The Machine God Chapter 238 - Baby Steps

Chapter 238

Baby Steps

Other than the sounds of the crew shifting, working away at their tasks, the bridge was silent. Even Davis and Petra had stopped bickering.

Alexander stood beside the captain’s chair, one hand resting on the railing. Droney hovered at his shoulder. Augustus, Annie, and Talia had taken their usual positions around the bridge.

Vikram’s fingers moved across his console. Numbers populated faster than Alexander could read them, trajectories and gravitational models building in layers on the nav display. The man hadn’t spoken in several minutes.

“Final calculations are in, Captain,” Vikram said. “Exit point is plotted on Jupiter’s far side from the target, roughly one hundred thousand kiloters above the orbital plane of its inner moons. That should put the planet’s mass between us and the target.”

“Should?” Carn asked.

Vikram hesitated. “The margin of error on a gravity dive is wider than a standard jump. We could exit anywhere within a sixty-thousand-kiloter sphere of the target coordinates.” He paused. “Assuming my calculations are correct.”

“Worst case?”

“We exit closer to Jupiter than intended and have to fight our way out of a steeper gravity gradient while blind on sensors until they recalibrate.”

Carn nodded. “Yuki, the mont we drop out, I need you ready for imdiate manual control. Trust your eyes. If you see anything, don’t wait for the instrunts to catch up.”

“Aye, Captain.” Yuki’s fingers clenched, then unclenched, but her voice was steady.

“Petra, sensors to active the instant we exit. I want a picture of what’s around us before we finish blinking.”

“Ready, Captain.”

Carn looked over her shoulder at Alexander. “Anything from your end?”

“I’ll reinforce the ship.” He spread his powers through the Sleipnir, settling into every system simultaneously. Reactor. Engines. Life support. Hull plating. The ship may not have awakened yet, but it was still an ensouled machine. It belonged to him. It was an extension of his Will.

Carn turned back to the viewscreen. “Vikram, initiate the jump on my mark.”

“Standing by.”

She let the silence hold for a beat. “Mark.”

“Jumping.”

The viewscreen went white. The lurch hit Alexander’s stomach as reality twisted around them. A heartbeat of nothing. Two.

The viewscreen cleared.

Jupiter filled it. Not in the distance where it should be.

The gas giant dominated the entire forward view, bands of ochre and rust swirling across its surface. They were close. Far closer than one hundred thousand kiloters.

“Sensors recalibrating,” Petra said. A few seconds passed. “Clear space. No contacts. No active signals.”

“Yuki, get us into a stable orbital track,” Carn said. “Now.”

“On it.” Yuki began firing the thrusters in rapid sequence, angling the ship’s nose away from the gas giant. “Correcting altitude. Adjusting vector.”

The ship shuddered. A deep, structural vibration that Alexander felt through his boots and through every sensor he’d threaded into the hull. Jupiter’s gravity had them. The pull was enormous, orders of magnitude beyond anything they’d experienced near Earth or Mars. The reactor whined as the engines fought to stabilize their trajectory.

Then the lights on the port console bank flickered and died.

“Navigational array just dropped offline,” Vikram said. His voice was calm, but his fingers stopped moving. Without navigation, he was blind.

The Chief’s voice crackled over the comms imdiately. “Bridge, I’ve got a power surge in junction fourteen. Nav array breaker tripped.”

Carn didn’t hesitate. “Can you reset it?”

“Need to pull the panel and manually bypass. Twenty seconds if you authorize to cut the safety interlock.”

“Do it.”

Alexander was already reaching into the junction with Technopathy. He could feel the tripped breaker, the interrupted circuit, the backup pathway sitting dormant beside it. He nudged the backup online—

The nav console lit up.

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“Backup nav is up,” Vikram reported. “We’re sixty-three thousand kiloters below the target coordinates. Much deeper into Jupiter’s gravity well than planned.”

The comms crackled again. “I don’t know what happened, but the backup just turned on. I’ll work on the primary.”

“Understood, Chief,” Carn said. “Vikram, find that asteroid.”

Yuki’s hands danced across the controls. The shuddering smoothed as she adjusted thrust vectors, balancing the ship against the planet’s grip. “Stable,” she said. “Mostly. She’s pulling starboard, but I can hold it.”

Carn leaned back. “Petra, any sign we’ve been detected?”

Petra shook her head. “Nothing on passive sensors. No active pings. If Santiago has sensor coverage out here, they didn’t catch our arrival.”

“Good. Vikram, update?”

Vikram was quiet for several seconds, studying the data as it scrolled. “I found it, Captain. But...” He pulled sothing up, leaning closer to his display. “There’s a much closer alternative. A catalogued moonlet, roughly four hundred ters along its longest axis. Mixed composition. Silicate, mostly, but the survey data shows significant iron-nickel veins throughout.”

Ryan stepped forward. “How close?”

“Close. That’s why I ruled it out originally, because it orbits much deeper into Jupiter’s gravity well than we planned to operate.” Vikram glanced at Carn. “But given where we ended up, it’s actually within reach.”

“Can Mr. Rooke eject it from its orbit this close to the planet?” Ryan asked.

Vikram’s fingers moved. “Running calculations. Hold.” A pause. Numbers shifted on his display. “Yes. Its orbit is eccentric and already being perturbed by the inner moons. And it’s currently approaching the highest point in its arc. Orbital velocity is at its lowest.” He looked up. “If there’s a ti to knock it loose, this is it. The slingshot trajectory will also be tighter from this depth. Faster transit to the target.”

“Then that’s our ride,” Alexander said. “How close can you get , Yuki?”

Yuki glanced over her shoulder with a grin. “Close enough for Sleipnir to kiss it if you want. Long as the Captain doesn’t mind.”

Carn 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 ters of battered rock and tal, 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 tallokinesis.

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 tal 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 so 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 ters 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 sa 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 ford at his temple.

He ramped up further, using his second ntal thread. Sustained pressure, applied to every inch of the tal 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 tallokinesis and Hyperawareness focused entirely on it.

“I’ve got it,” he managed. “Sort of.”

“Bearing adjustnt,” Vikram called out. “Two degrees starboard, seven below your current vector.”

Alexander shifted the pressure. Steering sothing 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 ti 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 confird. “Seven hours and forty minutes to closest approach.”

Alexander released the tallokinesis 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.”

Carn’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 dimd to ergency 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.