The twelve mountain-class asteroids dropped through the lower corona like the jagged fangs of a collapsing world. The smallest among them was two miles across. The largest, chosen by Kira’s tactical tracking system as Omega-01, was a four-point-two-half-mile monolith of solid nickel-iron, possessing a striking force profile that rivaled the earth-shaking impact of a continent-killing comet.
Swarming across the pitted, blackened surfaces of these iron mountains were dense clusters of bio-clockwork cold-matter thrusters. The Continental Eclipse Sun-Eater had not merely thrown these rocks. It was actively steering them. They fired bursts of total-zero gas to ensure that Omega-01 was locked onto an inescapable crash vector with the Aethelgard’s central keel.
“Arthur!” Kira cried out, her voice rising above the scream of the ship’s attitude verniers. “The gravity bending angle won’t work on Omega-01! Its mass is too large! If Titus tries to curve a four-half-mile iron mountain at sixty miles per second, the crushing force will snap our corvette’s silver-steel keel in half like dry pine!”
“Then we don’t deflect it,” Arthur replied, his boots already moving toward the forward watching hatch. “We break it.”
Through the heavy quartz viewport of the forward companionway, Arthur locked his magnifying glass onto the plunging dark shape of Omega-01. His lenses magnified the asteroid’s crystal-clear structure, scanning the internal fault lines running through the frozen nickel-iron lattice.
