TEN THOUSAND MILES out of Triton’s atmosphere, Captain Zachary Crowe was running a final systems check for the jump home when the nav panel lit up – incoming message. Samantha King, navigator of the Shenandoah, stiffened in her seat when she caught sight of the flashing signal.

“Are we available, Zaz?” she asked, biting her lip.

“Not really, but it might be important. Put it on the intercom so Dendy and Carl can listen in.”

She accepted the subspace priority call. The image of a man with a gray crew cut appeared on the grid. Commander Tobias Ellison of the 12th Fleet, Air Assault Marines, sat in a handicap float chair, facing the camera. A long scar cut a trench down the front of his neck.

Zaz eased up from his deck chair and stood out of courtesy, wondering why he was being hailed by such a high-ranking military officer.

“I’ve reached Captain Crowe of the Shenandoah?” said the commander, his speech slightly garbled.

“You have, sir,” Zaz responded.

“You’re not representatives of Blue Peace, I hope. I had a difficult exchange with them last year. It seems they’re adverse to taking risks where lives are concerned.”

“No, sir. We’re Planet Janitor, environmental custodians, though we’ve been contracted by Blue Peace before.”

“We found your location on the KED. You were chosen because we have no other vessels in that sector. One of our deep space observation platforms has picked up an inbound stray of approximately three-point-two million metric tons. Preliminary calculations indicate it’s on direct trajectory with two of our flight corridors. The Houston-International Space Complex and the Lunar to NASA Observation Platform are in a direct line for transit. Probable contact-interception is one hundred percent.”

Zaz frowned. They weren’t looking for another job at the moment, but he didn’t want to sound indifferent or unsympathetic. Still, he had a few nagging questions and concerns. “Why can’t traffic be diverted from those flight corridors until the object has passed?” 

“You ask the organizations that question, who are running passenger, supply, and maintenance flights to those locations. You can’t shut down those corridors indefinitely. Besides, the International Space Authority is likely to throw a fit if they discover we allowed a rogue object to approach so closely to our space infrastructure. This is Space Defense Directorate business. We want this handled.”

Yeah, it’s your business and that’s why you’re calling me. Although his façade began to crack. “How much time are we talking about?”

“A little over two hours standard before it passes your vector point. We dispatched two cruisers and two heavy galleons from our Mars base. They’re on an intercept course in case it gets past you.”

“Half my crew is Earth-side,” said Zaz. “You’ve caught me shorthanded. We’ve just come off a Triton mapping expedition and were expecting to make the jump home. I don’t know if we’re the proper solution to this, or if we have the – ”

“According to our records, you have munitions onboard,” said Ellison, ignoring Zaz’s objections. “A strong enough C-6 charge will deflect the solid body asteroid. We’re talking about at least a two-degree shift in course trajectory – a very simple maneuver. This shouldn’t pose any problems for you. We’re asking for your voluntary enlistment to perform a low hazard task for your government.”

Which meant that this would not be a hire-for-profit mission. The last minor asteroid he’d knocked out of the solar system netted him 50,000 Imperials. However, there was something more to consider than just monetary concerns. The situation tugged at his moral center. There had to be a compromise.

“Twenty-five thousand Imperials,” said Zaz. “Compensation for the cost of fuel, in addition to covering the workload and effort put forth by my crew.”

“I would hate to cite the Humanities Act at this point, Captain Crowe.”

“The Humanities Act also indicates that a crew should not risk bodily harm, under any circumstances.”

Ellison frowned. “I didn’t expect you to barter over this. I agree to the terms. However, I do so reluctantly.”

Zaz gave him a pert nod. “Send us the coordinates and telemetry data patch. We’ll set up an interception.”

“Very well. After a mission-accomplished entry, you can expect a transfer of funds to your account and a written commendation, which will be added to your civilian record.  Apprise us of your progress and any new information you glean from the encounter. We’re sending the data patch now. We’re counting on you. Ellison, commander 12th Fleet, out.”

Zaz let out a gale-force sigh. This would not sit right with the shipboard crew. The remaining crewmembers were Earth-side, waiting at the Long Beach Port facility. They had been expecting the Shenandoah’s immediate return. Both groups had been anticipating some well-deserved time off after having spent the last seven months (off and on) in the solar system. In that time, they had managed to stack up nine missions: four space debris removals, two ore transfers, two satellite retrievals, and one mission of mercy. The Shenandoah, a converted Russian-built ore freighter, was long past due for a scheduled maintenance check; her hydrogen tanks were low – a prolonged burn would sap their fuel supply.

Samantha flipped back a wild lock of bright red hair. She ignored the data input, turning to face Zaz instead. “I can’t believe you agreed to this, Zaz. You heard it yourself – they have a bead on the rock and are fully prepared to take it out. That’s what our orbital Defense Directorate is for – eliminating imminent threats.”

He wasn’t listening. He could only think of the threat an impactor that size would have plowing through traffic lanes, and the destruction it might wreak if it fragmented.

A few minutes later, Dendy, Planet Janitor’s petite botanist, scurried through the bridge hatch and curled her fists on her hips. She gave Samantha an accusing glare, even though she had clearly heard Zaz making the deal over the intercom. “Say it ain’t so, Sammy. I thought we were making the pod jump for terra firma.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m only the nav officer. Better talk to your captain.”

Dendy sidled up to Zaz. She put one hand on his forearm, like she always did when addressing him.

“Aren’t you getting a little tired of riding in on the white stallion every time someone sends out a distress call?” she asked. “It’s not like you can’t afford to be choosy. We’ve more than filled up our quota for this year. Haven’t we earned that vacation?”

He gazed into her light brown eyes, losing his train of thought for a moment. “It’s not a question of what I want or need,” he said. “That commander could have pulled rank on me and enforced the Humanities Act. Besides, you know our mission statement – we’re stewards, sworn to preserve and protect any habitable environment against all threats. That includes defending the sanctity of all humankind in matters of peril or suffering. Sometimes we have to take it on the chin.”

“Take it on the chin?” said Samantha. “Zaz, I’m punch drunk from taking it on the chin.”

Zaz leveled an intense stare at each of them. “You tell me how it would feel, knowing that any station or ship took a direct hit because we, or the Defense Directorate, failed to stop an incoming asteroid. I’m sure you would have no trouble arranging the funerals and replacing destroyed property.”

Dendy closed her eyes briefly. “You would have to put it that way, wouldn’t you? I guess it’s the right thing to do, even if we are pulling the short straw.”

Carl Stromboli, the demolitions expert, stomped through the hatch, puffing hard from his dash to the bridge.

“Out-fucking-rageous,” he said. “Looks like I’ve got a BB to blow. You crunch any numbers on this thing yet? Why is everybody standing around looking like shell-shocked mutes?”

Zaz was the first to move, taking a seat in his accelerator couch. “Sammy, get our gun scope and sensors on this object. See if you can verify dimensions – size, velocity, density and trajectory. I need a rendezvous estimation, but I need some really tight numbers first.”

“Aye.” Samantha swiveled back around and ran her fingers over a keypad, but not without giving Carl an I-can’t-stand-you look. “Just give me a few minutes and I’ll have the profile for you.”

Dendy hurried up to the forward station and took a seat at the console. “I’ll monitor our performance and engine data,” she said, looking to the others for approval. “I don’t want to be a fifth wheel around here.”

Zaz nodded. “PSI and fuel are critical – watch for redlines on the performance gauges.”

Samantha keyed in the scope and sensor data, bringing the information up on the main viewer. “Okay, got her,” she said. “She’s coming in fifteen degrees off our starboard bow. Mass is 3.2553 million tons, with a diameter in excess of eleven hundred feet. That’s awfully light for a nickel/iron body, and spectral analysis confirms it. Density is undetermined at this point. She’s got a perceptible wobble about her linear axis, about twenty revolutions per minute. But she’s coming in very, very hot. Velocity is about twenty kilometers per second, or about forty-five thousand two hundred and ninety miles per hour.”

Zaz didn’t have to be told that such speed would push the limits of the Shenandoah’s engines. Catching up to the beast would be a problem, even if they had a lead.

Carl whistled. “Damn, at that size she’ll need two megapack charges, and we’ll have to use one of the big drones to get in there for a standoff shot.” He rushed toward the exit. “So much to do, so little time!”

The explosives expert was now in his element. Carl lived for igniting combustibles, setting off charges, and imploding structures. He wouldn’t waste any time rushing down to the pyrotechnics lab to pack his charges and rig the detonators.

Zaz fired the retros, bringing the ship around in a stable profile by using the stars as a reference. He cut the drift, bringing the ship to a halt. The huge port and starboard viewing windows gave him an unobstructed view of space so he could confirm what the gun scope and sensors were seeing. He ignored the brightest stars and picked out a small pinprick he suspected was their target rock. Zaz could see the slightest variation in its position after a few minutes, proof that it was moving toward them, nearly head-on.

Samantha swiveled in her chair and faced Zaz. “We don’t have enough fuel for the prolonged burn we’d need to catch it,” she said. “Even with a lead and punching her in the guts, we can’t do it. Remote detonating a bouy is out of the question – not precise enough.”

“This is already starting to look bad,” said Dendy.

“We’ll use gravity assist and slingshot around Triton,” said Zaz. “Calculate the burn for orbit and intercept.”

Samantha slapped her forehead. “I didn’t think of that.”

“That’s why he’s captain, Sammy,” said Dendy, almost swooning over Zaz.

Samantha worked fast. She calculated the telemetry data for an orbital burn around Triton and programmed the data into the computer guidance system, setting up the autopilot for the maneuver. Zaz felt a vibration travel up through the deck. The ship turned. The edge of Triton came into view as the ship accelerated into its gravitational arc. They could see three quarters of the moon, its water, ice and nitrogen make-up obvious; it looked like a blotchy, multi-colored snow cone. There were active geysers on its surface, tiny smudge-like plumes that mushroomed up into the atmosphere.

“How we looking, Sammy?” asked Zaz. “My head’s vibrating. I can’t see the grid lines on the screen.”

“We’re tight in the pipe. Just about ready to end hundred and fifty-two seconds of burn…” She squinted as she read the data. “On my mark…engines off! Approaching thirty-eight thousand and climbing.”

“Gettin’ the whip,” Dendy mused.

The chore would be staying in tight synchronous orbit, while making a steady climb in velocity. The crew took their stations: Dendy readied the gun scope, training the sensors on the object; Carl prepared the bombing drone; Samantha manned the ship’s engine console. Zaz remained in his command chair, his hand poised over the three slide-lever throttles on the armrest.

“Approaching periapsis,” Samantha called out. “Fifteen second auto burn for maximum velocity.”

As the moon’s gravitational pull intensified, the digital velocity readouts on the screen climbed in a dizzying blur. Five minutes later they were traveling at optimum speed, barreling around the far end of moon.

As the Shenandoah snapped out of the gravitational field, they were traveling in excess of 49,000 miles per hour. Whether it was a computer miscalculation or a gravitational anomaly, they’d jumped the gun and come out in front of their target. It meant a breaking burn – more fuel expended.

“Okay, target is one degree off our port stern, seven-point-three thousand miles out, and moving fast,” said Dendy. “Velocity is now forty-five thousand, two hundred and fifty. She’s slowed down a bit – must have shed some mass.”

Zaz watched the graph as he toggled the reverse retros for a tempered burn. He tapped the throttles back gently, incrementally slowing the Shenandoah. The mass behind them closed the distance. Dendy brought up a visual of the object on the screen. Carl swore. Samantha gasped. Dendy remained dead quiet, her attention fixed on the data readouts.

Zaz could not believe what he was seeing. The asteroid looked like a fat dumbbell, flipping end over end. The edges of the thing were hurling dust, ice and larger chunks of debris in a bizarre figure eight pattern around the object. It emitted a blue plasma disruption – and every so often threw off static discharges that looked like miniature lightning strikes. He’d seen contrails on comets before, but nothing that resembled this fireworks display. He couldn’t believe that a stone object with such a radical, unbalanced configuration could maintain its shape without flying apart or disintegrating – unless it had a super dense core and a heavy gravitational field.

“Jesus,” said Samantha. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a flying soup bone. Dendy, I hope you’re recording this.”

“Have been the whole time. It’s one for the books.”

They watched as the object passed torturously slow in front of their port viewing window. At a thousand yards, it still took their collective breaths away: a lopsided tumbling mass of blue plasma on a reckless ride through deep space.

Zaz flicked the throttle one, twice, thrice. He shut the retros off and held his breath. They were now even with the object, running a parallel course. “What we have here, folks, is an asteroid with a sublimation coma. That’s the remnants of a comet on its deathbed, burning off all its gases until it’s nothing more that a solid core. We caught this one in its transition period.”

Carl grimaced. “I don’t care if the fucking thing is a baby buggy with chrome spoke wheels. I’ve got a package to launch filled with enough C-6 to knock that whatever-you-want-to-call-it into the next galaxy.”

Dendy looked up from her console, her face pensive. “I don’t think you want to do that. No, I know we don’t want to do that. It’s crosshatched. I’ve never seen so many surface irregularities – cuts, fissures, mounds. Zaz, we have a rubble pile here! Correction – make that two rubble piles connected by some kind of equatorial mass, possibly an oblong iron core.”

The news could not have been worse. One could not detonate explosive ordinance on or near a rubble pile – a collection of compacted stony meteoroids – without it flying apart. Dangerous shrapnel would be sent in every direction, possibly knocking out defense platforms, satellites, and even commuter spacecraft. 

Carl’s face pinked. “Check your sensors again. There’s no such thing as a bunch of rocks flying around space looking like that.”

Dendy glared at Carl. “That’s not a solid asteroid, Stromboli. It’s a compacted mass of hundreds of objects.”

“We’ll defer to Dendy’s judgment on this,” said Zaz firmly.

Carl reared up from his chair. “Don’t tell me I went through all that for a goddamned hang fire! Now what the hell are we going to do? Shout it out of the system?”

“You’re just pissed because you can’t blow something up,” said Samantha.

“Shut up, the both of you,” said Zaz. “Samantha, get Ellison on line and tell him what we’re up against. We’ve got one maneuver up our sleeve that might work.”

Samantha relayed the message, but like the other two crewmembers, her eyes were drawn to the captain with what looked like terror. No one said anything for a long while, until Carl couldn’t stand it any longer.

“You’re not thinking about ramming that bitch?”

“Nobody said anything about ramming,” said Zaz, knowing the Shenandoah weighed almost two hundred thousand tons and packed the equivalent of a hundred and fifty million horsepower. “I say a good strong shove would do the trick.”

“Zaz,” said Samantha, “the son-of-a-bitch is somersaulting end over end. It’d pound the Shenandoah into a tin can if you got the wrong angle of attack.”

Zaz was on the verge of losing his temper. He knew what he had to do. He had no tolerance for hesitation or paranoia right now – he was committed.

“Zaz knows what the heck he’s doing!” Dendy shouted. “We can come in at the midline – there’s less rotation there. Besides, stop and think about it – we know the structural makeup and behavior of this beast. If we let this thing get past us, the military is bound to do something real stupid, like fragging it into a bunch of dangerous pieces.”

Carl and Samantha exchanged fitful glances, but made no further protests. Zaz set his jaw and lit the retros. He used minute pulses to move the ship laterally, careful to watch the ship’s profile on the viewing screen. It amounted to a delicately choreographed maneuver, sidestepping the ship toward the revolving mass.

As the asteroid loomed closer, its menacing size put the crew on edge. It nearly made Zaz dizzy to look at it through the huge window panel, and it was no easier on the equilibrium watching it on the screen graph.

The 1,200 foot-long bulk of the Shenandoah inched closer to the behemoth. Debris struck the hull, igniting in tiny pyrotechnic sparks. The nav console began to hiss with an electrostatic white noise. Zaz gave the bow retro a squirt, bringing the huge nose of the ship in toward the center mass of the asteroid.

Samantha called off proximity data: “Ten meters and closing…five meters.  Two meters…initiating contact on my mark…now!”

The ship gave a jolt. Zaz fired the outward jets, shoving the ship’s port bow into the rotating mass, trying to stabilize it. A tremendous vibration traveled through the hull. The deck plates rattled. The interior of the bridge filled with a nauseating sound, like a giant bell ringing. Zaz knew the double hull would hold up against the friction. He just prayed that the asteroid would not break into two smaller bodies.

“No course deviation,” Samantha shouted above the noise. “We have full hull integrity, but it won’t last.”

Zaz gave full power to the outboard retros – a twenty second burn.

“Negative deviation,” Samantha cried out. “It’s not enough.”

Of course, it wasn’t enough. The retros were attitude thrusters. He needed a lot more juice to shove this hulking mass off course.  “Brace for main engine start,” he called out, knowing that there was no time for his crew to transfer to the accelerator couches.

He shoved all three engine throttle-levers forward. The ship wobbled and lurched. There was a muffled roar inside the bridge, combined with a terrible wrenching sound. Still, he increased the power to the main engines, listening as Samantha warned that they were exceeding the limits of their hull’s integrity.

“We’ve got a course shift!” Dendy cried. “One-point-seven degrees. Kick her in the guts, Zaz!”

He maxed the throttles, certain he was pushing redline.

The ship cocked dangerously, puncturing through the asteroid’s surface. Part of the rotating mass came around to pound the hull. Necks were snapped back against their headrests. Carl’s harness snapped, nearly pitching him from his seat.

Zaz ignited the onboard retros, simultaneously cutting the main engines. The Shenandoah shuddered with one last violent jolt, ripping away from the spinning mass, awash in a storm of small chunks of ice dust. A sudden calm descended upon the bridge. Everyone was silent, still frozen to their consoles. Zaz noticed his own hand white-knuckled on the controls. He tasted blood on his lip.

Dendy broke the silence: “Two-point-four degree course shift! I repeat: the foreign body is now on an adjusted course change. Sensors indicate that it is intact.”

Carl straightened in his seat, fingering the torn harness. “Promise me you’ll never do anything like that again.”

“No promises,” said Zaz. “Although next time, I’ll give it a few more minutes thought. Sammy, any damage?”

“We didn’t get out of it unscathed. I’m reading an outer hull breach. I’m guessing we’ve got some nasty scratches and dents too – you can throw in a paint job.”

Dendy put her head down on the console. “In case anybody’s morbidly curious,” she muttered, “we don’t have enough braking fuel for the trip home. That last burn sucked our tanks. You can forget about a jump to anywhere – that’s out of the question too.”

Zaz slumped in his seat. He knew from the start such a possibility existed. It was an equitable trade; they were adrift at the edge of the solar system with no gas station in sight, in exchange for the privilege of having freed up two important flight corridors. At least, that’s the way he looked at it. Only a barbarian would have shunned such a heroic deed. Then again, there was Carl Stromboli.

“Ain’t that just peachy great!” said Carl. “We’re stranded out here like chumps in a broken down ship.”

Zaz sighed. “Sammy, hail Commander Ellison and tell him that the objective has been met. Then give him the object’s new trajectory–they need to divert all sub-space cross traffic. Tell him to expedite a fuel barge to our location ASAP.”

“Aye, I’ll call it in as a code yellow, vessel assist.”

Dendy unbuckled her seat harness. “Well, tag us late for home, guys. Anybody up for a game of spider-checkers?”