Astro Offshore -

Mira grabbed the handrail as the floor lurched. Outside the viewport, the grey horizon of Ceres rotated slowly. They were no longer a rig. They were a ship without an engine, venting atmosphere from a dozen severed feeder lines.

Diaz stared at her. “That’s insane. The cable will whip. It’ll cut the rig in half.”

“Send the pulse,” Mira whispered.

For twelve hours, the rig groaned like a dying whale. The derrick, a lattice of carbon nanotube cables stretching a kilometer down to the seabed of the asteroid, vibrated at a frequency that made teeth ache. At 03:00 ship time, the alarm didn’t blare. It coughed .

“The drill head weighs four hundred tons. It’s still spooled out two kilometers into the rock. If we release the clutch, the torque will spin us in the opposite direction. We use the planet’s own crust as a flywheel.” astro offshore

Mira felt a cold she hadn’t felt since her first EVA. Twelve. That was a quarter of her crew. She slammed her fist on the emergency panel. “Scramble the pods. Get the survivors into the lifeboats.”

“We’ve lost the lower habitation module. Rupture in Section C. Twelve souls unaccounted for,” Diaz replied, his face pale. Mira grabbed the handrail as the floor lurched

“It’ll also generate a friction weld in the borehole. That weld will hold for exactly sixty seconds. Long enough for the retro-thrust to slow our spin and stabilize us.” She looked at the blinking red lights marking her lost crew. “And long enough to send a distress pulse via the drill’s acoustic telemetry. The rock itself will carry the signal.”