Sun Burn Part 4

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.