Lucas sat on the bridge of the
Enterprise
and frowned at the orbital chart. He was reminded, obscurely, of one of the many shitty 20
th
and 21
st
century spec-fic shows that Helen had crammed down his eyes during the long, slow, stately voyage to Arcadia. It felt like a thousand years before, like a lifetime ago. It was a time where magic was relegated to vidscreens, and where cheap effects that could clearly be seen on modern resolutions wobbled around and pranced to even cheaper, synth'd up music.
The episode in question had involved an engineer, trying to stop a moon from crashing into the surface of a planet. A godlike being who had been forced to be human for contrived reasons had, in irritation, exclaimed: "Just change the gravitational constant of the universe!"
The joke, of course, being that while such things were easy for the godlike being, they were quite beyond the crew of the fictional starship. At the time, Lucas had mostly been blind stinking jealous of a ship that could travel faster than the speed of light, create artificial gravity without rotation or acceleration, and seemed to be able to turn on a dime without expending propellant or reaction mass. Hell, he'd been jealous of the fact everyone involved had been able to fit properly into their nearly skintight uniforms without ever needing to be shown working out.
Now, of course...
"The ritual's starting, sir," the communication officer on duty said. Captain DuPont nodded back to him -- and the screen at the front of the room switched from the camera view of the Ceres worksite to the habitat dome that had been thrown over one of the craters. The camera filled with washes of static, while several figures in crudely fitted spacesuits shook staves over their heads and chanted words that Lucas half understood.
Helen grabbed onto the small workstation that Lucas was using, grinning as she levered herself to sit against the wall.
"It's pretty great being Lord Winsom, you know," she whispered to him. "You can't believe how hard those elves
bitched
until I gave them orders to shut up and fucking do it."
The ritual buzzed even more -- and the camera filled with static. When it cleared, the elves were all sagging, but they were sagging in that queer, boneless float of the very tired in microgravity. The whole ship
shuddered
. He could feel it, deep in his bones. A sensation that the ground upon which they were seated had shifted. The bridge was, properly, situated near the core of the
Enterprise
. That meant that it was in the same microgravity as the rest of the surface habitations on Ceres -- and that very minute gravitational pull had kept it pressed firmly against the array of scaffolding that turned the
Enterprise
into one of the hundreds of makeshift thrusters that would be pushing the dwarf planet in the next few hours.
But even with thousands of thrusters, each with theoretically infinite reaction mass in the form of summoned water, Ceres was nine times ten to the twentieth power kilograms. It was nine hundred kilometers wide. It was, in effect, another smaller moon. Humanity could have spun it. Humanity could have shaped it.
But they never, never in their history,
pushed
it.
Until now.
The order couldn't have been given or punched in by human hands. Instead, one of the admirals had given a nod to a tech, and that tech had thumbed down a switch, and that switch had triggered a hastily thrown together bit of programming that set each thruster online at the same moment. The ships were all mature pieces of technology, when it came to their programming and operational structures. This meant that only ten percent didn't fire at the same time, and only two of them had major crashes that required their operating systems to be rebooted and fucked with for a few hours before they came to sputtering, hissing life.
The end result was within the parameters that Lucas and the rest of the logistic officers throughout the fleet, had worked out.
Ceres began to move. In fact, it began to move with worrying rapidity -- with its mass partially negated and with an entire fleet's worth of thrusters, it began to slowly curve in its orbit. Orbital dynamics were sometimes quite complex. In this case, with a surfeit of ΞV and the laws of physics broken over their knees like a cheap tablet, it was very simple. By accelerating, they turned Ceres' orbit into an increasingly elongated parabola -- then by burning again, along a tangent, that parabola would intersect with Earth's orbit within the next month.
The Earth, the Moon, and Ceres would whip past one another like a bullet fired between a pair of dancers -- though Ceres, by that point, would likely be glowing from the amount of nuclear ordinance that would have struck it. Abandoning their shield, the fleets of free humanity would engage in the single largest fast pass attack in the history of solar systems. Without time to decelerate, the fleet would simply drop their nukes, fire their lasers, and throw as many railgun slugs as possible at a safe angle, to strike the undead ships without peppering the Earth's inhabited surface.
And, while zipping past, the marines would be taking advantage of yet another piece of magic.
Magic that Lucas would take part in. He tried to not think about that.
Instead, he watched with trepidation as the orbital charts shifted.
Helen, her hand reaching out, tweaked his ear. "Hey," she said.
Lucas looked over at her.
"You're not going down with the marines," she said, smirking. "That's
my
job."
Fireheart had been rather blunt about it: The elves of the Faelands would,
of course
, be following Lord Winsom into battle, to earn their new stories. The of course, had been given while glaring daggers at Helen. Helen had managed to not snort and roll her eyes. So, there was that. Lucas put his hand over her hand, squeezing gently.
"I saw what being a material focus did to Vidya," he said, quietly.
"Did you know, I heard that she's getting it from Prince Qasim?" Helen asked, grinning. "Like, getting it
hard
."
"Vidya? Banging Qasim" Lucas snorted. "Yeah. Right."
***
