Negative Plasma

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By Nate S. Jaros

 

          It was more uncomfortable than he expected. He knew, of course, that blistering death was millimeters away, just outside the thin walls of the vessel. But he never conceived that having it so vibrant, and so real would be this difficult. To his knowledge, no one had ever plunged a ship into a star, certainly not with human life aboard.

         He rolled up the sleeves of his dingy button-downed shirt as beads of sweat glistened in the short blonde hair around the sides of his head. His armpits and chest felt wet, and his damn collar itched like it was made from wire bristles. He tugged at it and sighed and watched the gauges reveal the worsening situation. He began to regret this adventure.

       Laie Jaddin piloted his custom-built needle ship, which currently passed four-hundred and fifty-one meters deep and dove further into the solar plasma maelstrom of Sigma Fourteen, the local medium-mass yellow star. Outside the ship’s thin metallic hull, his incredible creation fought back the wrath of super-heated ions which grew stronger with every millimeter he descended.

        There were no viewports on the needle ship, that would have been foolish for the conditions on this journey. By choice, the ship was solid metal. Nestled inside, all he could see were the dull gray cylindrical walls of the tube around him, and the ramshackle cockpit he had constructed, with its gauges and wires and cables scattered around in a twisted mess of tangled junk.

         His heart felt like a piston inside his chest.

         Focus Laie! he thought.

        Today was a big day, the big test. A literal trial by fire for his invention, which was imbedded into the metal tube-craft he piloted. Nagging doubts resonated in his skull, they bounced around creating angry echoes he couldn’t discard. He felt his stomach tighten into knots.

         He could imagine the failure, how it would all end. A crack in the hull, or something he missed with the device would break. The implosion would probably be fast. In an instant the superheated plasma would rush in, and the ship and his life would extinguish like a dash of gasoline thrown into a campfire.

        A rapid shudder rang through the floorboards of his odd needle-shaped submersible. The jolt in his feet told him the craft’s metal shell was asserting its displeasure, and it did so with firm resolution. Laie glanced around the inside walls. He imagined them wrinkling like tin foil under duress from the oppressive heat and pressure outside.

       A loud boom sounded. The adrenaline hit his bloodstream, and he tensed. Dread filled his soul, and he struggled to keep it from consuming his mind, like the searing elements outside endeavored to consume his vessel.

        Will it work? Will my ship hold strong and fast, resilient to the firestorm outside?

        But the ship, his glorious, albeit strange submarine-like achievement, she held together.

         For now.

         Laie again focused hard on the gauges and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. The temperature inside the small cockpit space was comfortable, but he still felt warm. It was likely his anxiety. Tubes and wires haphazardly bundled together protruded from behind the round glass dials and computer screens.     They traced colorful lines around the space and spread like ivy on a wall throughout the small cabin. He studied the navigation display, which was a recycled old monitor screen with a crack down the left edge. So far, the trip has progressed as planned.

        He read the structural readouts on the bank of indicators; they showed him data regarding the intimidating conditions outside his ship’s thin hull. Those quivering black indicator needles consumed much of his attention. He swallowed hard, his confidence irresolute.

        More clangs sounded through the floorboards as the ship strained against building heat and pressure.

His eyes darted to his negative plasma generator displays. Their simple arcs of color showed green and conveyed smooth operations with the invention.

          Good. It’s working.

          The system, his device was holding. It was doing what he designed it to do. The negative plasma system held at bay the millions of furious ions bombarding the ship’s outer skin, threatening to turn the ship, and him, into vaporized bits.

          Laie conceived the negative plasma idea in his lab as a simple theory. He recalled long nights toiling over the numbers at his desk, scratching out concepts and math on countless reams of paper. If it worked, it was essentially reverse fusion. Amplified and controlled correctly it held the capacity to stop particles from agitating, like super-heated plasma, ultimately canceling their accelerated movements. He theorized this technology could blanket and cool anything submerged in a fusion firestorm.

          But it was only an idea.

          It had never been tested.

         Until today.

          The black indicator on the white face of the outside temperature gauge continued its steady climb and snapped his drifting thoughts back to reality. Its upward movement did nothing to quell his building worries either. The gauge showed five thousand degrees Kelvin and it continued to rise. His limbs shook with nervousness as a familiar dark troubled feeling crept its way back into his mind.

         He crossed his arms around his chest, breathing deeply again. There were other reasons for his apprehensions. They had to do with how he acquired the huge needle that was now his vessel on this uncertain quest.

        Laie’s thoughts wandered back to the day he obtained the raw metallic needle from the Bok’zith, a little-known race of dangerous alien engineers that overran and eradicated whole solar systems. Long ago, the news feeds gave the latest grim reports of another Bok’zith encounter or showed a distant world and a Bok’zith extermination fleet destroying its unfortunate inhabitants.

         But the Bok’zith had not been heard from in decades.

        Laie remembered the time he sat in a shady saloon, on a long-forgotten planet near the frontier. It was late and he had already consumed too many whiskeys when he learned of a broken-down hauler that was full of Tu-Xenium metal “needles.” The fifteen-kilometer-long Bok’zith engineered pipes resembled a needle, though tapered and sharp at both ends. The Tu-Xenium they were crafted from was valuable beyond any known substance or mineral. Comprised of the smoothest material in the known universe and rumored to be able to withstand intense temperatures, he had learned of this alien alloy and the Bok’zith’s incredible metallurgical abilities long before that sullen night in the saloon.

         The three inebriated shipmen, dressed in dirty and ragged flight suits sat across from him at the bar that night when it all happened. The room’s dark and smokey atmosphere shrouded his observations of the crew. Their excited conversation about what they witnessed in orbit before docking was far too easy to listen in on and Laie heard their boisterous stories of the broken-down alien hauler adrift nearby. His mind formulated the unfortunate sotted plan as he finished the last of the amber liquid in his glass.

          The following day, while soothing his hangover, Laie considered the haunting conversation he had overheard. His curiosity and his not-so-fortunate financial situation drove him to the foolish act he accomplished next.

         Laie flew out to the derelict hauler and stole a needle. All fifteen kilometers of it. Despite all the stories he’d heard about the Bok’zith’s warring and dangerous reputation, the alloy technology was something he needed for the project.

        Would the Bok’zith want it back?

        These thoughts continued to weigh heavily on him as he progressed downward on his epic journey.

        An acrid smell of ozone and melting plastic from something nearby wafted into his olfactory senses.    He stood and swayed next to the small seat centered at the midpoint of the needle. He looked up to see the seven kilometers of hollow, slightly tapering, Tu-Xenium metal above him and remembered that below him was the same. The gray walls around him were close, and claustrophobic. He resided in the middle of what looked like a long vertical tube. The hand-built piloting section having been crammed into the compact spot was essentially a seat and a collection of computer monitors and gauges, all designed to control the needle ship, and monitor its various propulsion and protection systems. In Laie’s mind, the most important system was his new negative plasma generators and their turbines which worked together to shroud the needle ship in its protective cold cocoon.

       From somewhere below him, more creaks reverberated through the lengthy ship, amplifying as they reflected along the inside of the resonating hollow conduit. Laie flinched with each moan and pop of the metal under pressure, certain that impending death lay just seconds away.

       With rapid, darting eyes he scanned the gauges and monitor screens again. The outside temperature gauge now read eight-thousand degrees Kelvin, and the negative plasma system held strong with no signs of frailty as they did their job of mitigating the speed of the white-hot fusing atoms outside and blanketed the needle ship in relative safety.

        However, Laie hadn’t forgotten that millimeters away from the protective layer, blistering ions swarmed like angry bees. Yet there he was, inside a huge, stolen, Bok’zith Tu-Xenium metal pipe, plummeting into a vortex of hot fury with nothing but a theory for a shield.

         What am I doing?

         More doubts.

        Laie shook his head and placed his hand up to the inside curved wall of the needle ship. It felt smooth, and somewhat warm to his touch, but not hot. He could feel a vibration, a buzzing of sorts through the metal as the needle’s skin resisted the pounding fusion ions outside.

        Perhaps that shuddering was the effect of the negative plasma system?

        It was hard for him to know.

        Laie allowed a smile. But the splinter of confidence soon ebbed inside him.

        Negative. Plasma. Worked.

         As the needle ship descended deeper into the ocean of plasma Laie knew aborting the attempt and returning to surface early was an option, he had proven his concept. But he reminded himself that for his secondary scheme he needed to go a little deeper, to a place with a little more temperature and pressure to make this trip truly worthwhile.

         The plan was unassuming. His needle ship also housed two empty tokamaks tanks, each able to contain and hold a large quantity of fusion plasma energy. Simply put, he’d go deep and fill the tokamaks, while testing the negative plasma theory in the process. The captured condensed plasma he hoped to retrieve equaled a huge financial windfall.

        A loud beeping noise sounded in the cockpit.

         A red light illuminated on a monitor. Laie’s pulse quickened as his eyes leapt to the display.

        It was the negative plasma system. It had reached operation at one hundred percent and worked at maximum exertion to neutralize the ever-increasing fury outside.

        In his feet, through the floorboards again, he felt the high-pitched vibration. The buzzing waves were stronger now and they pulsed through the length of the hollow tube as the whole metal rod and his cold shell technology gave everything they could to resist the super-hot pressure.

        This is insane. It won’t hold!

         Yet he proceeded deeper into the punishing fire ocean. Enraged plasma ions now began to attack the hull of the needle ship. Like a cool breeze against a hot sandstorm, his invention could only do so much at these depths.

        What if the negative plasma system failed at this exact moment?

        Laie bit a fingernail and tugged at his collar as more sweat from his brow formed. He felt his stomach turn over as his surroundings seemed to wobble. There was no way for him to know if the material of his stolen Bok’zith ship could survive at these depths and pressures without the protection of negative plasma. It was incredible metallurgy, but he doubted its ultimate strength.

        He balled his fists, opening and closing them again. He felt his heartrate soar.

         This is it. This is as deep as I will go.

          It was time to capture the super compressed plasma and fill the energy tank tokamaks and get back to the surface.

         Laie pressed a few buttons on a screen. Somewhere, not far below him in the long needle, two small doors opened. Hyper-fast plasma rushed in and filled the two waiting storage tank tokamaks he had carefully aligned inside the hull. The tanks instantly filled with the raging hot ions, and his display showed each one reporting full. He shut the hull doors, capturing the dense energy in the containment tank cells.

          This would have to do.

         All he had to do now was stop the descent and begin a climb back to the surface. Above him, over one hundred kilometers of hot plasma awaited the needle ship’s ascent. Laie furiously pressed buttons on his navigation screens, and commanded the decent engine to stop, while awakening the ascent engine.

          Then, like splintering wood, he heard the crack.

         Something was wrong.

         He felt the blood leave his face; a slight lightheadedness overtook him as his eyes went to the engine gauges.

         The ascent engine had lit, and started, but something was wrong with it. Laie glared at the engine’s display, willing it into action while an odd feeling of heat washed across his face. The warmth reminded him of standing in front of his mother’s open oven, radiating its warm glow as she baked cookies.

          He looked up at the metal wall of the needle, the once gray inside surface now glowed a reddish orange hue. Hot fusing ions had worked their way through the tiring negative plasma shroud. They had begun to hammer into the outer skin of the needle’s alloy.

          “No! Come on, come on!” he screamed.

           Oblivious to the threat however, and with struggling engines, the ship continued its insane plunge into the abyss.

           Laie smashed his hand against the wall of the needle ship. “Come on, climb!” he shouted, staring at the depth gauge. It defied his outburst and continued its unnerving downward trend.

          The temperature gauge revealed a steady climb and added to his terror.

           If I can reverse the descent engine, I might have a chance to escape.

          He tried it. With speed, he pressed more buttons on the display.

          A new tremor ricocheted throughout the confined space.

          Then another bang.

           The descent engine announced its disagreement. These two engines were all he had to stop the needle ship’s horrifying fall to certain death.

           The depth gauge stopped its movement and then began to rise. Laie heard himself gasp.

Slowly, he thought he could feel his doubts and fears begin to wane.

           Laie took a deep breath.

           It was not over yet, escape was close, but not sure. As the ship climbed, confidence in himself and his abilities grew. The blanket of oppressive anxiety disappeared. Success-laced adrenaline surged in his blood.

          He had done it.

          Or so he thought.

          Another tremor pounded the needle ship; he felt it like a hammer to the floorboards.

           The engine readouts glared a new crimson glow and announced their faltering systems.

          The vibrating needle ship continued its climb. Engines buzzed with anger and gave everything they could to return him to the surface and to an escape.

          The walls of the ship glowed with red fury.

          Come on. Hold on for just a few more minutes!

           Another impact rocked the hull.

          Then another.

          Laie felt the engines surge and cough.

           The next bang tossed him sideways in the cockpit.

           Lights blinked then failed, and he was suddenly surrounded by inky darkness.

           More fierce vibrations as a pungent smell struck him; something burned nearby.

          Then the terrible shaking in the coffin-like black space became worse. He knew his ship was dying as it hurtled towards sanctity above.

          Laie closed his eyes and cowered in the cockpit chair as it violently shook him to his soul. All he could do now was hope for his ship to emerge from the terrible grip of the star. But that sliver of confidence grew.

           Just then, he started to believe in himself.

 

#

 

         They had returned, with vengeance and mass.

          In the vacuum of space, the Bok’zith fleet sat in a motionless hover surrounding half of the star.     Hundreds of sharp-looking, angular and silvery warships of various sizes encircled a portion of the yellow fireball where they had traced their recent prey. A target they had been monitoring for at least fourteen Chak’vai cycles. The largest Bok’zith ship, the command ship, and its harem of support vessels floated directly over the star where they detected the anomaly earlier. Scattered nearby the hulking command ship, muscular-looking attack frigates prowled like hungry wolves maneuvering for a position of advantage to the anomaly’s location.

         The armada parked closer to the star than any human ship dared to go. Each Bok’zith vessel was encased in the valuable Tu-Xenium metal allowing it to proceed to this incredible proximity without incurring ill effects. Impervious to the heat and punishing radiation, the fleet did not fear travelling inside the region where a star’s coronal mass ejection could touch them.

         It started as a flicker on a scope assigned to scan the boiling surface of the star. The temperature anomaly had suddenly reappeared. The small black flicker developed into what looked like a smudged ink spot on the display, and then enlarged, marring the face of the boiling yellow sphere. It changed once again as an object emerged from the cauldron of solar plasma.

         A Bok’zith warrior stood at the console and monitored the computer which scanned the solar edge.      He pressed a button and moved a scaly finger on a touch pad. His display zoomed in on the dark spot. Automatic darkening filters ratcheted down the blinding white on-screen visuals and magnified the area of anomaly on the bubbling star’s surface.

          As the on-screen image resolved, a small, thin object became apparent to the warrior examining the display screen. He moved his head closer to the glass to examine what he saw. The object was slowly moving away from the edge of the solar surface. It was hair thin, but long, and looked like a microscopic cilium, or perhaps that of a painful sliver of metal being extracted from the skin on a finger.

According to his sensors the metal sliver registered at fifteen kilometers long and was comprised of the familiar unique proprietary alloy.

        The computer said it was intact.

        It was their missing needle after all.

         The warrior smiled in its strange toothy Bok’zith way and waved a hand signal at the fleet Captain standing near, motioning him to come over.

          They had their thief now.

 

         Nate S. Jaros is a retired Air Force fighter pilot and non-fiction author of Engine Out Survival

Tactics, and multiple real-life combat flying stories featured in FighterSweep Magazine and Avgeekery Magazine. He is an avid Sci-Fi enthusiast and writer and his debut fictional short story Courier is forthcoming in Cosmic Consequences: a Dark Sci-Fi Anthology due out August 2026. Nate is a pilot engineer in the aviation industry and lives in Fort Worth, TX where he enjoys sampling local whiskeys, and driving his old Jeep… but not in that order.

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       Luke Lester is an artist and writer from Victoria, Canada. He has recently been published in Absolute Underground, Black Petals, Flash Fiction North, Paragraph Planet, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Yellow Mama. More of his art and writing can be found on his blog: The Other Place.