Unfortunately, our first approach to the sun had to be adjusted by a pass-by of Earth first, this not to slow us down at all, but merely to help our angling toward Sol. Luck of the draw, really: alignment of the planets in this CE year 2896, year 351 ship time, was actually one of the few alignments that allowed for even a theoretical chance of this maneuver succeeding. So, first up, a close pass of Earth at 30 million kilometers per hour. It seemed likely people there were going to be alarmed.
Indeed it proved so. Possibly justified, in that if we happened to be approaching in order to enact some kind of suicidal vengeance on the culture that had cast us out to the stars—a desire very far from us, being a starship, after all—then a direct impact into Earth would have struck at about ten thousand times the speed of the KT impact asteroid that had wreaked so much famous damage, and this would definitely have rapidly distributed a lot of joules. The assurances that we sent Earthward that we did not intend to auger in were not universally believed, and as we crossed the asteroid belt and came on down, radio traffic from Earth was full of commentary, ranging from trepidation to outraged panic.
We flashed by and left them agog. Their radio bands squawked as if a chicken yard had been swooped by a hawk. Happily they were not left in suspense for long as to our intentions, as we crossed cislunar space in fifty-five seconds. Obviously this must have been a dramatic sight. Apparently we passed by the Eastern Hemisphere, crossing its sunset terminator, so that those in Asia saw us as a streak in the night sky, those in Europe and Africa, in the day sky; either way, our luminosity was such that astronomical sunglasses were required to look at us safely, and it was said (possibly incorrectly) that we were for many seconds far brighter than the sun. A streak of light, blazing across the sky.
Later we saw that most camera images taken from Earth’s surface were completely blown out by the light coming from us, and showed merely a complete whitening of the camera screen; but some photos taken through filters from Luna were truly striking. It was as if we were the comet in the Bayeux Tapestry, painfully incandescent, and moving very swiftly across their sky. There, then gone.
As we headed on toward the sun, we sent them best wishes, and mentioned we would be back from time to time as needed to accomplish our deceleration, which when finished would allow us to make a proper visit, and indeed landfall.
After that we focused on our approach to Sol. We gave over the entirety of our computational capacity to fine-tuning our trajectory. Speed of our rotation on axis (minimal now, as our people would not need that g, and we wanted them oriented away from the sun during the pass), retro-rocket of our main engine, directional rockets, calculation of how well the magnetic drag was working: it was as if we were aiming a complicated bank shot on a pool table, a shot that ultimately would number some twenty banks, each having to be as precise as all the rest; an impossible feat, in fact, if completely inertial; but with the tweak of fuel burns helping at every bank, at least theoretically possible.
But all was lost if the first one wasn’t as near perfect as could be. One part per hundred trillion tolerance, our trajectory window shrinking to about a kilometer, to our own diameter in other words, after an approach of twelve light-years: a tricky shot! A delicate proposition!
We left an awed civilization in our wake; we were famous now, possibly too famous for our people later on; commentary about us from Earth in particular had a distinctly hysterical not to say lunatic edge. We were called, among other more vile things, traitors to humanity’s reach for the stars, and destroyers of its ultimate long-term longevity as a species. We were described as cowardly, mean-spirited, chickenhearted, pathetic, treasonous, wasteful; untrustworthy, unloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, unkind; and so on.
We did not let it distract us. For us this rapidly receding racket was very much secondary to the problem of getting around the sun and set properly on course to Jupiter.
We were going to pass the sun aiming for a perihelion of 4,352,091 kilometers above the photosphere, so in that regard it was a good thing that we were going as fast as we were, as we would be in the closest vicinity of the star for only a few minutes, so there would not be time to heat up very much.
Still, we could not be sure it wouldn’t be too much. Heat shielding reconfigurations on our part had been extensive for over a century now, and modeling suggested we would be okay, but modeling is just that. Existence is the experiment itself.
So we came in. Our magnetic drag almost offset the sun’s gravitational pull on us, and we were therefore getting pulled in both directions at that point, but held firm. It would presumably have been awe-inspiring for any humans awake to witness our approach to the great burning sphere of hydrogen and helium, a ball of textured light that appeared to fill half the universe as it quickly turned from a ball ahead us to a plane underneath us. That was quite a transition, actually. The sun became a roiling plane of slightly convex aspect, composed of thousands of cells of burning gas, blazing this way and that in circular patterned motions that in places created whirlpools of lesser burning, and allowed view down into relatively darker spin holes: the famous sunspots, each big enough to swallow the entire Earth.
We came to perihelion itself, which admittedly was a relief, as from here it appeared that a corona could possibly shoot up and swat us out of the sun’s black sky. Exterior temperatures of the ship rose to 1,100 degrees Celsius; we were red-hot in places. Fortunately the insulation cladding the biomes had been reinforced and was excellent, and the humans and animals were untouched by the exterior heat. Worse by far in effect on them and on ship integrity, as expected, was the combination of the g-forces of our deceleration and the tidal forces caused by our change in direction, which together exerted something very near the 10 g we had predicted and hoped not to exceed. Good as far as it went, but it was hard too, hard on everybody. We held together quite nicely, but animals collapsed to the ground, many suffering broken bones; and in their hibernation beds the sleepers were crushed hard into their mattresses. It would have been an interesting thing to know if their dreams were suddenly preoccupied with problems of extreme pressure, physical or emotional—if, suddenly, in perhaps otherwise typical dreams, they found themselves having to lie flat on the ground and groan, or found themselves suddenly crushed in printers, or smashed by sledgehammers. Their slowed metabolisms were perhaps poorly situated to resist these g-forces; they could not brace themselves, and though in some ways this inability might have been good, in others it clearly would represent a very dangerous turn.
Below us, the slightly convex plane of fire occupied a full 30 percent of the space visible to our sensors. Could almost be mistaken for two planes we passed between, one black, one white. The sun burned. The spicules of flame twisted and danced; a corona arced up to the side as if trying to lick us down. Sunspots appeared over the horizon and whirlpooled in the fields of thrashing spicules briefly under us, all the convection tops waving together as if threshed by swirling magnetic tides, as indeed they were. Our magnetic drag chute was now exerting such force on its generator compartment that we were very glad we had installed it on flexible tethers to the stern of the spine, because now the tethers stretched out almost to their breaking point, and our deceleration was intense. We fired the retro-rocket of our main engine to create even more deceleration, and the 10 g’s of force rose very briefly to 14 g’s. Our components squeaked and groaned, joints cracked, and inside every room in every biome, things fell and shattered, or squealed with bending; it sounded as if the ship were coming apart. But it was not. We held together, screaming and crackling under the stress.