Sun Burn

“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.