Everyone in the war room heard the voice from a hundred million kilometers distant. “I’ve learned from the war news updates that if the electromagnetic jamming fails to last for another three to four days, we may lose the war. If this is true, Papa, I can give you that time.
“Before, you always thought that the stars I studied had nothing to do with the ways of the world, and I thought so too. But it looks like we were both wrong.
“I remember telling you that, although a star generates enormous power, it’s fundamentally a relatively elegant and simple system. Take our sun, for example. It’s composed of just the two simplest elements: hydrogen and helium; its behavior is the balance of just the two mechanisms of nuclear fission and gravity. As a result, it’s easier to model its activity mathematically than our Earth. Research on the sun has given us an extremely accurate mathematical model by this time, work to which I’ve contributed. Using this model, we can accurately predict the sun’s behavior. This would allow us to take advantage of a tiny disturbance to rapidly disrupt the equilibrium conditions inside the sun. The method is simple: use the Vechnyy Buran to make a precision strike on the surface of the sun.
“Perhaps you think it no more than tossing a pebble into the sea. But that’s not the case, Papa. This is dropping a grain of sand into an eye.
“From the mathematical model, we know that the sun is in an extremely fine-tuned and sensitive state of energy equilibrium. If correctly placed, a small disturbance will create a chain reaction from the surface to a considerable distance down, spreading to disrupt the local equilibrium. There are recorded precedents: the latest incident was in early August of 1972, when a powerful but highly localized eruption created a massive EMP that heavily affected Earth. Compasses in planes and boats jumped wildly, long-distance wireless communications failed, the sky shone with dazzling red lights in high northern latitudes, electric lights flickered in villages as if they were in the center of a thunderstorm. The reactions continued for more than a week. A well-accepted theory nowadays is that a celestial body even smaller than the Vechnyy Buran collided with the surface of the sun at that time.
“These disruptions on the sun’s surface certainly occurred many times, but most would have happened before humanity invented wireless equipment, and therefore went undetected. In addition, since these collisions were placed by random chance, the disturbances in equilibrium wouldn’t have been optimal in strength and area.
“But the Vechnyy Buran’s impact location has been meticulously calculated, and the disturbance it will create will be orders of magnitude larger than the natural examples mentioned. This time, the sun will blast powerful electromagnetic radiation into space in every frequency, from the highest to the lowest. In addition, the powerful X-ray radiation generated by the sun will collide violently with Earth’s ionosphere, blocking off short-wave radio communications, which are reliant on the layer.
“During the disturbance, the majority of wireless communications outside of the millimeter radio range will fail. The effect will weaken somewhat at night, but during the day, it will even exceed your jamming of the previous two days. Based on calculations, the disturbances will last a week.
“Papa, the two of us always did live in worlds far away from each other’s. We could never interact much with each other. But now our worlds have come together. We’re fighting for the same goal, for which I’m proud. Papa, like all your soldiers, I await your order.”
“Everything Dr. Levchenko said is true,” said the general director. “Last year, we sent a probe to enact a small-scale collision with the sun according to calculations based on the mathematical model. The experiment confirmed the model’s predictions of the disturbance. Dr. Levchenko and his research group even hypothesized that this method could be used to alter Earth’s climate in the future.”
Marshal Levchenko walked into a side room and picked up the red telephone that was a direct line to the president. A little later, he walked back out.
The historical records give different accounts of this moment: some claim that he spoke immediately, while others recount that for a minute he was silent. But they concur on the words he said.
“Tell Misha to carry out his plan.”
The Vechnyy Buran fired all ten fission engines, jets of plasma hundreds of kilometers long erupting from every engine nozzle as it made final corrections to trajectory and orientation.
In front of the Vechnyy Buran was an enormous and lovely solar prominence, a current of superheated hydrogen wheeling upward from the sun’s surface. Like long ribbons of gauze drifting high above the fiery sea of the sun, they shifted and changed like a dreamscape. Their ends anchored to the surface of the sun, forming a gigantic gateway.
The Vechnyy Buran passed slow and stately through the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer-tall triumphal arch. More solar prominences appeared in front, one end attached to the sun, but the other extending into the depths of space. The Vechnyy Buran with its blinking blue engine lights threaded through them like a firefly amid burning trees. Then the blue lights slowly dimmed. The engines stopped. The Vechnyy Buran’s trajectory had been meticulously established; the rest depended on the law of gravity.
As the spaceship entered the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, the black backdrop of space above turned a magenta all-pervading in its radiance. Below was a clear view of the sun’s chromosphere, twinkling with countless needle-shaped structures: discovered in the nineteenth century, they were jets of incandescent gas emanating from the surface of the sun. They made the atmosphere of the sun look like a burning grassland, where each stalk of grass was thousands of kilometers tall. Underneath the burning plain was the sun’s photosphere, a sea of endless fire.
From the last images relayed from the Vechnyy Buran, people saw Misha rise to his feet in front of the giant monitoring screen. He pressed a button to retract the protective cover outside the transparent dome, revealing the magnificent sea of fire before him. He wanted to see the world of his childhood dreams with his own eyes. The view was distorting and rippling; that was the half-meter-thick insulation glass melting. Soon the glass barrier fell in a sheet of transparent liquid. Like someone who had never seen the sea facing the ocean wind in rapture, Misha spread his arms to greet the six-thousand-degree hurricane that roared toward him. In the last seconds of video before the camera and transmission equipment melted, one could see Misha’s body catching alight, a slender torch melding into the sun’s sea of fire….
What sight would have followed could only be conjecture. The Vechnyy Buran’s solar panels and protruding structures would have melted first, surface tension making silver beads of fluid of them on the spaceship’s surface. As the Vechnyy Buran traversed the boundary between the corona and chromosphere, its main body would begin to melt, fully liquefying at a depth of two thousand kilometers into the chromosphere. The beads of liquid metal would cohere into a huge silvery droplet, diving unerringly toward the target its now-melted computers had calculated. The effect of the sun’s atmosphere would become apparent: a pale blue flame would emanate from the droplet, trailing hundreds of meters behind it, its color gradating from the pale blue, to yellow, to a gorgeous orange at the tail.