“Mayday, mayday, I am going down! I repeat, I am going down!”
Alarms jangled and screamed, dials spun around faster than tops, and in the center of all that jargon, bouncing and jostling about, sat a small stubborn pilot, trying to hold the shuddering starcraft steady. She gritted her teeth, wiping hair out of her eyes.
“Mayday, mayday, anybody there! I am going down, callsign Sunspot, ship I.D. SA-3507!” she yelled.
Sparks clung to the edges of the sun visor, threatening to burn through into the cockpit. She punched the terminal, trying, hoping against all odds that her messages were getting through to the SA. But it seemed that either the sun’s corona was eating her messages, or the only ships listening in were the enemy. She pushed that thought deep down. It wouldn’t help right now.
The ship kept plummeting, falling toward the yellow dwarf star below, her hands shaking. It was cruelly ironic, she realized, her callsign “Sunspot,” and now she would face her end cooked by the self same sun.
She pulled at the controls as another solar flare washed past the left wing, threatening to topple the little space hopper and send it straight down. She fought back, thanking the Statesmen that whatever ingenious little deck engineer whorerigged the wing work had put in durable power steering. Her arms wouldn’t have been able to turn the steer bar otherwise. She kept it in a glide, albeit not a smooth one, over the surface of the sun. However, with every statemeter, the little hopper plummeted lower and lower.
“Mayday, mayday! Is anyone there… please?” she choked, a few tears rolling down her face, unnoticed.
The ship hissed politely as it slowly burnt under the heat, but other than that there were no sounds, no help from beyond the corona. She screamed, punching her hand into the small speaker. It sparked feebly in response but stayed silent.
She took several deep breaths. A small digital clock in the corner ticked down the moments till they crashed.
00:38:29…
00:38:28…
00:38:27…
She calmed herself, the ship kindly seeming to jostle just a little bit less.
“What do you know?” she asked herself, a trick she had learned in the flight school. Take stock of what you know and what you don’t, because until you do, you won’t be able to figure out what needs doing.
“I know that I am in a modified Hopper-Class ship, originally designed for short sun trips no longer than three days out of habitable atmosphere, augmented to be a stealth bomber, hiding in the photospheres of stars. I have no fuel, and I have stripped all sanctioned weight off the ship in order to maintain altitude. I am armed with three state-sanctioned OPBM’s, a short-range railmusket, and three spent flare cases”
There had been slightly more than that, but she had detached them all in an effort to stay aloft. The OPBM’s were the heaviest things the ship carried, but it was unthinkable to remove them:SA loyalty mandate 49-2. Her loyalty instructor would have been proud to realize she had been listening during basic, maybe even smiled for once.
“Either my unencrypted messages aren’t being received, or they are being ignored.” She breathed shakily. “No one is coming to help me…”
“What do I need to escape?” she asked herself.
The answer was simple. Thrust. She needed thrust, something to push her up out of the sun’s atmosphere. Anything to propel her forward. That had been one of the major innovations since the first civil war, wings that could work in the most minute of atmospheres, like the near vacuum of this sun’s corona, using radiation pressure in place of air pressure. They had called them sun hoppers from the very beginning, designed to fly through a sun’s corona for short periods of time. That was before they had been repurposed for the war, of course. The Glorious War.
“Okay, thrust, where am I going to get thrust?” she asked herself.
The ship jostled heavily as a solar flare burst past them. She screamed, holding tight to the controls till it had passed. Then she blinked. That’s how she’d get out. She’d ride a solar flare.
It was technically possible, and the ship would likely withstand it. The problem was that solar flares were extremely hard to predict. They only occurred when there were shifts in the magnetic poles, or when a great amount of energy was injected into one localized area of the sun. But how could she do that? She glanced around, hopeful. The OPBMs would be enough, but SA loyalty mandates forbade her to launch except upon enemy targets, and she…well she was a loyal soldier…