Pyrite, Part 6

Sinead immediately tried to bring up direct communications to Earth, but there was nothing. Not a single delayed word. Then Luna. Nothing. But this was only the most obvious problem.

King went to check on the power station. If they were stranded, they might be here a while. A few minutes later, she came back. "You need to see this," she said to Sinead. "That bastard."

"You keep saying that word, Sherry. I do not think it means what you think it means," Sinead said.

"Oh, I know what it means," and she brought up the screen she had been looking at on Sinead's tablet. A diagram of the reactor appeared and the critical readings were crowded together, but even a fool could see the problem. Another window was half-hidden underneath the diagrams and it displayed the a definition of "bastard."

"How long until it blows?"

+++

"The numbers aren't moving in a predictable pattern. No more than an hour, but it could be 10 minutes for all we know."

"What will happen?"

"Well, the explosion will not kill us, which is fortunate. But what it will do is send us in the opposite direction of the explosion. In this case, because the process that put this asteroid in place mirrored the poles with the Earth so we could stay in constant contact, we'll end up in the approximate vicinity of Polaris in several thousand years."

Sinead thought about it. "Starting from this population, I would not want to deal with the inbreeding situation that far down the road."

"At least we'll have interstellar radiation mutating our descendants in new and interesting ways."

Sinead just half stood/floated there and thought. Then she said, "Seriously, though, can The Leech handle that?"

"The explosion is far enough away. We're still six klicks from the other end of this thing, and all the rock that remains is directly between us and it. I wouldn't want to do it on purpose, but we'll probably be fine. We wouldn't get into interstellar space, of course. What it'd do is it'd just kick us out of the Legrange point and we'd crash into Earth. We'd never even have a chance to get out of that gravity well."

"Great," Stanley said as he came in, "another trip on a rocket, right?"

"Close. Just a rocket with one solid push. Do you think Evans knew? About crashing a giant asteroid into the Earth?"

"Perhaps. Probably not," King said. "As much as I'd like to think him terribly evil right now, he probably didn't think it through. Who wants to land a giant rock on their home planet which could kill millions?"

Pause.

"Billions," King said. "Forget I asked."

Sinead asked, "How long to coordinate the trajectory for a safe landing of the cargo?"

"Not long under normal circumstances, perhaps a half-hour on the outside for all five," Sherry said. The programs went through various paths to determine the most economic path for the rocks for the given desired landing site. Weather on Earth was even accounted for. Normally, some of this processing was off-loaded to supercomputer clouds on the surface, but it would all have to be done here.

Sinead looked at the log files for the communications. There it was. In the middle of the last transmission from Evans was a new program update for their fusion reactor and the communications. Damn pushed updates. It'd take days to hunt down either problem and undo the damage if it was something stupidly simple. Sinead was sure that it wasn't stupid or simple. Evans wasn't a physicist, but he used to be a programmer of notoriety and skill.

"Well, let's get that started. At least the bastard won't get rich before the world ends."

Sherry smiled and then stopped. Her face slackened and her eyes looked out at nothing. Sinead stared and wondered what was wrong. Then Sherry brightened and said, "What if we crash one into us?"