Everything seemed to be in order. The bus was on the pad. The sphere was powered up. As far as I could tell everything was in working.
The satellite system was monitoring the asteroid. Unfortunately there was about a 40 min lag time. That was going to be the longest 40 minutes of my life.
I took a last look over the documentation I could find. It seemed ready to go. There was a 10 minute count down as the system had to works its way through about 50,000 operations prior to launch. Each one small but important.
An hour later I started the count down. I'm not a religious man, but I said a prayer that everything would go according to plan, despite the fact I was doing this alone and I had never been officially trained on this machinery.
Despite a long 10 minutes, everything went according to plan.
Each of the bridge arches systematically powered up in preparation for accelerating the bus.
I thought the simulation I had watched a few days earlier was in real time. I was wrong. It went from stationary to full speed in the blink of and eye. There was a bright flash as the nested spheres discharged their energy into the bus. Then it was gone. No big bang, just a flash of light and gone.
I ran to the satellite terminal and waited.
