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.