RAM-6 slid perfectly into its designated Lagrange point. Don spent five minutes monitoring his readouts, making sure the asteroid would stay balanced between the pull of the moon and earth before retracting the anchors. He gave one good push with all twenty drives and the RAM drifted away from the asteroid. A half-dozen pod sized drones pounced on the icy mass, cutting it into manageable pieces. A MULE waited patiently for chunks of ice to ferry down to the surface. The Multi Use Lift Equipment would deposit the ice in a freight elevator which would bring the valuable Hydrogen and Oxygen into the city proper.

Freshly refueled and satisfied that he had achieved a safe distance from the activity, Don activated the autopilot and the RAM blasted off towards its next rendezvous in the belt. A quick cycle through his flock assured him that the autopilots had everything well in hand and he turned his attention back to RAM-10.

Sam altered the course Don came up with in his previous shift and managed to shave 13 hours off of the transit time. She even got the rock spinning again. The new course passed closer to earth than Don had allowed for. The trick was in the way she brought drive-14 and it’s partner back into the game, taking it in turns to gently push back against the planet as they spun. The trajectory had a slight wobble as a result but it was stable enough.

Don shook his head marveling at Sams skills. She really was a cut above. He checked the traffic logs again. Making sure their path to Luna station was still clear. It was starting to get crowded but the RAM wouldn’t come within 500 kilometers of any other crafts. He decided to take Rover out to finish the survey. It would be easier to do once the RAM was docked at the station but he wanted to keep it’s downtime to a minimum.

An hour later an alert flashed onto his screen. The RAM was about to start its deceleration. Don backed the roving camera away so it wouldn’t get crushed by accident. The drives spooled down and began to reorient. The maneuver struck Donovan as oddly graceful. With a jolt, he realized why. The giant object spinning through the void, drives flaring outwards, was vaguely reminiscent of the golden apparition who came for Mother just two days ago. Everything he had buried under an avalanche of work came rushing back to the surface. He punched at his console and the screen displayed the status list for his flock.

Several shuddering breaths later, Donovan began to regain control of himself. He couldn't’ afford to break down while he was on duty. An alarm brought his attention back to the status list. The icon for RAM-10 was flashing and he brought up the detailed view. Half of the structural alarms were in the red and the others were quickly deteriorating. A chill stole over Don and he flipped back to Rover’s feed. Don’s bladder let go.

Five of the drives had activated, blasting at full acceleration when they were only halfway through their reorientation. The asteroid was cut nearly in half. It wasn’t a neat break and the RAM was pulled apart by its anchors embedded in the rapidly separating icebergs.

To his credit, Donovan only froze for a moment before springing into action. The ice was spreading out due to the spin it maintained before the split. The five drives were clustered on the same side of the RAM and thrust the ice in the direction of Don’s home before the payload crumbled.

Don shut them back off before they could shred the massive ice block any further. In the next moment, he activated the private emergency channel.

“Sam I need you!” He yelled.

It would take a minute for her to get online and Don checked the RAM to see if anything was functioning. One of the reactors had been torn completely free and was unresponsive. The other was in the center of the growing icefield with about a quarter of the ring and only three functioning drives remaining. He wouldn’t get much use out of them. In the next moment, a plume of radioactive steam blasted out of the reactor. He would need to find another solution.

He remembered RAM-6. It had already gotten pretty far away from earth but it was the closest equipment he had and without any freight, it could get to the scene faster than anything else he had access to. He just finished cutting the drives, stopping the RAM’s headlong sprint to the belt and was about to flip it and send it back towards earth when Sam’s face popped onto Don’s screen.

“What the hell happened?” Her pupils were dilated from the stimulants administered by the emergency protocol. Wide and arched eyebrows betraying her panic.

“I don’t know!” Don shouted back. It was the first time it occurred to him to wonder what had happened. An icy hand squeezed his heart as he realized he could have activated the drives in his haste to escape the reminder of his mother. Now wasn’t the time to worry about that. He had to try and stop these rocks from causing too much damage.

Surface impacts weren’t that big a deal but some of the pieces spinning towards the ground were massive enough to cause serious earthquakes.

“We’ve got to do something about the pieces. A lot of them are headed for the planet. Bring RAM-6 around. I’ll get the word out and see if anyone else can help.”

Don immediately surrendered control of RAM-6 to SAM. The last few days proved that she was the superior navigator and they needed that RAM here as fast as possible. Sam removed the limiters and redlined the drives, blasting the rig towards earth. The RAM was still moving away but it was slowing rapidly and would soon be headed back in the right direction.

Don got on the radio and started broadcasting a mayday signal, petitioning craft in the area for help and submitting the trajectories of the pieces into the traffic log. He was hailed by a few small craft in the area but there wasn’t anything that could match the size and power of a RAM.

“What the hell did you do?” someone demanded.

“If you don’t have any ideas on how to stop this ice stay the hell off my frequency” Don snapped back.

Blessedly, one MULE submitted a plan to get to the site in time to push one of the medium-sized chunks out of the way of the planet. It wouldn’t save the day but Don took a second to thank the MULE’s operator. More ships followed suit. Cutters submitted a plan to cut another piece and separate it enough to mitigate the worst of its impact. They would sacrifice their crafts, riding the ice down past the point where they will be able to escape the gravity well.

It was way too little. Hours remained before the ice would reach the planet but with earth’s low number of crafts and the vast distances they were scattered through, too few could arrive in time to help.

Three pieces tumbling towards the earth were far too large for the smaller craft to handle.

“How’s it coming Sam?” Don asked.

“Pretty fucking shitty Don.” She snapped back. “I’m coming in fast but I don’t see any way to handle all those separate pieces even with a RAM.”

“I’ve got an idea.” Don replied “get to this piece and anchor it if you can” Don highlighted the smallest of the three large pieces.

“We should stop that big fucker if we're going to take the time to anchor anything” Sam objected.

Don responded by sharing the simulation he threw together while calling for aid.

“You’re crazy” she responded. More importantly, she shifted her flight path to match up with Don’s plan. Don submitted their flight path to the traffic logs and sat back. There was nothing left to do now except watch. He nervously flipped through his list of rams, confirming they were too far away to be of use.

With only two hours left until the shards would start impacting the planet, Sam jockeyed into position around one of the remaining large chunks of ice, matched it’s rotation and completed a rushed anchor-job. They didn’t have to secure this piece nearly as well as normal due to its size. Sam reoriented the drives and cranked them up, stopping the wild spinning of the ice. Next, she shuttled it as fast as she could in a trajectory that would intersect with another of the large pieces. Two-thirds of the way there Sam released the chunk she was ferrying and blasted the rig off in pursuit of the remaining piece.

Don watched as the ice Sam released pulverized its target. Both splitting into much smaller shards which would pose a greatly reduced threat to the underground communities.

Now with only an hour left until impact, Sam reached the largest of the ice chunks. Once her RAM matched the tumbling of the meteor she wasted no time in activating the laser drills at full power. Don was thankful for once at the unreasonable power of the drills used to bore out deep wells for the anchors. Steam blasted out from the focus points, leaving a cloud of snow in the meteor's wake. In moments the stress was too much and the large meteor split in half. Don took control of the drills, keeping them focused on the piece which was falling away as long as he could, melting it down. It made very little difference. The drills were designed for close-in work and lost their effectiveness as their target drifted away.

Anchoring to the remaining piece. Sam activated the drives at full thrust. It was too late to push it out of the way of the planet and even without the meteor, the RAM wasn’t designed to enter a planet’s gravity well. All they could do now was try and slow it down before the impact.

Don was hunched forward. He hadn’t blinked in what felt like hours. There was nothing else he could do, so he watched as his little armageddon rained down on the planet. He drank in the continental plateaus and great salt-lined basins which were about to be changed forever. Scarred by his momentary lapse.

Minutes before impact, he was suddenly seized from behind. Cold metal clamps closed around his shoulders and a metal cap was slammed down over his head blocking his vision. He was dazed but quickly came back to full alertness as screws dug into his skull. Screaming and trying to reach his head, Donovan was uploaded.

“Zrrt-”

His body fell limp.