tooth soup

photo credit: L.Brumm Photography

Tunguska/detrimental/vacillate

from Todd’s prompt

When a novice astronomer comes to our organisation and claims to have spotted an Earth-destroying meteor with his backyard telescope, it’s usually a quick and easy procedure to prove them wrong. But when a professional such as myself, working in one of the largest facilities for scanning the near-space of Earth, finds the very same thing? It’s kind of a big deal.

Or at least it would be, if I had told anybody about it yet.

Despite the Hollywood cliche, the best method is still to nuke the meteor at regular intervals in order to push them off course. I’ve done my own calculations and if they’re at all correct, this big boy would require a joint effort of just about every single nuke that’s officially stored around the world to knock it out of our ballpark. I also know that unless those nukes are launched by next Sunday, we’re pretty screwed.

So I figure I’ll let them know this coming Monday. Or Maybe Tuesday, I’m not sure yet. I think of it as a test. If the human race can stop bickering enough to get this thing sorted in the space of a week, we’ve earned our right to survive. If not, well, at least we’ll leave a bunch of nice bones for our followers to puzzle over.

photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

silver/scarecrow/eat

from Lucy’s prompt

All in all, the yield from this asteroid cluster had been a good one for the Allegreta family. For twenty years they had chipped, crushed, and exploded the `roids for the precious metals and organics that sat patiently within their porous structure. The tiny pod enclosure that had been their house had grown as the credits they received from sending their crop off to market rolled in. First a refinement plant, then a nursery, and finally a complete renovation to include the rooms necessary for their growing dynasty. The Allegreta family had profited modestly well from the space mining business.

There were precautions to be made, of course. A great deal of these dealt with the prospect of bandits. Groups of ships that would fly into a successful miner’s stake and spirit away an asteroid or two with explosive hooks or—in the slicker operations—tractor beams. The Allegreta family dealt with this in two ways. The first was to have one of the older generation on standby in a scout fighter equipped with a boomstick; a giant ship-mounted laser that could peel the hull of a bandit’s ship with a single shot. The other way was devised by an ingenious cousin one day when looking at all the waste material, mostly non-precious metals, that was produced as a byproduct of the refinement process.

“Can’t we do anything with this stuff, Papa?” he asked Jakob, the operations manager of the time. Jakob shook his head, but the little cousin frowned and kept thinking on it. Eventually, after much concern by his parents over his obsession, he came up with the idea of a dummy fleet. A set of huge, metal sculptures placed at the corners of their fields with enough electronics in them to give them the resemblance of possessing a boomstick each. Needless to say, he was the first Allegreta in 20 years to be sent away to university.

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