Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“These disruptions on the sun’s surface certainly occurred many times, but most would have happened before humanity invented wireless equipment, and therefore went undetected. In addition, since these collisions were placed by random chance, the disturbances in equilibrium wouldn’t have been optimal in strength and area.

“But the Vechnyy Buran ’s impact location has been meticulously calculated, and the disturbance it will create will be orders of magnitude larger than the natural examples mentioned. This time, the sun will blast powerful electromagnetic radiation into space in every frequency, from the highest to the lowest. In addition, the powerful X-ray radiation generated by the sun will collide violently with Earth’s ionosphere, blocking off short-wave radio communications, which are reliant on the layer.

“During the disturbance, the majority of wireless communications outside of the millimeter radio range will fail. The effect will weaken somewhat at night, but during the day, it will even exceed your jamming of the previous two days. Based on calculations, the disturbances will last a week.

“Papa, the two of us always did live in worlds far away from each other’s. We could never interact much with each other. But now our worlds have come together. We’re fighting for the same goal, for which I’m proud. Papa, like all your soldiers, I await your order.”

“Everything Dr. Levchenko said is true,” said the general director. “Last year, we sent a probe to enact a small-scale collision with the sun according to calculations based on the mathematical model. The experiment confirmed the model’s predictions of the disturbance. Dr. Levchenko and his research group even hypothesized that this method could be used to alter Earth’s climate in the future.”

Marshal Levchenko walked into a side room and picked up the red telephone that was a direct line to the president. A little later, he walked back out.

The historical records give different accounts of this moment: some claim that he spoke immediately, while others recount that for a minute he was silent. But they concur on the words he said.

“Tell Misha to carry out his plan.”

The Vechnyy Buran fired all ten fission engines, jets of plasma hundreds of kilometers long erupting from every engine nozzle as it made final corrections to trajectory and orientation.

In front of the Vechnyy Buran was an enormous and lovely solar prominence, a current of superheated hydrogen wheeling upward from the sun’s surface. Like long ribbons of gauze drifting high above the fiery sea of the sun, they shifted and changed like a dreamscape. Their ends anchored to the surface of the sun, forming a gigantic gateway.

The Vechnyy Buran passed slow and stately through the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer-tall triumphal arch. More solar prominences appeared in front, one end attached to the sun, but the other extending into the depths of space. The Vechnyy Buran with its blinking blue engine lights threaded through them like a firefly amid burning trees. Then the blue lights slowly dimmed. The engines stopped. The Vechnyy Buran ’s trajectory had been meticulously established; the rest depended on the law of gravity.

As the spaceship entered the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, the black backdrop of space above turned a magenta all-pervading in its radiance. Below was a clear view of the sun’s chromosphere, twinkling with countless needle-shaped structures: discovered in the nineteenth century, they were jets of incandescent gas emanating from the surface of the sun. They made the atmosphere of the sun look like a burning grassland, where each stalk of grass was thousands of kilometers tall. Underneath the burning plain was the sun’s photosphere, a sea of endless fire.

From the last images relayed from the Vechnyy Buran, people saw Misha rise to his feet in front of the giant monitoring screen. He pressed a button to retract the protective cover outside the transparent dome, revealing the magnificent sea of fire before him. He wanted to see the world of his childhood dreams with his own eyes. The view was distorting and rippling; that was the half-meter-thick insulation glass melting. Soon the glass barrier fell in a sheet of transparent liquid. Like someone who had never seen the sea facing the ocean wind in rapture, Misha spread his arms to greet the six-thousand-degree hurricane that roared toward him. In the last seconds of video before the camera and transmission equipment melted, one could see Misha’s body catching alight, a slender torch melding into the sun’s sea of fire….

What sight would have followed could only be conjecture. The Vechnyy Buran ’s solar panels and protruding structures would have melted first, surface tension making silver beads of fluid of them on the spaceship’s surface. As the Vechnyy Buran traversed the boundary between the corona and chromosphere, its main body would begin to melt, fully liquefying at a depth of two thousand kilometers into the chromosphere. The beads of liquid metal would cohere into a huge silvery droplet, diving unerringly toward the target its now-melted computers had calculated. The effect of the sun’s atmosphere would become apparent: a pale blue flame would emanate from the droplet, trailing hundreds of meters behind it, its color gradating from the pale blue, to yellow, to a gorgeous orange at the tail.

At last, this lovely phoenix would disappear into the endless sea of flames.

Humanity returned to the world as it had been before Marconi.

As night fell, undulating auroras flooded the sky, even into the equatorial zones.

Facing television screens filled with white noise, most people could only guess and imagine at the situation in that vast land where war raged.

General Baker pushed aside the division commander of the Eighty-second Airborne and the assorted NATO frontline commanders attempting to drag him onto a helicopter. He raised his binoculars to continue surveilling the horizon, where the Russian front was rumbling in advance.

“Calibrate to four thousand meters! Load number-nine ammunition, delayed fuse, fire!”

From the sounds of artillery behind him, Baker could tell that no more than thirty of their 105 mm grenade launchers, last of the defensive heavy artillery, could still fire.

An hour ago, the German tank battalion that had been the last remaining armored-vehicle force in the position had launched an admirably courageous counterattack. They’d achieved outstanding results: eight kilometers away, they’d destroyed half again their number of Russian tanks. But under the crushing disadvantage in numbers, they had disappeared under the Russian army’s roaring torrent of steel like dew under the noon sun.

“Calibrate to thirty-five hundred meters, fire!”

The explosive missiles hissed as they flew, and flung up a barrier of earth and fire in front of the Russian tank lines. But they were like a landslide before a flood, the earth a short-lived impediment against the implacable waters.

Once the earth blasted up by the explosions fell back to the ground, the Russian armored cars reappeared in view through the dense smoke. Baker saw that they were arranged as densely as if they were receiving inspection. Attacking in this formation would have been suicide a few days ago, but now, with almost all of NATO’s aerial and long-distance firepower jammed, it was a perfectly feasible way to concentrate armored-vehicle strength as much as possible, ensuring a break in the enemy line.