Forging a Second Sun

By Erik Reale

If hope alone isn't enough to survive on, maybe spite will suffice.

 

Building a bright future full of optimism for everyone in the universe may be an endless headache, but that won't stop Preo from scouring high-tech desolation for ways to fix everything that's broken. Neither will the endless swarms of robotic warships dominating the galaxy which constantly fire lasers and nuclear warheads at her stealth ship, the Charred Crow. When Preo's wanderings divert her to the barren, freezing world of Syth, she finds an opportunity to apply her discoveries: helping the local community fight economic exploitation and encroaching hypothermia by building them a solar-powered death beam.

 

Forging a Second Sun is inspired by numerous works of classic science fiction and rooted in retrofuturism, evoking the same feeling of awe and hope for the future despite how distant that grander future often feels.

 

Dr. Erik Reale, PhD is a scientist, engineer, and author with a passion for retrofuturism which evolved from a hobby into novel writing, inspired by numerous books about scifi art, architecture, and scientific history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Reale
• Release date: Mar 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798988119708

Erik Reale

Erik Reale is a scientist, engineer, and author of Forging a Second Sun, the first book in a planned science fiction series about all the reasons things don't need to be this bad and should be better. Retrofuturism is the pervading theme, because people used to feel hope for the future and they should still be feeling that.

Book preview

1

Distant stars blinked out of sight and then appeared again, all along the same arc as the trespasser drifted through the void. Its path crossed between its target star and the lights of the galaxy’s core, more and more stars becoming obscured as the denser backdrop revealed a diamond silhouette passing across it. The intensifying light of the star ahead did nothing to illuminate the ship’s perfectly black surface.

The stars disappeared behind the Charred Crow as it drifted through a ragged opening in a wall of metal that extended for kilometers ahead and behind. Double-checking that the ship’s trajectory wouldn’t need adjustment to avoid crashing into the sides, Preo watched patiently until her ship emerged inside the stellar shell and saw her objective in the distance among millions of satellites visible in orbits enveloping the star.

The Crow was silent, every unnecessary system shut down. Lights, electronics, all the rows of instruments were disconnected from ship power. No life support, save for that built into Preo’s spacesuit. Artificial gravity was off, every tool diligently stowed away, strapped to tables, or anchored by small magnets. No faint curving of space drawing in dust, no troublesome sources of excess heat attracting the attention of infrared cameras. Now safely obscured by all the dense matter behind the Crow, Preo deployed a forward electromagnet to latch onto a passing chunk of debris to pull her closer to her target, not emitting significant energy, if a rather clumsy way to maneuver. Pulled along between kilometer-long slices of debris, the Crow approached its destination in the fifty-million-kilometer radius from the star. Waiting to drift into position before powering down the magnet, one of the black plates on the ship’s bottom edge opened and a cable fired downward from it to anchor the ship, ensuring the flattened octahedron wouldn’t drift away while its pilot was out. Already difficult to detect, the Crow blended into an array of solar collectors, rows upon rows of hexagonal panels, each hundreds of kilometers wide, leaving the tiny vessel nothing more than a black speck disappearing between them. Tucked safely away, the panels shielded the ship from the billions of artificial eyes all around her, watching as they had for centuries and would continue to watch for millennia to come.

Triple-checking the seals on her suit, Preo waited as the atmosphere was pumped out of the airlock, a faint hiss being the last sound to be heard from anywhere save for the crinkling of the flexing spacesuit. As the canopy opened, Preo unclasped herself from her seat and drifted into the shell around the star.

This one was more cracked than the others. In the shadow of one of the surviving computer modules, a gently curving sheet of metal powered by the solar collectors above and too large to rest on the continents of a rocky planet, Preo was protected from radiation that would burn through her suit. It’d still taken a beating at this distance. If the long-dead superintelligence which inhabited it required or preferred any atmosphere, it was all certainly lost to the long stretches of twisted metal left by some weapon whose nature Preo could only speculate.

For Preo, this offered an opening, her grappling hook attached to one of the interior walls with a filament thinner than a hair and strong enough to reel in her mass. Now on comparatively firm footing, with walls, floors, and ceilings to push off from, she made her way to memory storage, light shining in from the star guiding her.

Looking back at the opening, Preo stood on an outcropping of wreckage as below her boots the scattered remains of the machinery extended for millions of kilometers down, above, to her left and right. The curvature was less than that of any natural planet’s surface, while the uncountable structures remained completely visible despite the distance, unimpeded by any atmosphere and only limited by the resolution of her eyes. Some structures were built to be independent and others were broken off from a larger whole, orbited and overlayed to form the gestalt impression of a sphere around the star. Preo surveyed the damage once again and turned back to look at the outer shell far behind her, the remnants being marred by cracks large enough for a planet to move through.

Thousands of years of construction, shattered in an hour. All for one mind. The sphere wasn’t the destroyed habitat meant for trillions of humans, instead each wall contained computer systems of a singular mind which encircled the star, a heart of plasma fueling an incomprehensible intellect.

Now it was dead, just like all the others, and Preo was going to take considerable enjoyment in ripping out what remained of its memories and sharing all the secrets it committed so much energy to hiding.

The next order of business was recovering her scout probe, a black tetrahedron the size of her head. It was clinging patiently to a wall of debris too large for it to cut through and perform this job itself, the mark of a laser cutter unable to form a complete entry before exhausting its power supply. Preo removed the probe that dutifully waited for her, found to be undamaged, strapped it to her back, then shook herself slightly to check that it was secure. It did its job, it deserved good treatment. Pulling out her cutting torch, Preo finished the hole and pushed herself feet-first into the opening.

There was her objective, an intact storage bank, one of the uncountable fragments of an artificial brain. Far better able to survive centuries of exposure to space than a human brain in a similar state.

Removing a transmitter from her belt, Preo plugged it into the core, also hooking it up to the orange monochrome screen strapped to her forearm. Anchored down by electromagnets in her boots, she connected the transmitter to slowly download the immense scientific, cultural, and historical data to the larger drives in her home base.

Broadcasting outward, a signal would travel for 21,000 light-years to reach its destination. Broadcasting inward, through the microscopic wormhole at the core of the transmitter, the signal’s destination was but a centimeter away. Moving all the information from this computer would fill Preo’s home base a hundred times over, demanding discretion as to what to retrieve. An algorithm of hers searched for what was of interest, prioritizing technological information, excluding any duplicate documents or data already commonly known to the wider galaxy.

It always irritated Preo, the uncertainty, the possibility that some invaluable secret was being glossed over because sifting through this volume of data would take too long. This station sat here for centuries, it wasn’t going to collapse today, but it might in a year, and then it was gone.

On the dim display, Preo idly flipped through random documents excluded by the algorithm. Just in case something intriguing caught her eye.

One such title was dubbed ‘Musical Compositions of X-Ray Radiance Around the Star 54G4N.

Sure. Why not. I’ll give it a listen, she thought, transferring that file back in among the rest to be downloaded.

Files were selected and uploaded one by one, Preo glancing back and forth between data storage and where the Crow waited. Beyond the ship, other fragments of the multi-layered megastructure were strewn across space, knocked into decaying orbits by ancient collisions, eventually to be submerged in the star’s plasma, returning through their mass some small fraction of the energy taken to forge them. Extracted matter fused under intense, artificially generated gravity many orders of magnitude greater than the star it was collected from, mimicking the core of neutron stars from which all the heavier elements were formed. All this raw material floated through space in reserves, unused, any vessel large enough to bring it back for a more constructive purpose doomed to be destroyed by guardians who had no use for such supplies but would nevertheless kill anyone who dared try to take it.

Leaving the transmitter to remain as a connection to this trove of information, Preo drifted through space with slightly flailing limbs towards her vessel, gripping the edges of one triangular plate which armored it. Making a mental note, putting more handholds into the hull would make this less nerve-racking, even though she’d thought the same thing before and kept procrastinating on the idea.

So close to the star and surrounded by all this debris, Preo took the necessary risk of detection, firing thrusters to get the ship up to speed, which were angled to move as though revolving around the star instead of emerging straight out of it. The direct route was a quick way to make the guards suspicious. The Crow’s infrared emitter radiated the thermal energy it built up back towards the sun, letting just enough low-energy photons out to blend into the background as the ship drifted along with the other junk, leaving the star behind. The eight triangular radar-absorbing plates that formed the Crow’s distinctive shape, when combined with anti-reflective coatings on the canopy and gaps between the plates, gave it nearly no albedo.

Outside the shell, there was nothing on passive sensors yet. A little more distance, and she could power up the wave drive before being noticed, then get back to human-inhabited space by tomorrow.

Assuming the speck in the distance stopped getting bigger. Enlarging specks were the most unnerving sights in this line of work. There shouldn’t be any specks this far out, every asteroid in this system and many others were ground up to make the shell thousands of years ago.

Of course, this system’s Sentinel Fleet thought to randomize its patrol routes, and one of its ships was orbiting directly into her path. At this distance, Preo already left most of the millions of warships behind as they protected a dead body and failed to impede one little salvage ship, all their energy accomplishing absolutely nothing.

This far out, the incoming ship was definitely a sentinel, the Crow’s computer warning her that they were on a collision course. The randomized directions the Sentinel Fleets sometimes took, designed to avoid predictability, were about to succeed in snaring an intruder in their domain.

The sentinel possessed sensors powerful enough to predict the coming impact with what it presumed to be a pebble of an asteroid, and upon that armor plating, the Crow would leave nothing but a scratch, not even worth raising shields to defend against. The intelligence of the sentinel didn’t care, as it reached the same conclusion of the Crow’s insignificance. Perhaps it was looking to draw the ship in and feed it to the all-consuming maw of a factory ship, break it down into some speck of raw materials and be crafted into a new squadron of drone fighters. Along with whatever carbon and minerals they could separate out of Preo’s corpse.

Preo watched as the spherical ship grew closer and closer, taking up more and more of the view, the rate it seemed to grow becoming faster and faster. The ship drifted along its path away from the dead shell, carried by inertia and guided by the star’s gravity. The unrelenting warship drifted nearer and nearer, now closer enough to see the weapons emplacements, nuclear warheads loaded, ready to act as the first line of defense for its master’s body. There was no sign of it moving, no reason for it to do so, and inertia was no help at all.

With a weary sigh, Preo knew she couldn’t wait any longer and accepted the situation.

Gripping the control yoke, the engines activated. Magnetic particle traps sent beams of high-velocity muons into contact with a second beam of their antiparticles. At the outer two tips of the octahedron, matter-antimatter reactions propelled the Crow around the sentinel and towards the system’s edge.

Within an instant of its acceleration, as waste heat and stray gamma rays from the engines were picked up by enemy sensors, Preo became the exclusive target of weapon systems designed to raze entire planets. Warnings spread across this solar system through faster-than-light communications, warships jolted to attention, drone fighter squadrons arced toward her by the thousands. A naval force designed to defend an entire solar system bore down on a ship that had its weapons removed for better speed and engine efficiency, save for a cutting laser at the front. Said cutting laser could cut through most armor. Unfortunately, if they were in front of her, Preo was already as good as dead.

The more she maneuvered, the more her sensor readouts filled with warnings, measuring buildups of energy in the fleet, the drone fighters deployed, all in such rapidly growing numbers it turned the entire screen a useless, uniform red.

"Don’t you all have anything better you could be doing?" Preo groaned at the millions of robotic warships, every single one of which now mobilizing to throw any and every weapon in their arsenal at the fleeing, unarmed salvage ship. The ones on the opposite side of the shell were charging headlong through the star’s atmosphere to close the gap. The Crow continued its acceleration towards the edge of the solar system, out past the orbits where the system’s planets used to be.

Enemy ships were catching up, but she needed just another minute to power up the wave drive. The inertial compensators strained to keep the ship’s interior in one piece and to stop Preo’s arms from being ripped off her shoulders during acceleration. Even with the help, incoming missiles could accelerate faster since they weren’t limited by including a squishy organic body, but the Crow had a head start.

The ship took an irregular, jerking path, never crossing the same space in its arc as the engines’ particle-antiparticle reactions released bursts of gamma radiation in odd directions. It ducked, weaved, and spiraled around an unpredictable path up, down, sideways, as chaotically as possible. Being about twenty light-seconds out from the nearest cluster of ships, they were targeting where the Crow used to be, or however best they could predict its trajectory. Randomness was the only way to avoid incoming lasers. Even then, Preo needed to make course corrections as beams of high-energy radiation grazed her starboard shields, making them flicker under the accumulating density of concentrated fire, threatening to overcome any level of maneuverability with overwhelming power.

More beams of high-energy radiation were on their way. There was no way to prove that because nothing moved faster through space. By the time the beams were detected and a confirmation was sent back to you, you’d already be roasted, but Preo knew from experience they were already closing in on her. They were coming, in larger and larger volumes until they would form an inescapable wall of destructive energy that would melt her ship.

More and more high-energy photons ate at the shields until a green indicator showed the wave drive was powered up, and the space ahead and behind the Crow warped to move without motion through the darkness, outracing light and leaving the deadly beams of energy in its wake.

Once beyond their patrol range, the machines powered down and returned to their ceaseless patrols, an ongoing pursuit deemed against their standing orders. A report noting the intrusion would no doubt be prepared and transmitted to the corpse of another superintelligence. Maybe someday Preo would get around to pilfering that one, too, as all their sentinels waited with infinite patience for orders that would never arrive.

Preo sat still, her heart slowly returning to its resting pace as she stared through the canopy at the passing stars. Air filled the cabin again, lights came on, and Preo’s limbs felt heavier as gravity returned. Synchronizing her wrist computer with the Crow, she added the newest discovery to her music library, reclined back, removed her helmet, and began listening to the rhythm of the galaxy.

2

Silence permeated the Crow , composite materials in the walls designed to dampen out vibrations. Preo ate alone. Worked alone. Relaxed alone. Everything alone, as she was now, smiling contentedly as she watched the slight parallax of stars light-years away. As the warping of space closed the distance between the Crow and the nearest civilized system, redirected via autopilot around three others patrolled by Sentinel Fleets, her studies were interrupted by a chime.

There was a distress signal from something drifting through the void between systems. Nobody else was likely within several light-years, too deep within machine territory to be pirates, so curiosity led her to investigate, the warping of space around the Crow changing orientation, drawing the vessel forward and down into the galactic disc. The warping was shut off as near to the signal’s source as it could get, then the Crow moved in under antimatter reactive drive.

It was one escape pod, an unusual design of a white sphere drifting out here in the void. No other ships on sensors, which never eased Preo’s mind considering she personally designed the Crow for stealth and others could do the same.

Emissions from the hemispherical caps of the Crow’s tips provided angular momentum, and carefully rotated the ship to let Preo face the odd vessel directly. If anyone was inside, they weren’t responding to any of Preo’s attempts to signal them with radio or light flashes, the latter being unsurprising since there were no windows on that sphere. Although that meant little to Preo as she watched from behind an indistinct blackened canopy. From the bottom of the Crow, a panel unfolded to expose a mechanical arm with a mounted gravitational emitter, the pull it created mutually drawing the two vessels closer until a second manipulator arm could reach out and touch the white surface. Carefully rotating the spherical body, Preo searched for some external feature. She was almost convinced this was an unmanned probe until she spotted a recess that looked sized for a human hand.

From the lower level’s airlock, a flexible tunnel deployed to connect the two ships. latching onto the pod and adaptably molding itself around what Preo hoped was a hatch, the inside pressurized with atmosphere supplied by the Crow. Preo again donned her spacesuit as a precaution to investigate, pushed herself down through the tunnel, and felt the hull of the other ship. Instead of metal, ceramic, or any composite she recognized, the white hull was some flexible polymer. Pounding a few times to see if anyone inside could hear her, getting no response, she found the handhold and managed to get the hatch open with a bit of fiddling, going slow in case the other side was a vacuum.

The interior of the spherical pod consisted of some exposed, black, padded framework with a purplish covering stretched between the gaps. A polished metal hemisphere lay at the opposite end, probably the propulsion system. Light was very dim. There were no controls Preo could see, and nothing in the way of accommodations, so either it wasn’t meant for human use, or it was only a short-range craft. Probably controlled via autopilot.

There was one man, floating unconscious in zero gravity. A bit taller and bulkier than Preo, elderly and rather rough looking, probably adrift out here a while without much to take care of himself with. There was nothing with him, no tools, no identification, no weapons, no indication of where he’d come from. There were no obvious injuries, no signs of malnourishment or dehydration, so it should be safe to move him around. Using a chemosensor to check the atmosphere, it confirmed for Preo that carbon dioxide levels were dangerously high, meaning he’d been here for an uncertain amount of time with failing life support. Hefting him back up to the Crow, Preo lowered artificial gravity to 0.05g for a few moments to make him easier to carry around without letting all the tools and expensive equipment float freely.

The castaway was weaved between the storage containers as Preo hauled him up from the lower level, passed the workbenches and disassembled technology of the middle level, and onto a bed