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Value?

Maximum.

Immediately, instantly, without any delay that human or transhuman senses could have registered, a great roar echoed through the control room; a roar as if a titanic dinosaurian beast was being flayed alive. Contemporaneously there was a great lurch as if the hurtling vessel had hit an obstruction in its headlong flight; an obstruction which slowed the vessel, clung to it like a colossal cephalopod of space, slowing, pulling – but not halting it.

The Fatal Scimitar shuddered, jerked, twisted, throwing its inhabitants onto the floor. All around were the terrible sounds of metal straining under enormous forces; great echoing booming noises like distant thunder could be heard crashing and reverberating from all directions.

Jorl got to his feet first. ‘The old girl doesn’t like it I guess.’

Jon ignored him and resumed his connection with the Control Computer. He called up data on trajectory and velocity and the rates of change of both.

Finally he turned. ‘We haven’t got a fraction of the power required to establish a stable orbit within this system. We can’t make up for thirty years of uninterrupted interstellar velocity in a few hours, days or weeks – even if we had unlimited fuel. We are still on a hyperbolic path.’

‘As I believe I said,’ Jarm commented, ‘we’re finished.’

‘Possibly not,’ was Jon’s response, ‘we are slowing and there is another way of losing velocity.’

‘Reverse slingshot,’ Shana36 suddenly interjected.

‘Reverse what?’ was Jorls’s comment as he turned to look at her, ‘I must have nodded off in the Educator when they did that one.’

Shana36 ignored him and continued to stare, somewhat unnervingly, at Jon.

‘Slingshots or gravitational assists were used in the early days of space probes by using large rotating masses, usually Jupiter, to transfer momentum. However, it’s possible to transfer momentum the other way by approaching the object counter to its spin.’

‘But the amounts transferred would be minute!,’ Shana12 said, who had not failed to notice who her double was staring at.

‘Indeed they would,’ Jon said, managing not to look directly at either of the women but at a point directly between the Shanas, ‘but there are a number of gas giant planets in this system that we can bleed momentum onto. But you’re right – it will take a while.’

‘Then we’d better get started,’ Jon heard Jorl mutter.

‘There’s a little something we have to do first,’ Jon continued, feeling increasingly light-headed as the enormity of what he was about to say started to dominate his mind, ‘something that will help us a great deal to shed momentum.’

The others did not rise to the theatricality of his performance and merely waited for him to finish.

‘We will pass close to this star on the turning point of our hyperbola and by approaching it correctly we will be able to lose a useful fraction of our momentum,’ he finally said.

Jorl turned to look at Shev and then back to Jon.

‘That’s a rather throwaway remark – “Pass close to the star” – how close?’

‘Within zero point one six of an AU.’

The others burst into a confused cacophony of various types of expostulations.

Finally Shana12 asked, ‘How hot will it get?’

Jon tried and failed to give a reassuring smile. ‘This vessel has a hull designed to withstand half a millennium in interstellar space and the star is cooler than Earth’s sun. The maximum temperature on the hull according to the Control Computer – I haven’t checked it – will be about 880 kelvins.’

‘Hot enough to soften quite a few metals,’ Jarm observed mildly, as if he were reading from a technical journal.

‘And that’s just the heat,’ Jorl snapped, ‘Surprisingly enough I wasn’t asleep during the lecture about hard radiation – Far UV, X-Ray, maybe the occasional gamma ray. Not to mention – but I must – a flood of charged particles shooting through us.’

‘I’m afraid there is no alternative,’ Jon said, desperately trying to control his growing irritation with Jorl, ‘you clearly haven’t realised that we have absolutely no way of avoiding the close passage. It’s the laws of gravity that have made this choice for us – not me. But if we control our path we can use it to our advantage.’

‘If we survive!’ Jorl growled, looking at the others.

Jon nodded calmly. ‘If we survive.’

* * *

The days passed as the starship continued its ineluctable fall towards the dread fusion furnace which formed the centre of this alien planetary system. The image of that inferno was noticeably larger each time anyone dared to look at it. Gradually more and more details could be made out on its surface; great sunspot clusters – the smallest of which was larger than the planet Earth – became easily visible. On the limbs, pale pink tongues of prominences could be seen reaching out into the blackness of space, looking like the delicate feathery fronds of some strange plant of fire but in reality great towers of plasma, hundreds of kilometres high.

And the heat. At first it was not noticeable as the synthetic humans busied themselves learning every aspect of the great starship, learning every nuance of the control commands, teaching themselves how the various systems functioned together.

But there came a day when the heat could no longer be ignored, when the rivulets of sweat had to be brushed away from eyes every few seconds. Like an invisible predator it stalked them, sapping their determination, their drive, their self-belief, sucking away their strength and energy.

Clothes were soon discarded but with nude bodies glistening with sweat, they worked on. Enormous quantities of water were consumed and expelled but they could only force themselves to eat small amounts of solid food.

The arachnoids ferried them a continuous supply of anti-radiation drugs.

Working together, Shev and Jon found that the vessel had the facility to produce a cloaking magnetic field which would deflect the star’s terrible torrent of charged particles by forming a miniature magnetosphere. But the controlling software had been corrupted during the cosmic ray burst. Doggedly, line by line, they reconstructed the code which would allow it to flash into existence. Line by line they worked, snapping and snarling at each other in their exhaustion; huge drops of sweat falling steadily over their work, blurring and smearing the symbols. After many weary hours they could do no more: either it would work or they would die.

Jon sent the command.

It worked.

‘Neutrons will still get through,’ Shev observed gloomily.

‘So they will,’ was Jon’s only reply and then he turned to the next problem.

The heat intensified.

Jarm and the Shanas discovered stores of lead-based creams with which the team liberally plastered themselves, turning them into ghastly white spectres.

‘Isn’t lead poisonous?’ enquired Shana36 with mock innocence.

‘So is hard radiation!’ was the other Shana’s response.

The heat intensified.

The air became blisteringly hot and the metal surfaces painful to touch. Under the lead paint skin began to crack and blister. Each breath brought burning air into their lungs. They shielded their eyes from penetrant radiation with lead infused visors that threw everything into a grey twilight.

Even the simplest task required great effort, both physical and mental. Still they worked at the controls, feeling the shifting gravitational and electromagnetic forces trying to twist the starship’s path into one that terminated in the photosphere. They took it in turns to attempt to sleep on the hot metal floor while those awake battled with the forces which hungrily, mockingly tried to pull them into a fiery death.