Read Online Usurper of the Sun by Housuke Nojiri - Free Book Online Page A

drain out through her pores. She was surprised by how bitter they both sounded. She was doing the one thing the crew had been advised to avoid—starting a heated debate in cramped quarters.
    “Tell me, Aki, what can I do to see the Ring like you do, like a masterpiece in the Uffizi that deserves protection?”
    “The problem is that you do not know anything about it. What you need is to try to understand the Ring. You have to want to understand. It is like how you feel when you look at a painting or a sculpture. It is here for us to understand, to interpret, not just to annihilate. You look at beauty because it is one of the few profound things that humans can do. To destroy without even trying to understand is the impulse of instinct, not a result of cognition.” Aki looked away, frustrated and angry. “Finding joy in annihilation is fundamentally inhuman.”

    SEVENTY-TWO HOURS later one of the probehounds was launched. The hound’s propulsion jet nozzle could be seen in the lower part of the monitoring screen. In front of that was the small reflection of the faithful dog going out to sever the Ring. The probe dropped in freefall to a point about twenty meters away from the Ring’s outer surface. When its small NERVA IV fired, there was a flash of light that whited out the screen until the automatic brightness control adjusted to the new level of input.
    The hound’s rear leaned slightly toward the ship and began moving at an angle that would minimize its exposure to solar radiation. When the blast from the hound’s nuclear-powered engine hit the Ring, the Ring melted like butter hit by a blowtorch.
    “Looking good! Let’s double the speed and see what happens. Per and Aki, keep an eye on the part that was cut,” said Commander Kindersley.
    “Yes, Commander,” Aki said.
    Aki lined up the images taken so far. Quick analysis showed that the edges of the burn had been bent inward but were slowly shifting back to their original shape and reintegrating with the curve of the Ring. Aki had never imagined such a resilient system. She was unsure whether any human had ever conceived that such technology might exist.
    If massive stress were put on a substantial portion of the Ring, the strain might cause the structure to collapse, but it seemed to Aki like compromising the structure of one part of the Ring would be insufficient to affect the rest of its surface. Every square micrometer of the Ring was maintaining a perfect balance between the light pressure it was giving off and the weight created by the pull of the sun. Even carpet-bombing, while it would cover the Ring with holes, would only produce localized damage. Aki presumed that even a slew of holes would get repaired quickly.
    “It looks like it has started to regenerate already. I wonder by which mechanism the Ring restores itself to its original shape,” Aki said into her intercom.
    The light pressure and gravity were both inversely proportionate to the square of the Ring’s distance, giving the curved and flush shape of the Ring a peculiar plasticity. Normally, even in such a complicated system, any parts that became concave would remain that way.
    “It is probably changing the albedo of the sunlit side of the Ring. It feeds back the intensity of the sunlight. If only the spectrometer on the hound were online,” Per said. “Look at the telemetry readings. Maybe trying to detect proton-antiproton mutual annihilation while blasting it was too simplistic.”
    “Everything’s going surprisingly well over here,” Mark stated. “The hound’s slicing along at five hundred meters per second. At this rate, it should reach the southern edge in about a week.”
    “The ship is about to approach the edge of the opening. What did you want to see here?” Kindersley asked.
    “I would like a close-up look at its repair work, especially now that it is trying to repair a section that was sliced clean through instead of just a...divot,” Per said, sounding a bit