We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

The orbital schematic display laid it all out, and I didn’t like the message.

I looked over at Guppy. No help there. Admiral Ackbar stared back at me, blank fishy expression revealing nothing.

“Can we still save the iceberg?”

[Probability greater than 50%. However, we may not be able to save the asteroid-moving equipment]

I rubbed my forehead, and tried not to swear. “Okay, Guppy. You take care of the course corrections. I’ll set up a script for the drones for retrieval of the drive. Maybe we can cut some corners.”

The iceberg coming up on Ragnarök was one of the biggest we’d found so far in the Kuiper Belt. This particular piece of ice had come in a little off course, and we were going to have to run the asteroid drive at maximum until the very last moment to get it into the proper trajectory. I didn’t want to fumble it and have the berg sail off into the sun. Or worse, impact the planet at speed.

Guppy began applying course corrections, with the changes registering on the schematic in real time. I watched the display absently, while I weighed my options. If necessary, I was prepared to let the drive go down with the iceberg and just build a new one. For a smaller chunk of ice, I’d have just shrugged and let it sail on past the planet, but this baby was huge. I could lose every other incoming chunk for the next six months while I built a new drive, and still come out ahead.

But if I lost the drive, I’d have no control over the pieces following this one. If one came in dead center, I would have to watch it go splat.

We were shepherding chunks of ice from the Kuiper belt, spaced about a week apart. Garfield found them and sent them inwards using his asteroid-moving drive, and I caught them at this end with mine. In another ten years, we would have dropped enough ice on Ragnarök to connect its small seas into actual oceans. My long-term plan was to make the planet fit for humanity to colonize.