The asteroid came in slow.

  Well, not slow—nothing in space was truly slow—but it felt that way. The ballistics team had been watching it approach for hours, the massive chunk of rock looming larger and larger on the station’s monitors. A dark, irregular shape against the infinite black, streaked with drill lines and scarred from the carving process. It had been dragged through the void for years—decades, maybe—tugged in from one of the nearby belts by haulers none of them had ever seen.

  And now it was here.

  Judas stood at the observation window above the mass driver, watching the asteroid slide into position. It felt less like work, more like a ritual—something sacred in its precision, in its inevitability. The mass driver stretched out beneath him like a colossal barrel, the kilometer-long tube yawning wide to receive the payload.

  The asteroid was massive—800 meters long, maybe 250 at its thickest—but even that was small by natural standards. Still, here, in the sterile cradle of Caliban Station, it felt monstrous. Like loading a city-sized bullet into a cosmic revolver.

  Its surface was pockmarked with embedded ferromagnets, jagged nodes studding the rock like hardened tumors. They gleamed faintly under the external floodlights, catching the glow as the asteroid slowly, methodically, slid into the driver’s open end.

  Judas clenched his jaw, arms crossed tight. No one spoke. The whole ballistics team was there—Dara, Ibrahim, Tariq—all silent, watching.

  The asteroid’s bulk hovered just above the magnetic rails, held aloft by electromagnetic fields so strong they could rip a human apart without breaking a sweat. It drifted forward, centimeter by centimeter, until—

  Thunk.

  The final clamps engaged, securing the asteroid in place. The mass driver’s internal coils hummed to life, test-firing in a low, steady thrum, sending faint ripples of energy through the station’s frame.

  Judas exhaled slowly. “Locked and loaded.”

  No one responded.

  The asteroid was now fully seated—ready to be accelerated to nearly five kilometers per second, fired like a slug straight into Pluto’s crust. The impact would be cataclysmic. Enough to punch through the surface, crack the ice, and expose valuable materials hidden beneath. That was the idea. The same process they’d done dozens of times before.

  But not this time. This time, it was the bullet in the chamber. This time, the electromagnetic flux in one of the coils would ever-so-slightly push that asteroid to the side, and it would, ever-so-barely, clip the edge of the mass driver at the very end of its launch, just tap it with the asteroid's butt. That tap, at that speed, with that mass, would rip Caliban into many small pieces, killing every non-robotic person aboard. And it wasn't looking good for the robots, either.

  “Forty-eight hours to launch,” Samson’s voice came through the intercom, dispassionate as ever.

  Judas barely nodded. “Copy.”

  He didn’t move for a long moment—just kept staring at the asteroid, its massive bulk dwarfing everything around it. It was a threat now. A loaded weapon. In two days, it would either save them or destroy them.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Probably both.

  24 hours.

  Judas was back at the same window. The asteroid hadn’t moved—not that it would—but now the energy in the room was different. There was a static tension in the air, a sense of the countdown ticking louder with every breath.

  The team moved around him, running final checks, verifying the coil alignment, testing the power surges. All routine. All normal. Except nothing about this was normal.

  The asteroid loomed below, silent, waiting.

  12 hours.

  The message had gone out. Quiet whispers. Carefully timed bathroom meetings. It was happening.

  The launch countdown was automatic—locked in now. The NSS Buddies hadn’t noticed, or maybe they had and simply didn’t care. Either way, it didn’t matter. They were out of time.

  Judas stood in the middle of the ballistics bay, pulse pounding. The asteroid was still there—silent, ready.

  “Okay, people,” he said, voice steady despite the storm in his chest. “It’s showtime.”

  The scramble began.

  Everyone moved at once—flooding out of the ballistics bay, splitting into groups. The plan had been in place for weeks now, whispered and honed in dark corners. Every person knew their role. Some were headed to the living quarters, to rally as many crew as possible. Others to the cargo bays, to make sure the NSS Buddies couldn’t just leave.

  Judas had only one destination: the thruster controls.

  He floated down the corridor, propelling himself with the handholds, dragging himself through microgravity. Every turn felt like a risk—what if an NSS Buddy was there? But the halls were strangely empty. Silent. It was almost worse.

  The thruster control hub was deep in the engineering section—half-forgotten, barely maintained. No one had needed to use it in decades. The station’s rotation and minor course corrections had long been handled remotely, automated through the Buddy network. That would all change today.

  Judas slammed into the door panel, fingers flying over the manual override. The lock disengaged with a heavy clunk, and the door hissed open, revealing a cavernous chamber lined with dusty control panels and flickering status monitors.

  It was disused—not rusted (there was no oxygen to corrode anything here), but worn in that distinct spacer way. Panels half-lit. Wiring bundled in corners, untouched for years. A thin layer of dust coated the manual thruster levers—actual physical controls, relics from the last time that adjustments needed to be made.

  Judas moved to the console, fingers tracing the layout. It was familiar, in a way—he’d studied these schematics for the past month, memorized every lever, every dial. But now, standing here, it felt unreal.

  Samson’s voice buzzed softly from the tablet embedded in his jacket. “You’re in?”

  “Yeah,” Judas said, breathless.

  “You remember your... anonymous math problems? Your sequence?” Samson said, unable to resist teasing him even now. He still hadn't been let in on the loop of what, exactly, was going on. He had deliberately avoided thinking about it. Judas was thinking about the rotation of naturally shaped asteroids in space. Solving some... tugboat problems, the sort of things engineers at the Lagranges think about when they trim the asteroids and strap thrusters on them to rotate them around.

  For weeks, he had been lie-thinking to himself. It wasn't a difficult thing to do for a Buddy, but to do so for so long took Herculean effort. He kept orbiting the truth like a moon swirling around a tidally locked planet. Whatever it was that Judas was doing, he didn't need to think about it too hard.

  He trusted him.

  “I wrote the sequence,” Judas snapped, more out of nerves than frustration.

  A beat of silence. Then: “Judas,”

  Judas didn’t respond. His hands hovered over the controls, shaking.

  “I assume that there is a high likelihood we will all die soon. If we do, I just want to say that it's been an honor being your Buddy,” Samson said.

  Matter-of-factly, trying not to shed a tear, Judas replied; “Samson, I needed those calculations so that I can point this station at Sycorax. I can't do the necessary updates in real time if something goes wrong. I need you to help me with the math.”

  And Samson said, just as matter-of-fact; “Of course, Judas. Let's get started?”

  The asteroid sat loaded in the chamber. The countdown ticked closer.

  And now, all that was left was to aim.