"They'd only shoot them down if they were going to threaten the facility. Anything else they'd let hit the planet. It would be an enormous waste of resources to target every little rock that comes in to die on that planet." Regar said.
"That's it then. There's our way in. We just have to convince the sensor platforms that we are a meteorite. They'll let us through, and bam, we're down on the planet."
Everyone started talking at once, but since Marty was right beside me I heard him first. "Your plan is to splatter us on the planet, Jake?"
"Hold on, hold on, everyone," I said, and everyone stopped speaking. "No, not splatter us on the planet. Maybe just get us really close to the planet and then—I don't know, fly into a cave or valley or something. Get us out of line of sight of the satellites. They can't have full coverage of every bit of that planet. Once we're down we make our way to the base over land. Are the satellites going to shoot at us on the surface, Regar?"
"It's a clever plan, Jake. No, the defense satellites will not shoot at you if you make it to the surface. They assume that if you're there, you're meant to be there. If you weren't, the network would have destroyed you before you landed. Therefore, it's impossible that you could be unauthorized. It's one of the weaknesses of automated systems. They won't connect your ship with the meteorite that just fell. The planet-based defenses will still not allow you to approach. That is another layer."
"That's a different problem. Let's execute this plan. I know just how to do it."
Chapter Thirty-Six: Riding the Potato
IT TOOK ANOTHER SIX hours to find the rock we needed. With Redemption's engines, the solar system seemed almost small. It wasn't, even with Union propulsion tech, but compared to the primitive rocketry of Earth's humans we were flying around like a bolt of lightning. Luckily the asteroid wasn't that far away, drifting in an irregular orbit around the sun between Mercury and Venus.
The rock in question was floating just outside the Redemption. We were close enough to it that I could see every little dimple on its pocked, nickel-iron surface.
It was shaped like a long potato. Approximately one hundred meters long and forty at the thickest, it'd been out here a long time. We had thoroughly scanned it, and it was quite unremarkable. Just a big lump of near-useless metals. It was rotating slowly in front of us, and Marty was concentrating intently on matching the spin and rotation. We were looking at one of the small ends of the potato and as I watched it seemed to come to a stop in the viewport in front of us. We were now orbiting it and stationary relative to it, spinning slowly together in the ancient dance of gravity.
"Job's done," Marty said with a funny accent.
"Nice work. Let's mark the hole and start cutting."
Through the transparent hull of the Redemption in front of us, the outlines of a cuboid hole in the asteroid appeared. It was a mailslot of a hole, just wide and tall enough to fit the Redemption. We would slot ourselves in after we got the asteroid on course and hide inside until just before impact.
The other plan that had been proposed had been disguising ourselves as a comet, but there had been some concern that ice would not sufficiently block our sensor signature and the platforms would just vaporize us. With tens of meters of nickel-iron shielding us, the plan felt a lot safer.
"Alright, this is going to take a while," Marty said.
The blinding beam of the front-mounted particle weapon speared out and cut into the side of our asteroid. Nickel-iron vaporized, the energy of its dissolution pushing it out into the vacuum. Smaller pieces crumbled and flew out as well. It wasn't the clean disintegration I'd been hoping for, but it would do the job. The slight thrust induced by the particles jetting out of the hole we were digging would affect the spin and orbit of the rock slightly, but Marty was on top of it and adjusted our station-keeping effortlessly. The man really was a gifted pilot. I had nothing to do but watch as he sculpted the hole, the particle beam his chisel.
Like its little brother the Gazer, the particle beam was energy hungry. Even so, with the entire power output of the Redemption feeding the beam it could fire essentially forever. Union tech was never inefficient, so it didn't generate waste heat either.
The hole Marty was digging was going to be our shelter, but it was also going to be our handle on the potato. Redemption wasn't really built for this. If we wanted to wrangle asteroids and move them around there were things that we could build and add to the hull. We simply didn't have time or the means at the moment.
Like Metra's plan to survey the asteroid belt, I wanted to avoid anything that took too much time. The sooner we stabilized the Connahr field, the better. My fighting in the Refinery complex against the Vassago troops had started a clock ticking in my head. If one of the Elder AIs had regained its sanity and was producing soldiers again then it might just be a matter of time before they all were. Even if the rest of them never recovered, one of them was a big enough threat.
With that threat in mind we were going to violently execute our good plan, instead of waiting for the perfect plan we might have next week. This plan had a pretty half-assed air about it, but it was quick and I was pretty sure it would work.
Marty was about fifty percent done. The Interface showed me his progress. It wouldn't be the neat, perfectly cuboid hole that we had planned, but as long as it was big enough it
