Author's Note: Welcome to Sol! Let me tell you a little bit about this AU venture. This story is heavily based on the plotline of the sci-fi film Sunshine. It's a very intimate look at the psychological aspects of space travel, but it also manages to dive into the realm of horror. It's beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and Danny Boyle consulted a physicist from CERN to get as scientifically close as he could to the truth. Naturally, he stretches that a bit, as do I in this story (The Dead Zone is not a real thing, but I will use it as Boyle did because it ramps up the isolation factor). As I watched the movie, I could not help but draw parallels between some of the characters and the Ronins, and wonder "…what would the boys do in this situation?" Thus Sol was born.
If you've seen the movie, you'll notice that I take some lines directly from the film on occasion— that is apparent in one particular scene in this chapter. I kept it because that character and that scene is so spot on for Sage, and there was little reason to change what sparse dialogue he has. Any other time I do use dialogue from the film, it's because they're talking about things concerning the ship or the science that is explained better in the film then I could do on my own. So it's not a crossover, but rather the movie Sunshine with the Ronins replaced as the characters, with a twist. If you think it's going to end the same way or go in the same direction near the end, boy howdy you are mistaken. I wouldn't want you guessing how it ends!
No armors in this fic: Everyone on board is power free. They're all in their early 30's. Their super powers are their giant brains. Everyone on board is a heavy hitter in their field and totally qualified to be there. There are OCs—I needed a crew of eight, and I had two slots open—so I am borrowing Robyn, Ghost of the Dawn's OC (with her permission, thank you darling), and the OC Regan is mine. Regan can also be found in Urban Legends. I needed some ladies to offset all that testosterone.
Special thanks and consideration goes to Ghost of the Dawn – she is the main reason why I even started writing this story again. She has been my cheerleader, sounding board, and muse, and I want to thank her a thousand times for her input and advice. It would not be what it is now without you. You created this monster, Ghost—enjoy.
Welcome aboard Inferno.
Chapter 1
Soundless in the cold depths of space mankind's last hope traveled; a leviathan containing the last scrapings of Earth's fissile resources.
The majority of the craft was comprised of a massive, dome-like shield where thousands of gold-plated panels tilted and reflected off sunlight as it loomed ever closer to its destination. A golden umbrella protectively encasing its vital contents from certain destruction caused by the extreme heat forever sizzling off the shields. It not only protected the precious package nestled inside the heart of the shield, it gave the only occupants of the craft a safe place to live for the long, long journey to the heart of a star. The living quarters stretched like a long, metal tail underneath the umbrella, littered with equipment and windows glowing brilliantly with light. At the tail end of the smaller living quarters, two communications towers spun lazily, tiny chopsticks in comparison to a shield one thousand times their size. If one had a view of the craft from behind, the entity itself would look Lilliputian compared to its destination: a small, dark blip on a map of golden fire.
From a view such as that, it would be hard to tell there was anything wrong with the sun.
Hard to see the sickness eating away at its insides.
Captain Ryo Sanada wasn't fooled.
He had no view of their destination from his small living quarters, but it loomed as large in his mind as the behemoth it was, boring down on the tiny ship sailing up to its fiery presence. As it had for almost half of his life.
The sun began to die when he was seventeen. International space programs and worldwide leaders had tried desperately to avoid widespread panic when space station reports came back with strange readings from the star. Something disrupting its conversion ability. They'd never seen anything like it. A space probe to the sun confirmed the existence of a massive, ancient particle that Rowen called a Q-Ball: some colossal floating virus that lodged itself in the sun and infected its ability to create the sunlight they so desperately needed. The consequences of such a disruption would be enormous and devastating for the entire planet. Ryo had, coincidentally, been in environmental biology class when the news report came in and the Japanese prime minister made an official statement. Every classroom in the building watched it. And every science class he took thereafter devolved into discussions about What Now: What was going to happen to the environment? How could they fix it? Could it be fixed?
He knew the answer to the first question. Earth began a slow freeze that only grew worse over the years. The time before Solar Winter felt like a distant dream, and the years since contained worldwide hardships that were hard to watch from afar. Those areas with already harsh winters and temperatures made more extreme saw mass exoduses of people attempting to leave for what warmer climates were left. Some governments didn't handle it well. Civil wars broke out; a world war was narrowly avoided when he was twenty-one. He'd enlisted because he was desperate to do something to help. Ryo knew in his heart he had to help fix the problem to stop the suffering—even if it meant dedicating his whole life to the cause. He was one of the lucky ones who turned on that path early—much of what others in the world had to deal with didn't touch him, as those who entered the space programs were groomed and cultivated to be the utmost assets when it came to finding a solution. He witnessed his fair share, though, in his service years, before he took the leadership skills he developed and turned to space.
They discovered the answer to the second question almost ten years ago.
The only way to drive out the Q-Ball particle was to force it out with an explosion: thus the creation of the world's largest bomb began. A spacecraft was designed to withstand the sun's still fiery glory; a team was handpicked by the two largest space programs in the world to deliver the bomb and see if it was enough to dislodge the particle and reignite the sun.
Ryo had not been a part of that team.
Because the first team failed.
His crew was not the first unprecedented mission to attempt an approach to the sun. But they would be the first to reach it and complete the mission, if he had anything to say about it.
The doomed first attempt to drive out the thing infecting their star weighed as heavily on Ryo's mind as the star did, if not more so. Years before they ever left earth, before he was even chosen as the one to captain Inferno, he puzzled over the failure of the first team. It wasn't even an issue of the bomb not working: it was never delivered. He didn't know what he hoped to find out about it that had not been analyzed and discussed to death by renowned scientists and philosophers the world over during the seven years of silence after Hariel's failure to complete the mission or return. Yet a need to understand gripped him anew when he was chosen to lead the mission that was Earth's last hope to save humankind from certain extinction.
There would be no other attempts. It had been difficult enough to replicate the bomb a second time to make up for the one that was never launched. The one that now drifted in space on a craft that hung suspended so achingly close to the sun. The high powered telescopes of Earth and the space stations could see the first spacecraft out there: motionless. Unresponsive.
A sunken ship in a sea of stars.
Ryo did not want to repeat whatever mistakes had been made the first time around. The possibilities—all the many ways a spacecraft or a team could fail—were numerous and terrifying to his meticulous mind. Reports, now filed away on the tablet in his hand, pointed to any number of mechanical issues in Hariel itself. Mechanical or electrical failures; oxygen depletion; destroyed sun shield; a deadly solar flare.
Eighteen months after Hariel's crew left Earth, and after the ship's communications went down, Earth never heard from Hariel again.
Inferno was sixteen months into the mission. Not only were they approaching the Dead Zone, but Inferno would have to pass within visible distance of Hariel to complete the mission.
The certainty of passing by the Hariel spacecraft wound Ryo up like a tightly sprung coil, but he made sure none of the crew members knew it. Or tried, at any rate: they were keenly attuned to him, and he wasn't sure if he was deluding himself into thinking they hadn't noticed his behavioral changes over the past month. He'd taken to hiding away in his bunk and poring over documentation of Hariel's last few weeks. He had another theory concerning their failure, and he wanted to explore it in solitude. Best not to place more stress on the crew.
A light touch on his side startled Ryo from his fixated thoughts. He looked down and found a pair of tiger blue eyes, so like his own, staring up at him.
"Hey, buddy," he said softly. He stroked the white and black cat and scratched lightly at his tail. White Blaze arched and purred, rubbing his face and the white slash on his forehead against Ryo's forearm. Ryo stretched, too, unaware that he had been holding himself so stiffly. He rolled his shoulders, tilted his neck, and felt his back pop.
The captain consulted the tablet in his hand and absently pet White Blaze, scrolling through to find the video logs of Hariel's captain, Anubis. He chose the last one uploaded before Hariel went silent.
Hariel's captain appeared on the screen, his face settled into relaxed lines, even happy ones. Long, deep red hair was pulled back from his aristocratic face. The date on the bottom of the screen read 9/15/2050.
"…It was a sequence of contact reports on the left shield quadrant," came the man's smooth voice. "The disturbance then turned into a minor asteroid storm. None bigger than a raindrop." Anubis, who had never been an expressive individual that Ryo had ever seen—what little he saw of him during the man's training in the space programs—was suddenly borderline exultant, those tiny asteroids shining in his eyes. "We had nineteen punctures…it took days of three hour shifts between myself and Cale to patch it up. Nothing serious. I watched them hit us from the observation room. It was…beautiful."
Ryo paused on Anubis's face and stared at the awe in the man's eyes. Rewound and listened again.
"It was…beautiful."
"Why weren't you worried?" he softly asked the image of the captain. "Nineteen punctures, Anubis."
Ryo knew he certainly wouldn't have wasted time watching the asteroid shower from the observation room. That far into the journey, it should have been more cause for alarm. Delivering the payload was everything. Not expressing your admiration for an asteroid storm, however small, that could have permanently damaged the ship.
It was as if Anubis had forgotten the severity of the mission.
He thought of the psychological stresses of extended space travel and wondered at the mental stability of Hariel's crew. At Anubis's thinking in those last months and weeks. What if he hadn't been the only one? What if, after that long year and some months, their minds simply couldn't take it?
That will not happen to us, Ryo thought as White Blaze rubbed his face against the tablet showing Anubis's face and purred.
From a warm, spacious room inside Inferno—the only room on the entire craft with a view of the star—the sun still burned. The observation room's outer wall was designed to filter out the sun's blinding light, rendering it capable of viewing by the human eye without causing damage. From this view, the sun glowed as the dying embers of a fire; still vivid and bright in hazy, swirling spots, and in others, swirls of darker orange, bordering on black.
The lone occupant in the quiet room took in the sight with an outward, practiced calm. Inside, he yearned for the star's former glory. He grieved for its current state as surely as he would have grieved over an illness in his own child, if he had any.
The room itself was empty save for a long, gently curved metal bench. The man sat in the middle, eyes on the glowing orb directly in the center of the massive thick glass, as tall and long as the large room. His back was straight, shoulders squared, hands in his lap as he took in the quiet and meditated silently, mind thirty million miles away even as he kept a small portion of it fixed on the very reason he was on the ship. Filtered sunlight danced through lush, thick, golden blonde hair that fell appealingly around a strong, handsome face.
The snug, yet open space reminded him of the meditation room in his family home. The dojo the Date clan owned and he had trained in when he was younger. Before it began snowing heavily on his birthday every year. The familiarity that the room, the quiet, and the light brought him, as if leaving the room would find him back in the halls of his childhood home, was soothing. He spent years craving the light of his youth, anything better than the weak sunlight that touched him like a chilled, unwanted hand when one was ill and cold. It had been so very long since he felt warm.
"Inferno." His voice was quiet and assured in the stillness of the room.
A pause, and then a soft, feminine, robotic voice answered from the small portable communications device hanging from a thin polyester cord around his neck. "Yes, Dr. Date?"
"Please re-filter the observation room portal."
"Filter up or down, Dr. Date?"
"Down."
The filter adjusted accordingly. The soothing, pale glow was abruptly more vivid. Warm, bright sunlight filled the room. He squinted and then widened his eyes, grey violet irises enlarging as his pupils contracted. The light was glorious. He breathed in slowly.
The question slipped out, borne from honest curiosity. "How close is this to full brightness?"
The soft, mechanically female voice interrupted the silence once again. "At this distance of thirty-six million miles, you are observing the sun at two percent of full brightness."
A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, lending his aristocratic face a heart wrenching beauty. His pores seemed to drink it in and his hair absorbed it, spinning it into the gold threads haloing his face. "Two percent," he murmured. He stood up slowly from the bench and moved closer to the glass, inwardly marveling at the novelty of his human vision only capable of viewing the force of the sun's light at such a small percentage. "Can you show me four percent?"
"Four percent would result in irreversible damage to your retinas. However, you could observe three point one percent for a period of not longer than thirty seconds."
Don't do it, the rational, educated part of him warned. Indulging will only encourage this unhealthy preoccupation. You warn your patients of behavior like this.
It was only thirty seconds. And there were already too many things he couldn't have. Sage had been careful for so very long. For sixteen months. After sixteen years of deprivation.
Three point one percent of the sun's full glory seemed paltry. A fleck of gold compared to the entire mountain. He would never be able to adequately explain to someone the need he had for sunlight, to be right in it, to feel it on and beneath his skin.
How he hungered for it.
"Inferno," he said, his heart pounding, "reset the filter to three point one percent. Please."
While retina damage was the last thing on his mind, he nevertheless picked up a pair of sunglasses lying next to the filtration device of the observation room and slid them on before sitting back down.
Distantly, that rational part of him kept warning that sun exposure to this degree was unwise.
Distantly.
The filter went down with a faintly audible click.
The world went white.
He couldn't control the gasp it tore from his throat. Beneath the sunglasses, his eyes narrowed, began to tear up, and then widened. His palms flattened on the cool bench and pressed, as if he were afraid the sheer force of sunlight would knock him backward.
The room no longer existed. Everything pulsated in hot white light, tinged at the edges with pale yellow gold. The sun filled the room, destroying every shadow and dark corner in its wake and leaving nothing but blinding brightness.
The extreme warmth and light were almost writhing, tangible things enveloping him; he felt he could drink them down like life. As painful as it was to look at, staring directly at the thing that was the source of life on Earth, he could not look away.
As suddenly as it embraced him, this cloak of brilliant light, it was gone. The filters returned and the intense, ethereal glow disappeared, leaving imprints of its glory on his vision, blinding him for long seconds. The liquid in his veins was molten gold.
Sage shook his head slowly, waiting for his vision to clear. Shadows returned to the darkened corners of the room and the sun was sick once more, but he couldn't keep the smile off of his face or the small laugh of sheer wonderment from bubbling up his throat like carbonation from a flute of champagne.
The most magnificent thirty seconds of his life.
"Hey, Ma."
Kento Rei Fuan waved at the little lens and the blinking red dot that recorded him as he collapsed into the chair in front of the camera.
"I got first dibs on sending a message back home today and I didn't even have to get up at the equivalent of five in the morning to do it. Probably because I'm the reason these ruffians can even send messages home this far into the trip." He settled back in the chair and kept his smile buoyant and easy, although this time it felt a little more like a mask he was hiding behind. He never had to force enthusiasm when he recorded messages for his family – it never occurred to him to let his longing to see or talk to them temper the fierce sense of belonging that being a part of this team gave him, the belief he had in their cause—but he felt the strain today.
"I hope business is running smoothly, Papa," Kento said, thinking of the aging man and his dedication to the family restaurant Kento grew up running around, then working in, and then leaving behind for the Pan Asian Space Program. "It's business as usual up here, too. Our package is still secure, thanks to resident genius boy Rowen. We're all healthy, Ma. Sage – well, you know him as Dr. Date, he's just Sage up here - has made it his sole purpose to make sure no one loses their marbles. Captain's good."
That was a lie. Ryo was obsessing over Hariel the closer they got to the sun, and in his fear of infecting the rest of them with his worry, he was starting to pull away. Close off. Kento wasn't having that shit, so something was gonna be done about it. But Ma didn't need to know all that.
"Our pilot is like the extra little sister I never wanted; Chun Fa, I'm telling you, you two would get along. She's a smartass like you. Navigator's still hot, still keeping me at arm's length."
He grinned crookedly. "We have plenty of fresh vegetables for cooking, even after all this time. Cye's made sure we'd be set on food and oxygen for the trip back home, too. He's got a better garden on this ship than most people have in their backyards in the tropics. And the ship is tight as a drum—our engineer's still hot, too, and sharp as a tack. Be jealous, Mei Ryu; I'm around them all the time."
Kento imagined his little brother's laughter, his sister's indignant response. Thought of Yun watching quietly and Rinfi holding back tears. She'd always been a hard one to read, but she'd cried during the last video message his family sent to him. So did Ma, for that matter, but he hadn't been expecting it from Rinfi.
He imagined their faces as he told them the news they didn't want to hear. His mother's reaction.
Kento leaned forward in the chair, clasped his hands over his knee, and prepared to break their hearts. "We're pretty far in, though, and I gotta tell you … we'll lose communication for awhile. I might be the badass who built this sweet system, but even I have my limits. I'm no match for space. So here's the deal. There's a lot of space shit—junk, sorry, Ma—interfering with the signal and it gets worse the closer we get to the sun. It's coming early, but it was expected. You probably heard me talk about it before, but we're seven days early in our estimation. We've got solar winds coming through, and the interference will screw with the moon stations picking up our transmissions. Yun, you probably remember a lot more details than I have time to go into, so if you could explain and help Ma and Pa relax, I'd appreciate it."
"This doesn't mean anything is wrong," he stressed, making eye contact with the camera lens. "We just can't communicate until after we deliver the payload and get back out of the Dead Zone so the moon stations can pick up our frequencies again. No, Ma, "Dead Zone" doesn't mean anything other than 'dead air' for communication. So I won't be able to receive any messages for awhile, and I won't be able to send any. As soon as our communications system can pick up and receive again, I will send you all a message letting you know. But it's going to take a few months."
Kento smiled again to hide the skipped beat of his heart, like missing a step on a staircase and feeling his foot hit nothing but air before the fall.
It felt like he was saying goodbye.
"Hell, in a few months, Rinfi, you'll be going back to school in the fall to finish your Master's," he said roughly. "Time like that flies by. It'll go by quick, I promise. I'll be thinking about you guys every day until then. And when I talk to you again?" A thrum of excitement coursed through him like a plucked guitar string and banished his depressing thoughts. He rubbed his hands together and this time, the grin was genuine. "We'll have done it. We'll drop the bomb, knock that Q-Ball out and jump start the sun, just like a car engine. Rev that sucker up and get it doing its job again. Then we'll be on our way home."
Kento winked at the lens. "I'll expect a hell of a homecoming from everybody. For now, though, I've gotta sign off and go make dinner for those hoodlum shipmates of mine. I've been cooking your recipes, Ma, or as well as I can manage with the supplies we have here. This ain't no restaurant kitchen." He paused, swallowed, and straightened back up. "I love you all. I'll talk to you as soon as I can."
He smiled one last time and, with a faintly trembling hand, sent the message.
The air smelled green.
He thought of tide pools tucked away in the cupped palms of rocky alcoves, the smell of seaweed, wet soil, and things growing.
Things grew here, too.
And Cye Mouri tended them, like a faithful gardener, like a caretaker, like a doting father. Encouraging them to thrive, so everyone on the ship could thrive, too.
Water trickled down windows that gathered moss in the crevices, then traveled over a lip of metal and cascaded into a shallow pool where watercress, wild rice, and water chestnuts grew. Units steeped in fertile soil grew carrots, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, and peppers. Counters under grow lights and rows of windows fitted with fans contained even more plant life. The fans whirred slowly, coaxing the oxygen out of the plants and into the ventilation system. The very next room housed more of the same.
Somewhere above Cye, droplets of water fell and landed in his hair and on his forehead. The warmth and humidity made him think of childhood summers in Yamaguchi and trips to the beach, well before the Solar Winter claimed the planet. When green things still grew on Earth in abundance. When he could visit those tiny pools and watch the life teeming within.
No rooms on the ship smelled and felt and tasted more like home as he remembered it before winter came permanently to the whole planet. Living on the spacecraft sometimes felt like living in a time capsule, pre-Solar Winter. He wasn't complaining. Cye never grew tired of marveling at the tiny ecosystem tucked away in two adjoining rooms in the middle of space. He had a hand in its creation, but everything in the Oxygen Garden grew of its own accord, too – he merely guided their production. Because of it all, they had enough oxygen to make it to the sun and a quarter of the way back. And business was booming.
The bronze-haired man leaned a hip against a counter cluttered with hothouse tomatoes and breathed in the smell of life all around him. It almost made him forget what they left back at home; the food shortages, the famines, the bitter, bitter cold and snow.
It almost made him forget what would happen if the mission wasn't a success.
Cye shook his head to evict the negative thoughts. He moved down the narrow aisle and made for the precious few units housing fruits; grapes, peaches, and strawberries. Feeling greedy, he plucked a peach.
"You'll spoil your dinner, young man."
The biologist took the first bite with a defiantly raised eyebrow as the brawny form of the communications officer entered the garden, carrying a large steel bowl.
"I think I'll manage to find room," Cye said dryly. "Pilfering in my garden?"
"If you want to eat that freeze dried shit they gave us a last resort, be my guest. Until then, you're damn right I'm raiding your garden, Farmer Mouri."
Cye smirked when Kento jostled him out of the way to pull out a head of cabbage. "What's on the menu tonight, chef?"
"Chicken stir fry."
"…I am not opposed to cooking again, Kento," he replied.
Kento glowered at him. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing. "Cye waved the peach and bit off a smile. "It's fine. How long did you say we have until we reach the Dead Zone?"
"I can't give you an exact time," Kento admitted after giving Cye one last suspicious look over the vague affront to his menu choice. "I can tell you to record a message before the day's over, because we're looking at less than twenty-four hours before the interference is too much. So if you want to send a little something to that cute mission control operative you sneak off to talk to, the sooner the better."
"I do not sneak off," Cye protested, fighting off a smile. "I give her reports."
"Uh huh."
Cye rolled his eyes. He appreciated the light hearted ribbing, because the reality of the Dead Zone was beginning to weigh on his heart. He wasn't quite sure what to say to his mother and sister when he messaged them, or how to tell them they wouldn't hear from him for almost two months.
If they ever hear back at all, an insidious voice whispered in response.
He blanched. Before the thought could drag him down, as so many what-ifs had been doing the closer they got to the sun, he let the noises of Kento bustling about distract him. Ripping water chestnuts from the pool and placing them in his bowl, muttering to himself about ungrateful shipmates and how he didn't need the resident biologist and cooking connoisseur judging his skills, it wasn't his shift anyway, and if he wanted to complain about the food he could just cook every damn night until they returned to Earth.
Cye finished his peach and followed Kento out of the garden. Needling the communications officer—a man who had fast become one of the closest friends Cye had acquired in his life—was far preferable to worrying about failure.
Chapter Title Song Reference: "Xibalba," by Clint Mansell. The Fountain soundtrack.