Chapter No.28. Real crisis.

We had gathered at the command station to hear what Janet had discovered.

"We have a much bigger problem," she said, sounding dire.

"Now what?"

"I've been tracking near Earth objects in an attempt to find a candidate gravity tractor for Earth. I've found one, but it's headed for a collision with Earth."

"How soon?"

"My calculations indicate two months."

I sighed. "Shit! That doesn't give us much time to alter its course."

"It might be too late."

I ran a hand through my hair. "Let's get into the G-chairs."

After we strapped in, I ordered COMA to get us to the asteroid in the quickest possible time. That involved two burns, one to get us out of Earth orbit and the other to put us on course to the asteroid, which was moving at twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour relative to the Earth.

We arrived at the asteroid after six hours, and we had to sustain another burn to match our velocity and course to the asteroid.

"That's a big rock," I said after looking at in the main screen."

"It's about a thousand meters wide," Sharon said. "Scans indicate that it's mostly an iron and nickel core with a rocky crust."

"How are we going to move it?" Natale asked.

"We'll have to use the object avoidance laser, hopefully without breaking it apart."

"I would recommend not more than enough power to vaporize the outer crust," Janet said. "If we do it correctly, it will cause the asteroid to move out of its course with Earth by ablation of its crust."

"I think I can do that calculation," Sharon said.

After several minutes, she had the proper energy setting and duration to cause the asteroid to change course without breaking it up.

We watched the laser beam blast the asteroid for a twenty-second duration, causing a vapor cone to propel the asteroid just a little. COMA moved the laser to hit different spots on the asteroid before blasting it. Again, it appeared to work without fracturing the object.

"We moved the asteroid's course enough, but we'll have to monitor it to make sure it doesn't get changed by something we didn't know about," Janet said.

I leaned back in my chair. "Looks like we'll be here for a while."

"Let's move the ship over to the other side of the asteroid," Janet said. "Our mass will act like a gravity well to pull it off course even more."

"Good idea," I said. "COMA can use the maneuvering jets to keep our ship just the right distance from the asteroid to maintain a gravity well effect."

The move to the opposite side of the asteroid wasn't a big deal. Maneuvering jets fired to make the move with little G-force. When we got to the other side, we saw something that was unexpected.

"What the hell is that?" I said, pointing at the main screen.

Janet zoomed the camera in on a black object sitting on the asteroid near a small crater. "It's not a natural object. It looks like a probe of some sort."

"It is something NASA sent here?" Sharon asked.

"Good question. If it is, I don't recall a mission like that."

"Maybe they sent it after we launched."

"That's possible. It would mean that they were aware of the possibility of this asteroid colliding with Earth."

"If that's the case, why didn't they come out here and change its course?"

"Maybe they never got the chance. Remember that we're over two hundred years into the future."

"Yeah, I keep forgetting that."

We gathered for a supper of spaghetti and soy meatballs with a glass of white wine to go along with it.

"This wine is not bad," Janet said after taking a sip. "Kudus to the agricultural robots."

"They look dumb but seem to know what they're doing," I said. "We're fortunate to have them."

"It's obvious that the engineers knew that we were going to spend most of our time on this vessel," Sharon said. "I don't think they really thought we would succeed in finding a habitable planet."

"True, but we're looking at it from a hopeful future, not the insecure past."

"Maybe they realized that Earth was going to be destroyed and didn't care what happened to us," Natale said.

"Keep in mind that we are the only survivors of three missions to locate a habitable planet. The fact is we're five survivors from three crews that totaled twenty-two. I don't know if they expected us to survive, but here we are. Maybe we're crazy for even trying to fix Earth's mess, but we don't have much else to do."

"The way things are going, no one will even know what we did," Janet said. "We're on our own out here in this dangerous universe that doesn't give a damn that we exist."

I took a good swig of wine and smiled. "Your sobering thoughts go much better with wine."

She sighed. "Yeah, I'm sorry about being so negative. I just don't know how to feel."

"I fully understand. We are young but we've been through a lot in the time we've been together. Maybe we should forget Earth and go live with the people on Alpha Centauri-B, but that would be resigning ourselves to a vapid useless life. If we, on the other hand, could mitigate Earth's climate change disaster, we would be saving mankind."

"Is anyone going to care?" Natale asked with a sarcastic smirk.

I symbolically pointed at each of us. "We would."

I think they understood what I meant, but it was hard to judge what they were thinking.

Staying at a safe but useful distance from the asteroid involved occasional maneuvering jet corrections. By the time we arrived near Earth, we were traveling way too fast.

We got strapped into our G-chairs and endured a burn to slow us enough to enter Earth orbit while the asteroid flew past only thee thousand kilometers away from Earth. It would have been considered a very close approach, but as long as it didn't cause any problems, we were happy.

After we got out of our G-chairs we contacted the dome city to report what we had done.

"Sorry about being out of contact so long," I said to Adal. "We had to go out to an asteroid that was about to collide with Earth and divert its course."

She wasn't all that impressed. "We are at the limit of habitability in our city," she said, not showing emotion.

"We will be embarking on a four-stage plan to attempt to reverse Earth's global warming. There are two methods that we can apply to do this; reforestation and iron fertilization. Phase one will involve you planting more conifers. We will go down to the upper North American locations to plant deciduous trees. Then we will deposit iron sulphate in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, which we hope will increase the populations of algae and plankton. These efforts will hopefully remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is the primary reason for climate change."

"Those efforts will take time," she said. "We will not be able to maintain our minimum statis for that long."

"Well, none of this is going to be easy, but we'll do our best to make it happen."

She nodded, and that was it.

"She's not a happy camper," I said.

I got smirks for that, but what we discovered next changed everything.