SUN-BURN Part 6

“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.