Carmen raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“Perfect,” Alexander said. “But let’s not get intimate with strange rocks on the first date.”
“Plotting intercept course,” Vikram said. “Forty-seven minutes at current thrust.”
Annie crossed over to him.
He turned. “What?”
“Dude.” She crossed her arms. “Are you seriously going to steal a moon?”
Alexander blinked. He hadn’t thought of it like that. Then he grinned. “Don’t worry, it’s just a baby moon.” He paused. “And I’m only borrowing it.”
***
Forty-seven minutes later, the moonlet hung in the viewscreen. Almost close enough to touch.
Four hundred meters of battered rock and metal, tumbling on a lazy axis. Pockmarked and scarred, it had been drifting through Jupiter’s orbit long enough to collect a catalogue number but nothing else.
Alexander moved to the front of the bridge. Droney followed, hovering just behind his shoulder.
He raised his right hand, fingers splayed, and reached out with Metallokinesis.
Power pulsed across the space between ship and stone. It hit the surface and bounced back, feeding him information. Iron and nickel threaded through the rock in veins and pockets, but there was less than he’d hoped. That was going to make it harder. There was less metal for his power to affect, and he was going to be straining his limits as it was. Because, while he hadn’t run into the issue yet, he knew there was bound to be some maximum capacity to what he could move.
Theoretically. He hadn’t found it yet, but maybe that was only because he hadn’t tried nudging the mass of an entire city.
He pushed.
Nothing happened.
Four hundred meters of mass at the top of its orbital arc, barely moving relative to Jupiter, and it still didn’t care. The moonlet continued its tumble as if he hadn’t done anything at all.
Which was fair. He hadn’t really been trying. That was just a warm-up. It didn’t count.
Alexander widened his stance and held out both hands. He pushed again, layering oscillating bursts of power in the same way he did to fly. The pulses lengthened, deepened, biting into the veins that laced the rock. He could truly feel it now. The inertia was staggering.
A bead of sweat formed at his temple.
He ramped up further, using his second mental thread. Sustained pressure, applied to every inch of the metal he could reach simultaneously. His jaw clenched. The drain pulled from deep within.
The moonlet’s rotation slowed. A fraction of a degree per hour, perhaps. Barely perceptible, even to him, with Metallokinesis and Hyperawareness focused entirely on it.
“I’ve got it,” he managed. “Sort of.”
“Bearing adjustment,” Vikram called out. “Two degrees starboard, seven below your current vector.”
Alexander shifted the pressure. Steering something that size felt like trying to redirect an avalanche by standing in it.
“Overshot,” Vikram added a minute later. “Half a degree back to port.”
He adjusted each time Vikram corrected him, and over the next several minutes the moonlet’s drift changed, its trajectory bending by fractions that would compound over hours.
“That’s it,” Vikram said. “Hold that line. You’re feeding it out of orbit and into a slingshot. Jupiter does the rest.”
Alexander held. His arms trembled, and his shirt plastered to his back. The drain was worse than boosting the Sleipnir’s engines during the destroyer chase. This was raw mass, fighting him with nothing but physics.
But Vikram was right. He could feel it. Jupiter’s gravity was pulling the moonlet further along the curved path they needed. He wasn’t pushing it the whole way. He wasn’t even really pushing it in truth. He was aiming it. Tipping the balance on an object that was already loosely held.
“Trajectory is locked,” Vikram confirmed. “Seven hours and forty minutes to closest approach.”
Alexander released the Metallokinesis and dropped his arms. His hands were shaking.
Annie appeared beside him with a bottle of water. “You look like shit.”
He wiped sweat from his eyes and took it. “Thanks.”
“I can’t believe you actually pulled that off. Talia said your baby moon weighs millions of tons.”
He finished gulping down the water. Between breaths, he nodded. “It was easy. Barely even felt it.”
Carmen’s voice carried from behind him. “Yuki, match trajectory. Tuck us in behind it. Then shut everything down.”
“Aye, Captain. Going quiet.”
The engines died. The lights dimmed to emergency levels. The bridge fell into a hush broken only by the soft hum of life support and the occasional chirp of passive sensors.
Sleipnir drifted into the moonlet’s shadow and went dark.