like I couldn’t concentrate,” she remembered, “I could barely remember who I was, what even happened to me, or where I was, and then I realised I could see perfectly without my glasses. What else did you do to me?”

“Your legs have been replaced, and so has your left arm. Your eyes have both been replaced, and the brain chip is simply there to regulate your new prosthetics like I said, but beyond that, there was startlingly no other damage to your chest, which is remarkable considering how high the drop was. We’re going to keep you here, in the hospital to keep you under observation, until you are used to your new implants,” the doctor looked at her apologetically. 

Sandra wasn’t sure what to make of all of this. Cybernetics and prosthetics had been slowly making their way into everyday life for a while now, but it was only in the last few years this was even possible. She looked down at her left hand curiously, almost expecting to see a mannequin-like facsimile of her original good old-fashioned

flesh and blood arm. But comparing the left and right arms, Sandra barely saw any differences. Even her legs looked identical to her real ones, and she was willing to bet the hospital had accessed her optician reports to customise her new bionic eyes. 

 SUN BURN! - Extended Copy. 

“Sun Dancer 4, calling Mercury Solar Station 10,” Jenna’s throat was starting to ache, and she desperately wiped her sweating face, “Sun Dancer 4, calling Mercury Solar Station 10. Over? Is anybody there? We need rescue! We were on a mirror drop-off mission when an explosion in our engineering section blasted us into the sun’s gravity. Can you send help? Our radiation shields are maxed out. We have no way of escape. Temperature and radiation levels are rising every second beyond the Sun Dancer’s tolerance."

Silence.
There was no reassuring message returning over the radio. Some beacons had been dropped all over the solar system as the Second Space Age of exploration started when the Chinese first launched their capsules and threw them to the moon and the lunar colonies and outposts were built, real-time communication became a necessity.
Radio beacons and relays were scattered at every surveyed point of space.
Jenna knew her messages were getting through.
Nobody was speaking to her.
It was that simple.
When the Sun Dancer had been damaged and they were hurtled towards the sun fast when the explosion triggered off their fusion drive, only to be dragged fast like a fish on a line when the gravity caught them, the Mercury Solar Stations had been sending them calls after calls.
But not anymore. Jenna knew what it meant, she just didn’t want to face it. They’d been abandoned, and it wasn’t any of the solar station's fault; they just lacked the technology to properly mount a rescue.
John walked slowly into the flight deck. “Still no luck?”
Jenna shook her head grimly. “More radiation treatments?” Her voice was resigned.
John held up the pill box. “It’s all we can do?”
“Why bother? We’re going to die soon,” Jenna wiped her face again, and she spared a glance towards the radiation shields covering the viewports.
She was glad they had them, proving some people knew about health and safety; when they’d started the mission, the viewports were polarised, but the explosion which threw them towards the sun made the light unbearable. Ceramic and concrete lined with lead sheets sandwiched with kevlar, the shields were a welcome relief.
“Hey, don’t say that Jenna-.”
“Why shouldn’t I? The solar stations have been quiet for two days now. They know it's hopeless. Nothing we do will save us,” Jenna snapped, but she was too tired, too frightened to argue.
John sat down next to her at the controls. “Mac and Ryan are still working on the engines, Jen. You know how good they are at engineering.”
“But they’ve been working for days. Why haven’t we gotten out of the sun’s gravity yet?”
“It’s a big job, Jenna.”
Jenna nodded, conceding the point, “Yeah, but so was the mirror drop job.
Take the Sun Dancer with 277 mirrors into space near the sun, drop them into orbit, and reflect more light to Mercury, and bounce it off of the mirrors on the planet back to Earth and the colonies, and launch ships out deeper into the solar system, and build up the nation empires in the solar system,”

She spoke as if she had heard this many times before. John chuckled. “You know back on Earth, there’s a 40-year plan to build a Dyson Swarm,” he reminded her.
“At this point, I don’t care.”
“No, me neither.”

Footsteps - one of the bonuses of the gravity pull of the sun as they could walk without relying on the acceleration of the engine bursts - were heard, and Ryan and Mac appeared.
The four astronauts had been friends for a long time, and Jenna and John could both see while the duo were both pleased, they were still worried. Not a good sign.

“What’s wrong?” Jenna demanded.
“What do you want, the good news or the bad news?” Mac took a swig from a water bottle before she wiped her glistening skin, looking like the swig was the only thing keeping her up.
“Good,” John said.
“Bad,” Jenna said at the same time.
Ryan chuckled before he sobered up. “The good news is we’ve repaired some of the engines,” he ticked them off his fingers. “We have restored four of the port thrusters and three of the starboard thrusters, and we have two of the fusion rockets working.”
“That...doesn’t sound too bad,” John replied slowly.
“Yeah, I mean, like, we have four fusion rockets, and we have twelve thrusters on each side to max out our manoeuvrability,” Jenna said.
“But we won’t have enough power to break out of the sun’s gravity,” Mac pointed out with a weary sigh, “so that’s days of work without any real luck.”
“Don’t be like that!” John snapped. “My dad was a writer, but he needed someone to push him to get to the top. And boy, did he do it. We can get out of this.”
“Yeah, but how? The pull of the sun is too strong,” Ryan said.
Jenna felt all of the hope she’d had in her body leak out of her like a popped balloon leaking gas, and she turned around and then she took a look at their navigational computer, which showed the Sun Dancer’s current position.
For some reason, she wasn’t able to take her eyes off of it. She had seen the screens for days, watching as her ship went closer to the sun and not paying any attention to it. But at that point, it was like she was staring at it with fresh eyes.
Like the radio relays, navigational beacons had been slowly scattered through space, scanning and keeping track of the various probes, ships and habitats which had sprung up as every nation of Earth, following the Chinese’s example of the rail-gun cannons before Europe and Australia used their own versions of space planes before the Americans put their skyhooks into orbit and every nation began taking chunks of space and bodies like the moon, Venus, and Mars, and to the asteroids and the Titan colonies, their individual empires expanding as they saw their future was in space and not being left behind on Earth.
But there was something about the screen that had caught her eye...

And then it was like Jenna’s brain went BINGO.
“A gravity assist,” she muttered as she remembered an age-old formula and plan. There would be problems, as the sun was relative to the rest of the solar system itself and the heat and radiation would make it harder, but they could make it.
“What?” Mac was by her side, gazing at her screen with a critical eye.
“A gravity assist. We could find an angle towards the sun, and we could use a gravity assist to go around the sun,” Jenna grinned, hope restored.
“No,” Mac shook her head, “No way.”
“It’s not practical, Jenna,” John sighed.
“Why not?”
“Our engines are too badly damaged, and besides our radiation and heat shields are too maxed out,” Ryan said. “Mac and I weren’t just ripping the engine room to pieces. We wracked our brains looking for a good enough solution.”
“We talked about using a gravity assist; if this ship had better heat and radiation protection, it might have worked, and the Sun Dancer classes are more heavily built for the job, but we can’t get too close to the sun anyway,” Mac looked down.
“So what was the point of repairing the engines, then?”
“Why do you think?” Mac glared at John for his stupid question.
Another light went off in Jenna’s brain. “The engines,” she whispered, “Mac, Ryan, the Sun Dancer’s engines include a fusion core ejection system, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Why?”
“And Sun Dancer has three fusion cores?”
“Yes, why?” Ryan asked slowly, not liking where this was going.
“How many fusion cores do we have?” Jenna asked.
“Well, we had four fusion rockets, and they needed a generator and a reactor each separately, and we have two separate reactors for all ship functions. Why do you ask, Jenna? You already know the answers.”
“Could we eject any of the fusion cores, blow them up, and let the shockwaves throw us away from the sun?” Jenna asked, trying and failing to hold back her hope or enthusiasm. To her relief, Mac and Ryan both looked intrigued as the idea slowly passed into their brains rather than being dismissive. “Are you crazy?” John asked in disbelief.
“No, she does have something there,” Mac bit her lip as she tried to think through how it could work. “It could work,” she went on slowly, “I mean, we’d have to go back to the engine section, and check the reactors, see if the ejection could work for all of them, and even check the other two reactors to see if we would need to eject that as well, but to only create another mini big bang, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work.”
Ryan had been silent for a while and he’d listened to his fellow engineer, and he’d been using the moment to think through the plan and had picked it apart, piece by piece to work out more about the plan.
“It will, and I think we should eject one of the main reactors; we won’t have any problems living off of one for a bit, and the further we could get away from the sun, the better. We could be picked up by rescue teams, the closer we get to either Mercury or Venus. But I’m still worried about how muchwe’d get out of the reactors when we eject them. But we’ve got a solution there. I think you’ve forgotten something important, guys,” Ryan smiled at Mac. “You’re forgetting the Jupiter slingshot five years ago.”

“Oh, yes!” Jenna smiled. “The bomb that blasted that capsule out of the slingshot that went wrong. Ever since then fusion and fission bombs have been standard issue. But would we need them?”

“I think we should no matter what.”
“So what’s the plan?” Mac asked as she tapped the keyboards, getting the best of the plan through the computer to give them an accurate plan. “We fire the bombs and the reactors into our flight paths. We blow them up, riding out the shockwave...”
“Yeah.”
Mac bit her lip as she finished inputting the data into the computer, making sure to put in the explosive yield of the bombs and the reactors. On the screens, the diagrams were showing clearly that if they fired the main reactor first, followed by two other bombs a few minutes after, the blast wouldn’t damage the Sun Dancer, and would push them away. Another simulation showed the Sun Dancer firing the bombs and reactors at the same time, and riding out the explosion altogether. But the final simulation showed the Sun Dancer firing all but a few bombs and reactors and riding out the shockwave, only to drop the remainder to get them further away.
Mac, sensing the others were seeing the same thing, went through the simulations again.
“They’re all good, but I like the last two the most,” John commented.
“I’ve just thought of something; when we do this, how are we going to guide the Sun Dancer away?” Ryan asked.
“You said we had the thrusters,” Jenna pointed out.
“They won’t have enough power,” Ryan replied.
Mac paid the conversation little heed, but as she took a closer look at the navigational screens, and saw the mirrors already surrounding the sun, she had another idea. “We’ve still got the solar mirrors. They’re similar to the light sails we use, but they’re not that dissimilar. We could use the robot drones and put them to work rigging them up.”
“Will they handle it?”
“They’re designed to take heat and radiation from the sun. And light sails are easy to rig up.”
“I’ll see to the robots now,” John hurried out to get to the robots to pass the orders on to make the rigging work. When he got there he would glean from the computer the best way to design the rigging and give it to the drones.
Mac turned to Ryan and Jenna. “Did you send the report on how the bomb was slipped onboard, Jen?”
The first thing the quartet had done the moment they slowed down after the explosion which threw them into the sun was to find out how they’d gotten there. The bomb had been hidden on the outer hull and was nowhere near the reactors or the rockets. They’d found the hull breach and determined someone had simply planted a mine outside. The bomb had been in two parts, the first part was a suitcase nuke to blast them into the sun, and the second part had been an extra one, designed probably to weaken the structure of the rocket.
“I did,” Jenna replied grimly. “They said they’d check security since the bomb would have been hard to place.”
“Unless one of our people was against the Dyson Swarm project,” Ryan said.

That made a lot more sense, although why it would be a problem they didn’t understand; the Dyson swarm would have enormous benefits, allowing humanity to have not just an unlimited amount of cheap, safe energy, it would help them expand into the rest of the solar system. While many nations had problems with each other, with space exploration merely adding newer things to the rivalries, they were on board with it. But some groups felt they were moving too quickly, but they were ignored.

They were still a problem, though.
All of the nations of Earth were building their mini empires in space after seeing their futures out there, and they’d been given the free passes they needed to get out there into the solar system. When you watched something like Star Trek, you saw Earth united for a common cause. Real life didn’t work like that. It looked like Earth’s nations would always be separate with their beliefs, their cultures, their ideals, and besides they’d brought their own ideas to the table when it came to space travel.
The Americans had the skyhooks, the South Koreans combined that with space plane technology. The European countries worked with Africa to design new space planes to build their own space station with their own style to expand the old International Space Station; they were joined by the Japanese; this mix of technologies was one thing, but each of the scientific teams that went there experimented with different fields never before pioneered on the ISS before.
But the idea one of their own had wanted to kill them left them shaken and worried. They had already known about this, but being reminded of it was horrific.

-8-

Outside the spaceship, the Sun Dancer was accelerating towards the sun without any noticeable movement inside. As the sunlight grew brighter on the fusion-drive rocket’s hull, the heat barely affecting the hardened ceramic hull plates, the sensors dotting it were on the point of overloading as they recorded the increase in heat radiation and gravity beyond their limits. The rocket’s long, solid body was marred by a large hole with a twisted piece of metal and ceramic, tearing through the ship’s structural integrity, and causing hell to the damage control systems.

Inside the flight deck, Jenna and John sat at the controls. Both of them were in their astronaut suits as a precaution to better protect them from the radiation, and to cool themselves down. It didn’t work. The heat had been building more and more, while the suits cooling plants had helped they weren’t anymore.
“Okay, Mac, Ryan, it’s now or never,” Jenna said into the radio.

Mac was on the engineering deck. Like the others she was in her spacesuit, and she had her armoured hand on the release lever. As a movie fan, she’d taken the precaution to just check the lever to make sure the connections weren’t messed up. “I’m ready,” she said through the intercom.
“Me too, guys,” Ryan spoke over the intercom as he stood in the launch bay. He had timed the nuclear warheads. Now he was just ready and waiting. “All nukes are prepped. Has computer finished the calculations and program?”

“Yes,” John replied. “Good.”

“I’m still not sure about blowing up one of the engine reactor plants,” Mackenzie interrupted. “Sure, it’s gonna give up a lot of thrust, but we will be relying on batteries and the smaller plants for power.”
“That’ll just have to do, Mac,” Ryan said.
“We have checked this out, Mac.”

“I know, its just I don’t like the thought of giving up something good.”
“Hey, I don’t like it either,” Ryan said.
“I never said you didn’t, Ryan,” Mackenzie said.
“Okay, we’re ready to go now. With some luck, the explosions will send us into a drift,” John interrupted the arguing engineering duo. “Good luck, everyone.”

Jenna bit her lip, swallowing hard as nerves overtook her. She glanced at John, who looked just as nervous. “Let’s do it,” she muttered.
“Switching to computer control,” John said slowly; it had been agreed to switch it all to computer control, as computers rarely if ever made a mistake. The computer had already been programmed.
“Releasing the locks now,” Mac called.
On the screens, the computer showed the ejection was in progress.
Sound didn’t travel through space, so forget those sci-fi movies and TV shows. But they felt the impact as the shockwaves rocked the ship, and they felt as if they were being pushed backwards. A moment later, they felt more explosions which pushed the Sun Dancer back even further away from the sun.
Jenna and John both studied the readouts. “It’s working!” Jenna turned in delight.
“We’ve still got some way to go, one of the rocket reactors is being ejected with another two bombs,” John checked the computer’s schedule. “Detonating....now!”
Jenna grimaced as the explosion rippled through the Sun Dancer. It was much closer this time, but when they righted themselves, another bomb exploded and the rocket was thrown even more backwards. She studied the navigational scanners, watching as the beacons calibrated their astronavigation instruments.
“It won’t be long now,” she muttered gloomily to herself, watching the scanners as the bombs slowly ticked down towards their inevitable destruction. But those bombs were their only hope against a fiery death, Jenna didn't know for sure if they'd be crushed by the sun's gravity, or by the heat.
“What?”
“Oh, I just said it won’t be long now,” she said absently before three more explosions threw them backwards; this time the bombs had been programmed to be launched at the same time, and detonate at the same time.
“Congratulations, everyone,” John said a few minutes later after the last explosion had created a shockwave which pushed their ship even further out of the sun’s gravitational field. “We’re out, and the robots are outside deploying the sails. And we’re already moving, our speed has doubled because of the sails.”

Mac checked the sensor dots on the hull. “The radiation and heat are dropping, but it's still high. We’re going to need to be checked out when we’re rescued,” she smiled.
“Sun Dancer 4, this is Mercury Solar Station 10.”
“Sun Dancer 4, this is Mercury Solar Station 7.”

Jenna rolled her eyes. “They’re certainly calling us now,” she commented.
-8-
The speed of the Sun Dancer had been too much for the Mercury Solar stations, so the responsibility fell to the colonies on Venus. Luckily the rescue ships on Planet Hell had rallied quickly and had been prepared for the job. They had carefully shot the rigged sails away, and then magnetic cables had grabbed the ship and pulled it backwards to slow it down before they’d grappled on and entered the ship and retrieved the crew, who then found themselves taken to one of the cloud cities hovering inside Venus’ atmosphere. Forget all of those stories where Venus was terraformed; the planet was too hostile and the atmosphere was too dense to be safely transformed. The only place to survive there was to build cloud cities, vast zeppelins that flew above the point where the atmosphere could crush anything down to the size of a coin.
Doctors and nurses fussed over the four astronauts. They put them through a battery of tests, they used blood transfusions to remove the risks of radiation poisoning, and they were given antibiotics.
“So what are they going to do?” Jenna asked Mac when the engineer returned, escorted and fussed over by a nurse as he walked slowly. The crew had been allowed to get up from bed only the day before, and they’d spent that time adjusting to the gravity of Venus after the fluctuating gravities they’d gone through recently.
“They’re going to let us adjust to Venus before they prep a ship to take us back to Earth,” Mac said as he was put on the bed.
“Back to Earth?” The idea was alien to Jenna.
“We’re going home?” Ryan jumped.
“Well, yeah. After what’s happened, we’re not fit to carry on the mirror job. It was their decision. Astronauts have to be fit, mentally and physically, and we’ve been blasted with gravity, heat, and radiation and we’ve been under stress. There is no way they will let us near the sun ever again,” Mac said.
John bit his lip. “Did they say anything more about what happened, the bomb?”
“They arrested a cargo pilot who’d shipped the bombs on the freighter rocket,” Mac answered wearily. “But they don’t know if they’ve got them all. They’ve also looked into launching more rockets, and a few other ships to make sure what happened doesn’t happen again.”
“It will,” John said gloomily.