I thought about that. Pluto had been left alone outside of the Connahr field for quite some time. The images I'd seen from my grandfather's sensor array in Earth orbit hadn't been good. They had looked a lot like Hephaseta 2. Silver capillaries running in all directions. I knew that at the intersection of those capillaries, Spikes would have formed.
"Wait a minute, we can check. Brick, can you get us a feed from Grandpa's orbital sensor array and show us what Pluto looks like right now?" I asked.
"Yes, sending you the feed," Brick replied.
An image popped up. It was Pluto although the fidelity was not great. We could make out that the capillaries were roughly the same as the last time we'd seen them—maybe a little thicker. What was different was the haze around the planet. Like the image was blurred.
"What's that haze, Brick?" Marty asked.
"Unknown. It appears to be objects in orbit. Small ones."
"That will be Ferals," Regar said.
"Crap, so Pluto orbit is full of Ferals. This is sounding more and more like a suicide run, Jake."
I had to admit, it did worry me. If the Ferals were so thick they were forming a haze around a planet, that was nothing but bad news.
"Have courage, Seekers," Regar said. "The Ferals launched into orbit are not optimized for efficient space travel. They are meant to move slowly through the solar system and fall into whatever gravity wells they encounter to spread the infection. They will have no chance against a warship like this. It may take some time, but you will be able to clear the infection from orbit. Only a small percentage of them will be able to give us any fight at all."
Hours passed, time moving slowly in the tiny cabin. For a while Marty and I tried to get Regar to tell us about life in the Union before the current crisis. It turned out Regar was a terrible storyteller. His stories were more like after-action reports, without description or detail. After fruitlessly pressing him, we finally gave up. He seemed as frustrated by the experience as we were.
"It's just not fair, you know? We finally get to join galactic society and it’s gone to shit. I was looking forward to visiting an alien world, seeing the sights, meeting the strange women. You know, tourism."
I had to agree with Marty. It was disappointing.
"Don't dismiss the Union quite so quickly," Regar said. "If all of the Elder AIs together couldn't wipe us out, this resurgence won't do it either. Somewhere out there the Union is fighting. Wager on it, Seekers."
He had a good point. The Union was essentially a post-apocalyptic society. That apocalypse had happened a long time ago, but they were survivors. We just had to get out there and find them.
Our course took us near enough to Saturn to see it, although not with the naked eye. Redemption's sensors magnified the image—making it seem like we were right next to it. It was truly magnificent, passing by on the right-hand side of the ship.
"I was going to plot a course that would let us skim the rings, but it was way out of our way. It would have added a couple hours to the trip, and it didn't seem worth it," Marty said.
"That would be cool; let's do that on the way back," I replied.
Regar looked at us like we were speaking nonsense, but didn't comment.
Chapter Forty-Four: Throwing Rocks
MORE TIME PASSED BY unremarked, leaving Saturn as a blur behind us.
"Let's start looking for rocks we can throw. I don't know how far we're going to have to go to find them, but hopefully we don't have to run all over the system," I said.
"We passed the asteroid belt hours ago. There were plenty of rocks there we could've grabbed. It's pretty far back now though," Marty said.
We hadn't even seen a rock flying through the asteroid belt. They were there, but so far apart that we might as well have been flying through empty space.
"Yeah, that's too far. We've just got the one tractor beam. Let's try to find closer asteroids."
"Jake, since you mentioned this plan earlier I have been using the observation array and historical data in the northern outpost to pinpoint candidate asteroids for you. I have several clusters. I will transfer the data now," Brick supplied.
"Brick comes through for us again! Way to go, Brick," Marty said, bringing up the data for us all to look at.
The clusters appeared ahead of us, floating in the black space visible through the front viewport. Each one was numbered and showed the distance to the center of the cluster, the number of rocks, and their average size.
Brick had labeled five clusters, the biggest having a staggering one hundred twenty rocks spread over several light seconds. The smallest asteroid in the cluster was smaller than a pebble, almost invisible at the range Brick was operating at. The largest was the size of a small Caribbean island—probably too big for us to move. Most of the rocks in the cluster were in the sweet spot—just big enough that they'd make a big bang, and small enough that we could accelerate them to a decent percentage of lightspeed.
"That's the winner right there," I said, pointing to the big cluster. "Plenty of ammunition."
"Aye-aye, Captain," Marty said.
"Aye what?" Regar asked.
"Just an old-fashioned way to say order acknowledged. We'll have to get you up to speed on pirate movies at some point, Regar."
"Pirate movies?" he asked, looking mystified.
"Regar's education can wait, boys. I've got a gift for you," Metra said, her voice interrupting the conversation.
"Now, I know neither of you are math geniuses. You can't just accelerate those rocks in the general direction of Pluto and have them do what you want. I'm guessing you want all of them to arrive at roughly the same time, and to hit as many different targets as possible; am I right?" Metra asked.
I felt
