"Well, it's working on mine," Beya said. "Dad, I never saw an ocean before. A moon-full of liquid water, just sitting there without a dome! Earth is alive, you can see it, not some lump of rock. And now we've hurt it."
"We were never going to be able to loosen the eight-hundred-year grip of the Shiras without being strong."
"But they will never forgive us for this," Beya said.
"It's necessary, believe me." He reached for her shoulder, then thought better of it. "Any news of the Second Wave, the comet crew?"
"Nothing was left of the comet, it seems."
"Maybe the imperial military got to it. That's one ship I'm glad I wasn't on, I must say." He glanced over, to see the Virtual Earth running through its cycle of trauma once again. "Shut that thing down," he called. "Look, we broke through their outer perimeter without a single loss. In twelve hours we make perihelion, closest approach to the sun. We've all got work to do. Tomorrow, it's Sol himself!"
S-Day plus 4
Solar orbit
The Thoth habitat was a compact sculpture of electric blue threads, a wormhole Interface surrounded by firefly lights. The surface of the sun, barely twenty thousand kilometres below the habitat, was a floor across the universe. Thoth was over nine hundred years old. And all his long life it had been home to Sunchild Folyon, leader of the little community which maintained Thoth, a legacy from the past, held in trust for the future.
But now the rebel fleet was approaching its perihelion, its closest approach to the sun—and Thoth's most significant hour since its construction by Michael Poole was almost upon it.
After prayers that morning Folyon went straight to the habitat's bridge, where, even through the prayer hours, shifts of sunchildren maintained watch over Thoth's systems and position. The mood on the bridge was tense, for the wormhole into the heart of the sun had been shut down for twenty-four hours already, a time unprecedented in Folyon's memory; maintenance downtimes were usually measured in minutes.
But this was an extraordinary moment which required extraordinary measures, as the Empress Shira had patiently explained to Folyon himself—and as he himself had had to relay to a reluctant Lieserl, deep in the belly of the sun. This was total war. Even Thoth had been infected by the smart plague. Every resource available to the empire had to be dedicated to the fight—and that included even Thoth and its ancient community. So Thoth's orbit had been carefully lifted from equatorial to a higher-inclination plane where the habitat was expected to lie in the path of the invasion fleet; and so the wormhole had, for now, been shut down.
The sunchildren had fulfilled their duties to the letter. But Folyon, conditioned since childhood to dedicate his life to a single goal, had found it hard to accept this distortion of his deepest imperatives.
Not wishing to exacerbate the crew's difficulty with his own qualms, he left the bridge and made for the observation deck. As so often, he dealt with his troubles by immersing them in the healing light of the sun, giver of life.
The sun was a flat, semi-infinite landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere—the thousand-kilometre-thick outer atmosphere—a thin haze above it all. The sunscape crawled beneath the habitat slowly, but that slowness was an artefact of scale, a collision of human senses with the sheer bulk of the sun. In this free orbit around the sun Thoth was actually travelling at five hundred kilometres a second. Folyon knew how privileged he was to spend his life in the orbit of the mighty star, the physical and philosophical core of human culture. At the prayer hours he would look away from the sun's processed light to the distant stars, and he imagined every human eye, even across interstellar distances, turned to the sun, towards him.
And he wondered how many of those observers even knew of the habitat's existence, or its purpose.
Deep below the habitat, tracking its orbit, the tetrahedral Interface of a wormhole, linked to the mouth tended by Thoth, was suspended in the body of the sun. Searing-hot gas poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the sun's flesh. In normal times this solar material would spew from the wormhole mouth cradled by Thoth, to dissipate harmlessly. Thus the wormhole was nothing less than a crude refrigeration mechanism, by which solar heat was pumped away from the fragile human-built construct that housed the soul of Lieserl, and enabled her to survive in the sun's fire. And it was all for a higher goal. Lieserl was a monitor, sent into the sun to investigate a complex, dark-matter canker that seemed to be building up at the star's heart.
Thoth's purpose outdated even the ancient empire of the Shiras, but, designated as a temple to Sol, it had always been maintained faithfully by the Empresses' lieutenants. Now Lieserl's wormhole was to be used as a weapon of war—but even this remarkable incident, Folyon knew, was but an episode in the greater history of Thoth and Lieserl.
A sunchild touched his arm, a young woman. His thoughts, as so often, had drifted away from the here and now. Sunchild Mura said, "The time is close, sun-brother."
"All goes well on the bridge?" He felt anxious.
Mura was empathetic for a girl of her age and she knew his moods. "Everything is fine. You would only distract them all, forgive me for saying so, sun-brother."
He sighed. "And so we go to war."
"They tell me you can see it from here. The fleet." She scanned around the sky—every photon passed by the observation deck blister was heavily processed—and pointed to a cluster of starlike points, far away above the sunscape. "There they are."
The lights grew in size and spread apart a little; Folyon saw now that they were splinters, like matchsticks, each with blazing fire at one end. "An enemy fleet from Alpha Centauri, come all the way to the sun. How remarkable."
Mura counted. "Five, six, seven, eight—all accounted for. And their GUT drives are firing./I This was celestial mechanics, Folyon knew; if you entered the solar system from outside perihelion was energetically the most advantageous place to dump excess velocity. "They will come close; the projections of their trajectories are good," Mura said, sounding tense. "And they will come on us quickly. The moment of closest approach will be brief. But the systems are automated—the reopening of the wormhole won't rely on human responses." She hesitated. "Did you tell Lieserl what is happening today?"
"I thought it was my duty," he murmured. "She will remember all this, after all, long after the rest of us are dust. I wonder if they are praying."
"Who?" Mura asked.
"The crews of those ships. For they worship Sol too, do they not? And now we are about to use Sol itself to kill them." He lifted his face, and his old skin felt fragile in the sun's processed light. "Do we have the right to do this? Does even Shira?"
She grabbed his arm. "Too late now—"
The ships exploded out of the distance. And at closest approach solar gases hosed from the drifting wormhole Interface, turning it into a second, miniature sun. Solar fire swept over the invaders. Mura whooped and punched the air. Folyon was shocked and troubled.
S-Day plus 4
Oort Cloud, outer Sol system
Densel Bel wished he could see the sun, with his naked eye. After all, he was among the comets now, within the sun's domain.
He stood in the dark, peering up at the zenith, the way the ship was flying; he tried to imagine he was rising in some spindly, superfast elevator. A light-week out from Sol, with the ship travelling at less than two per cent below lightspeed, the view from the lightdome of the Fist Two was extraordinary. All was darkness around the rim of the hemispherical lifedome. The only starlight came from a circular patch of light directly over his head, crowded with brilliant stars, all of them apparently as bright as Venus or Sirius seen from Earth. He knew the science well enough; the starfield he saw was an artefact of the ship's huge velocity, which funnelled all the light from across the sky into a cone that poured down over his head, even from stars directly behind the ship as it flew.