Sun Burn

“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 much we’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.