With a few sweeps of his hand, Marty cleared the last of the floating dust out of our temporary new garage. The particle beam went dark again, the blinding afterimage lingering for a moment.
"All done," Marty reported.
"Well, get in there and let's see if this works," I said.
Marty nodded, and the Redemption began to ease forward, maneuvering to enter the hole we just made.
The walls around us seemed uncomfortably close as Marty pushed the nose of our little ship into the hole. I knew that we'd given ourselves plenty of margin. If not plenty, then enough. Still, compared with the infinite emptiness of space, entering a garage carved out of raw nickel-iron just big enough for the ship seemed claustrophobic and frightening.
"Contact in three, two," Marty said and a moment later the view stopped moving as the belly of the ship made contact with the flat surface of the garage underneath us.
"Full contact, all pads. We're good," Marty reported.
The plan from here was simple. We weren't fully in the garage. The ass of Redemption hung halfway out with the front half of the ship touched down on the smooth floor. The gecko pads in contact were all fully engaged, gripping as hard as they could. On the hull of a ship like this, that was very hard indeed. These weren't pads made to hold a weapon in place. These were made for improvised docking just like this. Although to be fair, maybe the designers never thought anyone would do something this crazy.
"Do it; let's see if this works," I said, as close to an order as I needed to give.
Marty nodded and his hands moved to manipulate his invisible controls. The view outside shuddered slightly as the Redemption pulled against the pads' grip. There was a tiny amount of give in them before they stabilized and held their grip on the floor of the garage. Marty was firing the maneuvering thrusters, gradually neutralizing the slow spin of our massive potato. Even with our souped-up maneuvering thrusters it took some time and a lot of extra heat to neutralize the spin of such a massive object, at least compared to the size of the Redemption. As asteroids went, our potato was a tiny one.
"Spin neutralized. Coming to new heading," Marty reported.
Nothing changed in the view. With the majority of our ship encased in meters of nickel-iron, the ship's sensor input was almost nil. Sure, we could see what was behind us, but that wouldn't help. What we were doing was all based on our knowledge of where Mercury was. That was fine. We didn't need to see where we were going, but it was disconcerting.
A few minutes later, Marty disengaged the maneuvering thrusters. "We're on our new heading."
"Why do you keep waiting for me to give the order? You know what to do."
"This is your crazy idea and you're the captain. You've gotta give the order."
"For fu... Fine, fine. Engage."
With a sweeping gesture of his right hand, Marty pushed the Redemption to full throttle. The view shuddered slightly again as the gecko pads struggled to hold and then settled again.
I'd known that they would hold, but there was a difference between intellectually knowing the specs of a component you were betting your life on and cold, hard reality. If the pads had failed we would've slammed into the back of our potato's garage and become an exploding pancake of Union material wrapped around our crushed bodies. Maybe not so dramatic, but it certainly wouldn't have been good and we probably would not have lived. Marty popped up a display and shared it with me in the Interface. It was an overhead display of the solar system with our potato curving in toward Mercury, orbiting the sun. There was a velocity measurement next to the potato, and it slowly ticked up as the full effort of Redemption's drives pushed against the mass of the potato.
"Sure seems we should be using a tractor beam for this, doesn't it?" Marty asked.
"No doubt. Maybe there is one. We just don't have the blueprint for it."
"I should look into it when we get back. It doesn't feel right pushing the potato like this, but I guess it works."
The velocity kept picking up until finally it stabilized as Marty lowered his arm and killed the acceleration.
We weren't moving quickly. Not by Union standards. The potato was at that point a very fast asteroid, but not so fast that it was obviously a weapon. It wasn't likely that the automated defenses were very smart, but the possibility that they would reclassify a meteor moving too quickly as a kinetic weapon was there. We'd decided on fast, but not too fast.
"I'll move us into the garage," Marty said.
With a few gestures Redemption floated free and slowly eased itself fully into the potato's garage. Marty set the ship down again and engaged the gecko pads. Once we hit Mercury, we would disengage and float out the back like a piece of discarded debris, but until then we wanted to be nestled in the protective embrace of our potato.
Our friends had all been watching the same sensor feeds that we had and monitoring our flight.
When there were still a few minutes left, Regar spoke over our common channel. "Good fortune."
"Thanks, Regar," I said.
"Don't be stupid down there, Marty," Metra said.
"I'll be careful. You know how important this is," he replied.
I really wanted to ask Marty about what was going on there, but I didn't dare since I knew our conversation would be shared with the whole group. It really wasn't time for any kind of unnecessary drama.
The diagram of the solar system zoomed in, showing our potato on its final approach. We planned the course and speed of the rock to bring us down on the
