"Yeah, that sounds right," I said.
"I'm going to pass you a bit of software I wrote. Select the target on Pluto and the rock you want to throw, and once you've selected all your targets, the software will generate a set of courses and velocities to put each rock on at any given time. If you're a little slow executing, it will even adapt the schedule, up to a certain point. You will only have so much leeway, depending on the mass of the rock. You're welcome."
Metra had reminded me once again how woefully unprepared I was for captaining the Redemption. My understanding of orbital mechanics was vestigial, at best. Maybe that was fine, maybe a Captain didn't need to understand orbital mechanics as long as he had people like Metra that did. The captain just needed to give the right orders. That's what I was telling myself, anyway.
"That's amazing. Thanks, Metra. Once again, we couldn't have done this without you," I said.
"I know. Get it done and get back here. We've got work to do."
The three of us spent the next forty-five minutes gathered around Marty's interface, pointing at targets on the virtual globe that the Interface projected of Pluto. It showed all of the capillaries and intersections where we assumed Spikes would be. The very first thing we did was target every Spike with one of the bigger rocks. The largest capillary intersection we hit with two. Then we proceeded to target rocks all along the capillaries, blanketing the planet in kinetic strikes.
Blue lines in Metra's sophisticated UI described with terse notation just how much and on what vector each rock needed to be accelerated. Everything was frozen until we started accelerating the first rock. Once we did, the numbers would update in real time. If we were too slow, our acceleration numbers would have to get higher. If we kept screwing up, the rocks would no longer all arrive at the same time. If we really screwed up, we might even lose some of our targets.
While we were adding targets, the program kept updating everything as the cluster and Pluto moved slowly along their orbital tracks. It was a masterful piece of software. As a former software engineer, I tipped my hat to her. Building something like this would have taken me months, not even including all the time spent learning how orbital mechanics worked.
Finally, we were done.
"I'd say that's got it," I said.
"Give the order," Marty said.
The first couple times Marty had done this, it felt strange. Now, it felt natural. Well, if not natural, then less strange. I guess it would really be natural when I gave the order without waiting for him to prompt me.
"Do it," I said.
Marty frowned, but his hands flew across the controls as he began to accelerate toward the first of our rocks.
"Not very Captain-like," he muttered under his breath. I laughed.
The tractor beam worked flawlessly. We sidled up to the first rock, wrapped it in a field of null gravity, and began to accelerate it along the vector that the software provided. When the planned acceleration was done, we disengaged the tractor beam and moved to the second rock, and so on.
Several hours passed as we accelerated all 66 rocks toward their final destinations on Pluto. None of them was going fast compared to what the Redemption could do, but 2% of lightspeed was still plenty fast. Metra's software used the ship's sensors to track each individual asteroid in the cloud as it moved on its course toward Pluto. We followed a light second or so behind, not wanting to arrive before our presents.
The light show some hours later was impressive. I wonder if the Ferals looked up at the sky just before they died like the dinosaurs did. There was no atmosphere on Pluto, so maybe they had no warning whatsoever. Maybe they were doing whatever it is Ferals did when our kinetic weapons dropped and turned them into vapor. It was just over for them with no warning.
A wave of bright flashes swept across the surface of Pluto, looking like old-time pictures of carpet bombing in World War II, except the force of these explosions was measured in megatons. Tens and hundreds of them.
Even the smallest rock was at least equivalent to a multi-megaton warhead as it plowed into the surface of Pluto. I'd been a little worried, actually, that we were going to shatter the planet and turn Pluto into another asteroid belt. I'd been assured by Brick and Metra that was unlikely. Sure, it was going to take a hell of a pounding, but it would take more than that to break it.
I really wondered what had happened to the fifth planet, the one that was now the asteroid belt. If Pluto could take this much firepower and not shatter, what had done in number five?
Atomic fire swept the surface of Pluto, burning the Ferals off the surface. Not entirely—we hadn't dropped enough rocks. That was a deliberate decision. I didn't want to completely cleanse Pluto with kinetic weapons. We needed the Nanite Clusters and if we could scale back the threat it might even be good as a Cluster farm. If we were going to arm Earth we needed every Nanite Cluster we could get. Just bootstrapping Earth's economy to Union standard would take everything we could provide.
Our incoming rocks had made large holes in the haze of Ferals surrounding Pluto, but compared to the number of Ferals still in orbit, it wasn't even a noticeable number.
Brick spoke up. "Well done. I must point out that the flashes will be fully visible on Earth. Concealing our presence from now on may become more difficult. Earth governments will now be fully aware of an alien presence in the system."
"Let's worry about that later. We were
