No words can capture the utter insignificance I felt. The sun bloomed to cover half of my canopy. I was a flea, a speck, a subatomic nothing. The entire output of my life wasn’t even a spark against the omniflame.
Sol.
The primordial titan. My ancestors were forged from Sol’s body and incubated by Sol’s radiance. No matter how far we scattered across the stars, our birthstar’s substance would remain within us, atoms that would endure until the end of the universe.
I accelerated, trying to get as much distance as possible from the destroyer. Hurtling along the silver line of freighters, I saw the pockmark on the face of God. The Starmine. There were nine brilliant points of light arranged in a ring, flickering artificial stars that sometimes outshone the sun. It was an affront, a monstrous arrogance. But I had come for a far greater hubris.
Invisible to the naked eye, the corona appeared through my canopy filters as a seething red-violet storm. The lashing prominences were dark garnet, the hot spots ranging from madder to vermillion. Those swells might be three million degrees, a flare could be twenty million.
This section of the Starmine was a series of ring-shaped megastructures that generated a magnetic funnel. The first ring was at the outermost fringe of the corona, a five- hundred-kilometer-wide band of gleaming silver. I’d been briefed that the ring diameters would contract as I approached the sun.
At the chromosphere, the Starmine was only a hundred kilometers wide. There was no data on what would happen when I was inside the star. My orders were to wing it. Judging with my fist against the canopy, I was approximately ninety minutes away from the first ring.
The temperature rose in my cockpit. I could hear my exchangers singing with effort, creating a basso profundo duet that rang in my bones. I pushed the throttle forward, and the Yama shuddered with relief. A moment later, I was crushed by an unexpected burst of acceleration. If I weren’t in an effective vacuum, I might have thought I’d broken through the sound barrier.
The sudden shift veered me off course. I tried to pitch down and nearly murdered myself. What was meant to be a minor correction wrenched me straight into a collision course with the freighters below.
I barely managed to choke up in time. The violent motion gave me a micro-blackout. I had to tense my legs and abdomen to stay conscious, gulping compression fluid in a hick maneuver. When the danger passed, I had the terrible feeling my eyeballs were about to burst. I hesitated to touch the controls, afraid the next motion might knock me unconscious. I’d forgotten this was supposed to happen. The Yama soaked up more energy than it could eliminate with its exchangers. It had switched from thrusters to RAMP.
“It’ll be an adjustment, but there’s no way to simulate it without flying into a star. Adapt,” Tsuros had warned us.
The adjustment was like flying an entirely new ship. The spurs had become hypersensitive to my slightest motion. All my instincts were now wrong by an order of magnitude.
The Yama 10 Bomber was a strange design for a stranger purpose. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t make sense to fit a one-man bomber with radiative maneuvering planes. They were energy-hungry, far too powerful for such a tiny mass. RAMP was meant for capital ships, like the destroyer on my tail.
But there was nothing ordinary about flying into a star. The idea was to use RAMP as a set of super-exchangers, converting vast quantities of surplus heat into thrust. For the entire year-long jaunt through null-space, my Yama had been an energy miser, loath to waste a single erg. Inside the corona, I was so flush with power it would literally burn a hole in my pocket if I didn’t spend it.
I needed to get distance from the freighters, some space around me so I could get my bearings. I tried to lift up gently, but even my most delicate motion was too hasty. The bomber sprang like a cricket, spinning wildly. Another near-blackout, more hick-gulping.
When I came around, my neck felt like a can crushed beneath a boot. The canopy strobed between sun and space. I was in a death-spin that would have incapacitated any human with an ordinary vestibular system. Thanks to my surgery, I could bear it, but it was still disorienting.
I couldn’t feel my extremities. For a few terrifying seconds, I was afraid I’d severed my spine. Paresthesia came first, then pain. I began to feel my hands again, and I wriggled my toes. Again, my left foot struck the foreign body. My big gamble. My last resort was still lodged in the fold by my left foot. Not yet.
Delicate as a surgeon, I eased my ship out of the spin. I positioned my tail to the sun and my nose to the black as if I could hide what I was doing from Sol. Control sensitivity had become more reasonable, the Yama recalibrating on the fly. Facing out at the emptiness of space, I could admit it to myself. I was terrified of Sol. I was afraid to fly into the Starmine.
I didn’t have to. I could detonate right here. The explosion would wreck a hundred thousand freighters and wipe out the destroyer that had killed Liar and Corrupt. But the Sun would endure, and the collaborators would rebuild. History would remember me as the greatest premature ejaculator of all time.
No. I wouldn’t go out like that. I wanted to find a way out of this without killing anyone else. I realized the Yama was uniquely positioned to pull off an Oberth maneuver. The hotter I got, the more thrust I could generate. I could slingshot around the sun, attain an incredible velocity, and fire myself into deep space.
Perhaps I could even catch a glimpse of Old Earth or the Jupiter Pentakis on my way into interstellar space. I was captivated by the idea, but it was a fantasy. An Oberth maneuver required exact calculations I couldn’t possibly perform. I would just burn up.
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If I was going to go out that way, I wanted to go bigger: fire all my guns at once and explode into space. I could push RAMP as hard as it could go and suicide from acceleration alone. My funeral pyre would be a vast antimatter wound on the surface of Sol. If I was going to go that far, why not go all the way?
I know what you are. I know you won’t fail me.
My eyes narrowed. Sergeant Tsuros was light years away, and I still couldn’t escape him. Because he was right. I couldn’t resist the challenge, the risk, the glory. I could run the gauntlet. I could be the one.
I could destroy the sun.
I turned the Yama’s nose back towards the task. As Sol’s golden face loomed large in my canopy, I saw a glimmer of light at the corner of my vision. At first, I thought it was only wayward flak, but then six more flashes followed. They fired in sequence.
My canopy lensed forward to assist, telescoping until I could make out the spherical profile of a Collaborator capital ship. The Yama’s innards shuddered against me, reacting to my mounting dread.
Hexagons ringing pentagons. It was a Glömer class carrier. Those seven flashes were interceptors!
I pressed my thumb against the canopy and calculated, gauging the relative distance of the carrier as I’d been trained.
I was struck by the insanity of my position. Facing against a squadron of Collaborator interceptors, my only hope to gauge their vector was a guesstimate with my thumb. They were headed for the first ring of the Starmine, and it looked like they might beat me there. That was trouble.
The Collaborators would have the sun at their backs, and they could set up a defensive formation and pick me off as I tried to fly through. I was unarmed except for a weapon that would kill us all. My only hope was to outrun them.
Could I do that? The fighters would have an initial burst from their launch catapults, but I doubted the Collaborators would do anything as harebrained as fitting RAMP on a one-man ship. I pushed the Yama as hard as I dared. Then I pushed it a little further.
I was getting a better sense of the newfound power at my disposal. The exchangers roared, and the ship’s innards rumbled with strain. I soared towards the sun, running a race for my life.
Gray crept in at the edges of my vision. My circulatory system couldn’t keep up with the acceleration. I backed off the throttle slightly, and the taste of copper flooded my mouth. I wondered if my heart had given out.
Instead, there was a pleasant tingle running up my left arm. It reached my chest and exploded outward, sparkling in my fingertips. The Yama had sensed my low blood-oxygen level and was administering Djamori.
The drug took hold. My vision sharpened, outlines leaping out at me as if they’d been honed. Objects moved with a new fluidity, and I could react faster. The polling rate had increased for all of my nerves. Strength flooded into my arms and legs, an explosive potential that begged to be tested.
I could understand why Addict had ruined himself for this. If I wasn’t careful, it would ruin me, too. I was hyper- fixating on the feeling of the spurs in my hands, the contented purr of the exchangers, and the stringendo drumroll of my heart.
The first ring of the Starmine was approximately fifteen minutes ahead. At full telescope of my canopy, I could see the details clearly. The ring was a torus wreathed with tetrahedral spines radiating from the outer edge at forty- degree intervals. It looked like a spiked collar.
Suspended above each of the nine spires was a pure black orb, what I’d thought were artificial stars. Occasionally, they flared to life, so bright my whole canopy would wince into near-opacity. The spheres were only tiny dots at this distance, they were no more than a hundred meters in diameter. As I drew closer, I could see their effect on the corona was incredible.
Each orb was the origin of a vast, teardrop-shaped magnetic tempest: a million-degree hurricane that stretched out for hundreds of kilometers. I looked upon the ninefold storm and comprehended a pattern.
Farther into the corona, each storm was replicated, doubling in size. This continued, again and again until the pattern was too faint to see. In the eddies between each storm, there were echoes of the whole in microcosm, endlessly repeating self-similarity. The sun-stabilizing spheres had created a fractal the size of Jupiter.
An unfamiliar sound rose in my ship, I thought some system must have failed. I was that system. I was screaming, and I couldn’t stop. It was a low, drowned keening, pitched down by the compression fluid in my voice box.
I was gripped by a powerful urge to take the spurs and fly right into one of the freighters. Anything to get this awful realization out of my head. This was more than monstrous, it was blasphemous. Tai Di had grown powerful beyond anything I’d dared dream.
As my mind plunged into mortal terror, my body took the chance to rebel. My hand pulled the throttle without conscious decision, preparing to divert and flee. Deceleration throbbed in my teeth.
As I slowed, the streaking silver rails resolved into individual ships again. The lines of freighters converged at the ring, a hundred trains zippering together from every direction. It was like a wire stranding machine, twisting together a cable of ships out of thousands of freighters at incredible speed. Trillions upon trillions of kilotons of cargo flowed all around me, bound for the Starmine. I gulped at my doom like a witless goldfish.
It’s the drug!
The insistent significance of every detail was overloading my brain and compromising my decision-making. I couldn’t possibly run. There was a destroyer on my tail, and I was flying too fast to divert before I hit the corona. If I had any wits, I would have tried to surrender. But I was hyperventilating and probably in tachycardia.
I let go of the spurs, squeezed my hands into tight fists, and closed my eyes. I forced myself to breathe slowly. The respiration-assist thumped my chest off-kilter, like a dance partner who’d missed a step.
I was able to regain control of myself, but my moment of cowardice cost me dearly. Now, the attack wing was going to beat me to the ring. Cockpit temperature was rising, my exchangers groaning with complaint. I had to fly faster. I throttled up, hastening to my doom.
Ahead, I caught a glimpse of a banking interceptor. The ship was delta-shaped. Its nose came to a needle point, and its tail was a shark’s-tooth curve of thruster banks. The titanium-white hull caught the sunlight with a fierce glow. The ship’s canopy was ruby red, the muzzles of its four cannons were crimson. Two blue cheek blazes just under the canopy were the last piece of the puzzle. It was an AGA\LAG 81. I could almost hear Tsuros bark, “Affirmative!” at me.
Paranoia set in. Why were there only seven of them? Why had there only been a single destroyer guarding the approach? It was almost insulting. Did the Collaborators really think so little of us?
Why shouldn’t they? They’d already killed Corrupt and Liar. If I couldn’t out-fly seven interceptors, I was next.