Something Science Fiction.

Dear Reader,

I took a break from the novel I'm writing to whip this up. Consider it a thank you for sticking with me. As Monty Python says, And Now For Something Entirely Different:

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As she walked down the center of the corridor, Angel's boots clanked against the grid marked metal. If there were dust on those boots, it may have sifted down into the vent system's cleaning functional down draft. Considering that as ship captain, Angel was too high priority for the corporation to send her planet side, those boots were immaculate. It was dead watch hour. The previous captain slept during the final watch of the night. It was a luxury. Angel was up from the start of the final watch until the beginning of third watch. Constantly in motion, constantly at work and monitoring her ship and crew, Angel was said to be the epitome of the interstellar command's ideal captain.

It wasn't much of surprise. She was engineered for military type exercise. There was enough machine in the cyborg that she overcame the 3 second delay for human reflexes. There was enough code in her neural system that she spoke fluently with machines via the neural-link. The last captain was a wealthy human. He bought his position. Money did not make him adequate. Thus, when the corporation needed someone to retake control of the ship, they purchased Angel.

Now, Angel knew what her duty was. Command the ship and make sure that the heliosphere was secure. The sub-corona orbit should have rendered the equipment in her useless. She should have been laying on the deck seizing as the neural-link shut down. The ship should have been falling into the photosphere because there was no proper explanation for why it remained up. Angel wasn't the machine they wanted. The corporation considered this a failed mission when the previous captain refused the sub-corona orbit and went rogue. The hope was that Angel's system was enough to force past the previous captain's security measures to make the ship transmit data back before the catastrophic failure of the systems happened and the ship plunged into Sol, just as the last attempt did.

Angel, however, had her first real taste of freedom on ship. With out the security corps around her, with out the entire regiment running the Gauntlet in punishment for her defiance (which should have been eliminated by the programming), Angel could at last be somewhat human. It was all she had wanted. When she accessed the ship, she learned that the rumors of criminal's being used for revere uplink experimentation were true. A man whose name was Aeolus who was uploaded into the ship forcibly formed the ship's consciousness. Somehow, Aeolus was sane. The previous captain insisted the ship was defective, but it was Aeolus refusing his commands because they put the crew in danger.

Now, in the darkness of the dead watch, Angel walked the corridor of the ship with what some would have called a hallucination of Aeolus. Most nights, they said very little to each other via the neural-link. They simply were in each other's company. Aeolus was hesitant to dive into the sun. Angel had no desire to die as well. Thus, it was through the three year long journey to the sun from the point where she had boarded that they calculated an orbit that would keep the ship moving on the magnetic currents flowing over the star. Just barely within the sub-corona zone but high enough that the ship's shielding could keep systems running, they skated on the edge of death and gathered data.

The official report back was an overwhelming mass of data roughly organized. The corporation didn't know that Aeolus was once a scientist. They didn't know that his crime was committed long before the corporation's founding, of speaking a truth about the environment that leaders didn't want to hear. Once stasis systems were developed, Aeolus was placed in one. Irony that his own technology was used to imprison him didn't surprise Aeolus. He simply looked at his keepers who were placing him into the pod and said, "One day, I'll return. And a storm of all storms will be unleashed."

Aeolus was working on a stasis system to contain and sustain the stellar environment so that Sol did not swell to a giant star or collapse into a dwarf. It was the protoypes that got turned into prison systems where prisoners were trapped in a suspended animation state. As the systems became more advanced and things like the neural-link were developed, Aeolus was the first one lifted up out of suspended animation to have things tested on him. Aeolus knew exactly what Angel had gone through.

Now, trapped within a computer system, Aeolus sifted through data at a speed that was even greater than Angel could process. And he came to a conclusion that it was time to leave. The first cataclysmic eruption was about to happen. "Turn five degrees on the z axis and twelve on y," Angel said out loud, her voice echoing in the silence. The image of a forty year old man dressed in officer's rank garb with out insignia nodded. Angel looked over at him. "Are you sure this is it?" she asked.

"If my calculations are correct, we'll reach Earth in eight minutes. The CME will pass through the orbit path but not reach Earth. It will be at least one Juipter radius away from Luna. The sky will light with fire, but they won't be harmed. Then we have three days before the next ejection. Time enough to gather supplies and set our route," he answered. Angel looked down at her boots. Black ones, standard issue. In a half hour, they were about to be on Earth and then she was going to raid the seed vault at the Antartic before launching again in a desperate attempt to flee the shock wave of the beginnings of stellar collapse. If they were lucky, the sentient ship of eighteen souls, one cyborg, and a cat, would escape the Oort cloud with out damage and reach deep space to follow the route of the last interstellar traveler to move through the system to sanctuary on an M class planet.

"It is time, go to your quarters. All systems are secure. The crew are quartered and all hatches are battened down." Aeolus said, a trace of humor in his final statement. Angel looked over at him. "Storm's a brewin', cap'n." Aeolus said in his best imitation of the pirates of antiquity. Angel turned and entered her quarters. As she laid down in the stasis system pod, Aeolus set to the work of making sure that they were in correct orientation for their launch out of the sun. He laughed at the idea. For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, he felt almost human again. Down beneath that magneto-sphere, the star shuddered.

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Musical inspiration:
The Way from Zack Hemsey