Free Usurper of the Sun by Housuke Nojiri Page A

on its own,” he said with a calm unlike anything Aki had ever heard from him before.
    “Into my suit. A mouse crawling around in here. Depressurization has stopped. There’s no pain…”
    His voice began to murmur as if he were drifting into sleep. “Aki, can you hear me?”
    “Yes. Yes, Mark, I can hear you.”
    “I’m sorry. There’s so much more I wanted to say to you.”
    “I know. Don’t worry about that now.”
    Two minutes later all readings transmitting from Mark’s suit ceased.
    The image coming from the telescopic camera on the Phalanx showed a human-sized caterpillar’s cocoon resting in the center of a large indentation on the Ring. It was shrinking in size. Eventually, Aki looked away.
    She could not find a use for her feelings. Aki regretted being on the ship and on the mission. After forty hours, she finally emerged from her cocoon. Per and Kindersley found her, grabbed her by the wrists and wrapped their arms around her. She pressed her face onto their shoulders and hugged them back, crying like she had not cried since she was a child.

ACT XI: FEBRUARY 2, 2022

    THE UNSS PHALANX shifted to a battle footing and launched its first attack. It sent a nuclear missile whizzing toward the Island, beyond the horizon of the Ring, some four million kilometers away.
    The graser protecting the Island shot down the missile at the line of defense, disintegrating it in a microsecond, which was exactly what the crew had expected. Shortly after, the ship was hit with the massive surge of electricity that was released when the graser fired. Half the electrical systems suffered some sort of damage. After emergency procedures were performed, the ship and her hound made their way toward the Island, but the functional capabilities of both crafts were substantially impaired.
    Aki put on a pressurized safety suit and secured herself in place in her cocoon. She kept a close eye on the infrared image being transmitted by the hound as it scouted their route. The Ring appeared on the screen as a plain gray field with subtle variations in color. After some time, the small bump of the Island appeared on the horizon.
    “The hound is about to enter graser range. Make sure that all data files are closed,” ordered the commander. The backup electronics had been fried in the surge. If they were hit again, they would be crippled and in serious trouble.
    Aki and Per had estimated that the graser would need 147 hours to recharge. It was an estimate based on a few too many assumptions that were based on suppositions that were based on guesses. There was no guarantee that the estimate was even close to correct. They waited in tense silence. After about five minutes, Per dared to speak.
    “It is not firing.”
    “So it really does shut down while it recharges.”
    “Proceed?” asked Per.
    “I don’t see any reason not to. What the hell else can we do?” Kindersley said.

    FIVE HOURS LATER the Island was within visual range. The graser still had not fired.
    Their probehound was floating directly above the Island. Commander Kindersley ordered the hound to make its descent. Aki controlled the telescopic camera. The Island rose up from the surface of the Ring to form a cliff three hundred meters high. The edge had appeared rounded in observations made from Earth, but viewed up close it was a sharp vertical wall. The top of the Island resembled a mirrored plane stretching beyond the horizon. More like a continent than an island , Aki thought to herself.
    The opposite end of the Island was out of visual range, over 130,000 kilometers away. According to the readings that the sensors were producing, the Island was a table large enough to hold ten planets the size of Earth and still have room left over.
    The telescopic camera revealed a web-like pattern covering the surface. At maximum zoom, it looked like the walls of a honeycomb, a collection of hexagonal-shaped pillars, each about four meters across with their surface covered in a