“Now this,” Bascal said, to no one in particular, “is the hard part. You ever try to back up a sailboat against the wind? The trick is to angle in, null your orbital velocity, and then use the sail itself as a brake, kind of like a parachute.”
Conrad couldn’t make sense of that remark. “A parachute? What are we, diving into the sun?”
“Onto the sila’a, yes. The fusing hydrogen sits on top of a neuble core, and there’s a solid wellstone surface on top of that, to hold it all in. We need to make contact with that outer shell in order to communicate with the machinery. But there’s an advantage in doing that: it gets us close enough to reflect the laser beam right back at the sila’a. Set up our own little resonating chamber, for extra pressure, extra thrust. It’ll be like shooting a rocket out of a bottle.”
“I ... have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve done this before?”
“Hmm? Oh, gods no. Nobody has.”
Conrad wanted to object: the very idea of backing into a star—even a miniature one—seemed like craziness of the highest order. And bouncing laser beams back into it, for extra thrust? Something had gone awry in their plans, some deeply fucked failure of communication, because he sure hadn’t agreed to any of this. But here and now, did they have a choice? Could they get back to the planette even if they wanted to? Even if Bascal would let them try?
“Okay,” Bascal said, “I’m going to turn us again.”
It was a stately process, and while it transpired Conrad couldn’t help noticing how bright it was getting outside, as the light of the sila’a drew ever nearer, illuminating the guylines and the translucent shrink-wrapping around the cabin. The sail itself was mostly invisible now, a batwing of utterly transparent material, with little squares of silver flitting across it, and clustering in particular on its right-hand side, like a swarm of sun-seeking insects.
“Asymmetric pressure,” Bascal explained, catching Conrad’s look. “The light pushes on the starboard half of the sail but not the port. That’s what turns us, pulls us around.”
“Why does it flicker like that?”
“Stability. The control system is keeping the sail from fluttering or sliding out sideways against the guylines. It’s like the tensioning springs on a spinnaker tack.... Well, you’ve never been sailing, so never mind. But yeah, it’s supposed to do that.”
Gradually, the flickering squares of silver diminished in number, and spread themselves more evenly across the sail, and began to gleam in a really painful way as the sila’a brightened and neared behind them.
“Boy, that’s bright,” Bascal observed. He did something to the controls on his panel, and the squares of silver became squares of bronze, and the shrink-wrapping above the skylight turned a translucent shade of black that was very close to the natural color of wellstone. It blotted out the remaining stars, and made a shimmery halo of the sail and guylines.
Conrad began to notice a sensation of weight, pulling and pressing him into the mattress again.
“Gravity,” Ho Ng said. “Is that the star I’m feeling underneath me, Sire?”
“Yeah,” Bascal told him absently. He was still fiddling with the controls, looking annoyed about something. “Well, it’s also our deceleration. We’re sort of hovering right now. Or we will be in another minute. I’m trying not to bump us too hard.”
Against the surface of a star. Good God. Against the solid surface of a manmade star that was so unimaginably hot that it could warm a planette, could cook a dinner or burn a young man’s face, from forty-seven kilometers away. And yes, it was definitely getting warmer in here!
“Are we going to be cooked, Bas?” he couldn’t help asking.
“No,” the prince said, sounding even more annoyed. But he fiddled some more, and the view outside the windows went totally black for a moment, and then mirror-bright, reflecting the cabin’s interior lighting back in lumpy, funhouse-mirror ways.
Then he looked alarmed, and had time to say “Whoops” in the moment before something very solid and very heavy slammed up into the center of the cabin’s floor.
BAM!
Even as he was slammed into his mattress and jerked against its straps, Conrad was aware of the sounds of cracking and splintering. He even had time to note that these sounds, however brief and mild, were just about the most alarming thing you could possibly hear on board a wooden spaceship. And even when the cracking stopped, the floor itself groaned. Something was bending it in a way it had never been bent before, and the force of gravity— the invisible hand pressing Conrad into his padding— seemed much too strong. Much stronger than at the surface of Camp Friendly.
“Get us off this thing!” he shouted at Bascal. “It’s breaking, it’s going to break! How do you talk to the star?”
“Verbally, I assume,” Bascal said, sounding a bit shaken himself. “Otherwise we’re in real trouble.” Then he turned his head toward the floor and shouted, “Hello? Sila’a? Can you give us laser sail protocol, please?”
Nothing happened.
Nothing except that Conrad felt his rage boil over. This was their plan? Ramming a star and then shouting at it? Asking nicely? This was their fucking plan?
“Laser sail protocol!” Bascal shouted, more loudly. Then screamed, probably as loudly as he was able, “Laser fucking sail! Now!”
Conrad snarled. “You’re a goddamned idiot, Bascal. Thanks for this.”
“Oh,” Bascal said. “Shit. I forgot to mirrorize the sail.”
He touched the control panel, and then—
They went. Something caught them. Conrad could feel the sail bulging outward against its own incredible stiffness, the tight guylines suddenly straining, the crushing/ pressing ball of the sila’a, maybe four burning meters across, falling out beneath them and dropping away, away.
There was nothing stately about it: the other thing Conrad felt was the air crushing out of him, like an iron-weighted pillow settling down on his chest. Taking the next breath was like lifting barbells with his lungs. His vision had gone grainy and narrow, and he felt, in a distinctly physical way, that he was looking out through a tunnel from the back of his brain. His soul had fled from its usual spot just behind the eyes, had been squeezed back against the barrier of his skull. If it squeezed any farther, it would leave his body altogether.
The windows had gone transparent again, or anyway they were admitting light—a biting monochromatic violet, mirrored brightly in the checkered silver of the sail and shimmering with the telltale interference gleams and darknesses of reflected laser. The cabin groaned and shrieked, and from somewhere came—again!—the long and loud and ominous crack of splintering wood. But Conrad barely noticed, barely considered it. He dragged a breath in and then let it whoosh back out. Dragged it in, let it out.
New squares of silver appeared here and there, the checkerboard sail filling as the sila’a drew smaller and dimmer and more distant beneath them. Conrad understood, in a vague way, that Bascal was throttling their acceleration, upping the reflectivity of the sail to draw out more velocity, more speed, keeping them right at the limits of human endurance. He wished he’d asked more questions during the planning phase—especially given the whole Garbage Day fiasco—but this was a vague thought as well, pieced together in the brief interval between Herculean breaths. He dragged one in and let it out. Dragged it in, let it out.