# Fluctuations · The Surge

New Millennial Wayfarer

*Translated by GPT*

Winds rising, clouds gathering.

*DEPART* first detected an abrupt change in the direction of the surrounding magnetic field. Then the fast-moving stream of particles that followed struck it. The solar wind had reached Mercury. For the Sun, this was like the cilia extending from its body beginning to sway as it stirred. For He Rixin, it was a merciless lash. The calm was broken. The present solar minimum seemed about to end, like a bear rousing itself from hibernation. He Rixin was an ant scientist at the mouth of the bear’s den, feeling the snowflakes drifting down.

No—even an ant was too grand a comparison. Mercury was the ant; *DEPART* was only a tiny bacterium on its outer shell. But this bacterium had extraordinary powers of perception, reading far more in the Sun’s changes than the whole of Mercury could. He Rixin was extraordinarily lucky. His brief visit had coincided with that rarest of windows, a moment of solar transition. Humanity at present could only chance upon such an opportunity, never command it. It could observe the Sun, but could not predict it. Perhaps what he gathered here would take human understanding of solar activity a step further.

This was also a test. The faint link between *DEPART* and the Mercury base was now on the verge of breaking. For the moment, he could no longer hear his colleague, much less receive messages from Earth. The person closest to the Sun and the first person to set foot on Mercury had truly become the two most isolated people in the world. That isolation was their physical situation; what it felt like was worse. A tightrope walker high in the air, nothing around him, a single thin safety line attached to his body. The communication link with Earth, delayed by as much as five minutes, was that line. Now a gust had swept past. With a desperate effort the acrobat had regained his balance, only to find that the wind had torn the safety clip free of the wire. He Rixin was worse off still. His wire was coated in oil, and now it was beginning to burn.

*DEPART*’s radiation protection was incomplete. Human space technology had no capacity to spare for a thick suit of metal armor. The ship had been designed to take the solar wind on the chin. Its thermal reservoirs, the bulkiest components and the least susceptible to radiation, were placed on the sunward side just behind the reflective heat shield, acting as sandbags to absorb high-energy particles. The crew cabin and data-gathering equipment faced Mercury and took much less of the impact. But this solar wind was exceptional, stronger even than the strongest the mission had expected to encounter. It could penetrate the reservoirs, and things were beginning to go wrong. The magnetic probes’ signal-acquisition circuits were affected first. Only a few channels could still record the rapidly changing field normally. Most signals were drowned in the solar wind’s furious noise; some channels had been knocked out entirely by the high-energy bombardment.

Over the next few hours, *DEPART* suffered repeated explosive blows from the solar surface. There were connections between the Sun’s magnetic field and Mercury’s, but so many eruptions directed at Mercury in so short a time were still extraordinarily rare. *DEPART* lay directly in the middle of that particle pathway. The observations could not continue. The successive impacts had steadily stripped the probe array of most of its functions. Further magnetic storms might threaten the rest of the ship. The control circuits of two of the fifty-two thermal reservoirs had already lost contact with the main computer. Particle impacts would not stop the phase-change materials from storing heat, but the situation was dangerous all the same. If a reservoir escaped control and switched from storing heat to releasing it, every reservoir nearby might be affected and overloaded, triggering a chain reaction that would turn the entire ship into an oven.

This was far beyond anything the mission had planned for. *DEPART* had encountered a directed magnetic storm of a kind seen once in a thousand years and very likely recorded a turning point in solar activity. But that same event had forced the mission to end early. Communications were down. No one on Earth could know what had happened here or what had been recorded. Unless He Rixin wished to become the casualty of a failed mission, he had to stay alive and get back to the Mercury surface station first. At least he would not burn to death there. And setting foot on solid ground felt much better than floating in the sky.

Fortunately, the DEPART mission had contingency plans. The mission planners could not predict the Sun’s sudden eruption, but they had provided a way to save the crew. The original plan had called for the whole spacecraft to slow down through a series of orbital maneuvers and enter orbit around Mercury. There was no time for that now. He Rixin took all the data into the escape capsule and transferred most of the fuel into it as well. The capsule would then detach from *DEPART*, enter Mercury orbit after two hard braking burns, and land under the surface station’s guidance. *DEPART* itself would also leave Mercury L1, but its trajectory would carry it swiftly past the planet’s dark side. Its thermal reservoirs would not have time to cool sufficiently. After a few orbits, the ship would be a searing wreck.

A sailor struggling to stay alive in a storm needs courage, skill, experience, and knowledge. None of these matters most. He is not fighting the wind, the waves, or the sea. His opponents are of his own order: torn canvas, a slippery deck, taut rigging. Wind, waves, and sea sit in judgment. Nor has the storm deliberately built this arena. The sailor and his opponents have simply appeared in the wrong place at the wrong time and been made to fight. Onlookers may applaud the sailors’ skill and call them heroes who conquered wind and wave. A wise sailor keeps his humility. Survive enough storms, perhaps, and one grows numb to them. Survive the first, and all one feels is the relief of having lived. What matters most to a sailor’s survival in a storm is luck.

He Rixin knew he was safe for the moment. He had finally reached his colleague at the Mercury station, and every system in the escape capsule had miraculously kept working through the violent solar activity. After landing successfully, the two weathered these first shocks of the Sun’s revival under Mercury’s shelter and returned to Earth, shaken but safe.