A Rock of Offense, Page 3

shielded by the lump. I imagined that the smooth places surrounding it were very hot right now, though since it was made of metal the asteroid would conduct the heat away quickly. Over a billion tons of cold iron was an excellent heat sink.

  I touched the com button again, barely daring to hope that I had been successful.

  “Cecil, I’m coming back home.”

  “Yes sir,” came the response. Cecil sounded flat and emotionless, and it was impossible to read the results of my efforts from the sound of his voice. The headlamps lit the way across the lifeless metal to my home.

  After the long walk back it was good to see the dome’s top appear over the horizon. For the last hour, I had been concerned that the suit had stopped working, but it must have been at least partially okay, because I lived. Still, I felt I was driving around on empty, waiting for the inevitable moment when the air wasn’t carrying oxygen anymore. I was close enough now to finish the rest of the way even if the suit did stop working. As I approached the dome, I immediately noticed things looked different.

  The force of the explosion had bent one of the legs, not surprisingly the one I had cut the strut from, up from the ground and buckled the top of the dome. I was lucky the entire thing hadn’t sheared off. Cutting that strut was necessary, but I regretted it. There was no telling what damage I would find inside the cabin.

  A minute later, I was back at my orientation screen looking at the moon and our trajectory. It seemed I’d been successful, or at least mostly successful. I had ruined my spacesuit, but I’d gotten the asteroid rotating around an axis perpendicular to our course. The speed of the spin was much slower than Earth’s, but because of our smaller size, the stars moved faster. You could actually see them moving, but not fast enough to make you dizzy. I was happy with the result.

  “Pretty good so far, eh Cecil?” I asked, as I got a pack of peanut butter crackers from the pantry. I was famished.

  “Yes sir,” Cecil responded, his voice still sounding flatter than usual. “We are still Dialunar though.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think that would fix everything.” I dropped the wrapper from my snack down the incinerator. “Actually, I can’t really do what I’d planned to. I meant to cut that strut off the exit hole. But we’ll have to hope it doesn’t change things too much. We still have two bombs left to try and shift this rock, right?”

  “You’re going to release the bombs?”

  I was looking at Cecil’s speaker, speaking directly to it the way I did when I forgot he wasn’t a person. “That’s the plan,” I said. “I’m going to fire one off to the side and hope that works. I think I can change our course a few degrees.”

  “I see. Then the range of correction we need is from two to three point two degrees, if we act within the next two days.”

  “I’m going to try now. The longer I wait, the bigger the deflection needed, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then now’s the time.”

  I was waiting with my hand on a button. A very important button, the manual bomb eject. There was a lag time between pushing the button and the explosion of about twenty-three seconds, time for the bomb to rumble up from the guts of the asteroid to the surface. I was looking at my orientation screen, displaying a graphic representation of this asteroid, spinning in space. I was calculating when to press the button so that the bomb would explode to the side.

  “I can do that for you,” piped up Cecil. “Much more accurately.”

  “Thanks Cecil, but I’m not leaving the fate of mankind in the hands of a machine. When we die, or if we live, it won’t be on autopilot. It’ll be a man at the helm.”

  “Yes sir,” said Cecil, sounding somewhat hurt.

  “Nothing personal Cecil. It’s just that you got us into this mess. You made a mistake.”

  “There wasn’t a mistake,” protested Cecil. “I said there was a variable missing.”

  “Missing a variable is a mistake, Cecil.” If he said another word, I was going to shut him off. He kept breaking my concentration.

  Cecil was silent though. Maybe moping? I guess I could have been nicer. But whatever.

  I was watching the rotation, swaying forward each time we passed the appropriate place. Everything was riding on me hitting the button at just the right moment. Finally, I pushed it.

  “You were slightly early,” said Cecil.

  “Shut up,” I said. “Let’s see what happens.”

  Then I waited, listening. Up here in my dome, I was too far away to feel the vibrations of the bomb moving through the tube. I was hoping to hear something rattle or vibrate.

  But there was a lurching sideways heave, catching me by surprise. I had forgotten that the push would be sideways, and I stumbled against the wall. There was a high-pitched metallic scraping noise, and one side of the room lifted like Dorothy’s house in the Wizard of Oz.

  Then just like that, the mayhem stopped. I staggered to my feed and went right over to the status orientation screen to pull up our trajectory and orientation.

  We were still hitting the moon, but our course had shifted to a glancing blow. Also, we were now spinning like a top. A loud bang as if someone hit the side of the metal dome with a hammer shook the room one last time, and then the lights went completely out, all noise stopped, and I was in the deepest darkness I had ever experienced.

  I was blind, groping in the darkness. Cecil was down. If the electronics in the dome were totally gone then the problem had to be a cable. The room was dark, and stars were streaming past the window.

  I hoped I was lucky, because many things still had to go right for me. I couldn’t fire another missile with no power, and even if I could, it was anyone’s guess where the bomb would explode. The wrong place and the bomb might push us back toward the moon again. I needed Cecil to calculate the release. For Cecil, I needed power. For power, I had to go outside again, locate the problem, and fix it.

  That meant using the backup suit, a rig never really meant for use. I wouldn’t have the luxury of replenished air. I could take bottles, and that’s all. A half-hour per bottle, and I had two. So, one hour total. One hour of life, one hour for a chance to save everyone on earth. If I failed, I died, and if I died, so did they. No stress.

  Hopefully, I would go outside and find a connector had separated. If the cable had broken, ripped apart in the middle, I would be done. I didn’t have the materials to splice a cable that thick. I went out the airlock, took a few steps away from the dome, and turned to survey the damage.

  My dome was a mess. What had been a lifted leg after the previous explosion had become a fold. The remnants of the leg pointed straight up, above the top of the dome itself. The other three legs had held, so almost half of the dome remained on the ground. There were two legs on either side of the bend, and from the nearer dangled the yellow end of my parted cable. I saw a connection on the end. Fixable. That was the good news.

  I walked over to examine the connector. The plug had jerked violently out of place and in the process, one of the many pins that made up the connector had bent so far that it broke when I tried to straighten it. Whatever that wire went to was not going to work. I was crossing my fingers that the pin wasn’t the bomb tube, the orientation screen, or the main computer processor. Lights I could live without, other things might kill me, but at least I could finish the job. I found the other end of the cable and pulled the two together. They mated easily with the broken pin removed. The lights came on in the dome.

  The dome was no longer airtight. There was a slow, steady loss of pressure, but I didn’t need to keep the suit on yet. If I intended to live, I would have to find and seal the leak. But for now, there were more pressing issues.

  The orientation screen and processor worked, so I set the computer to do a self-diagnostic. Everything worked except Cecil. The broken pin on the coupling only affected him. Overall, it wasn’t the best possible scenario, but since I had to fire one more bomb, at least not having Cecil wouldn’t stop me. The ast
eroid’s rotation was so fast though I wasn’t sure I could time the launch successfully without him.

  I went over to the console and manually set the bomb to active. The only thing left now was to push the button launching several megatons of power skyward. After what the last bomb did, I imagined this bomb would probably shake the dome free and kill me. At least now, I wouldn’t have to fix that leak.

  I rocked back and forth, getting a feel for the asteroid’s rotation on the orientation screen. The spin was completely different from before, the rotation so much faster. I couldn’t get into the rhythm. This was my last bomb, and I knew I had to get it right. And I couldn’t. I needed Cecil.

  Then I had a brainwave. I could take all of Cecil’s programming, and re-load him into another, working part of the computer. In fact, there was a backup! Of course! Cecil was contained on two computers, always communicating with each other, one active, and one passive. The passive should contain a mirror of all the programming that was Cecil. He could be revived!

  I went to the monitor and brought up the file system. I found the area containing Cecil’s twin, and started looking though the code, to find his last backup.

  I poured through the files, caught up in program and looking at dates, figuring out how to restore him, and then his thought processes began to get my attention. I never realized before, but I could