DN - Hubble Space Telescope

Wait. There, ahead of my flight path, just at the very edge of my lattice perception and coming up fast. It’s huge, dark, and entirely cold. It’s been dead since a Nemesis fragment killed it two years ago. The largest single piece of space debris in history, a navigational hazard so massive NASA considered a mission just to pull it safely out of orbit.

The Hubble Space Telescope.

All at once, I understand how I’m going to win, and the thought of it fills me with dread. This is really, really going to hurt.

Yes, I can make it count, I reply. Then I close my eyes and put all my attention into the lattice. Red Steel scores another hit up the side of my thigh, and I grit my teeth. The Hubble is big, and it’s tearing along at an almost unimaginable speed. With confidence I only half-believe in, I reach out and start to run the fingers of my mind over the shape of its momentum. The trick to this is to be gentle but decisive. Hesitation kills.

There. That’s the main string, the blazing white weave in the pattern that holds its course together. The Hubble is coming up fast now, terrifyingly fast.

Doc fires again. The lattice is lit up with a swirling corona of electrons pouring off the front of the cannon shot as it blazes up from the surface. This shot is more shotgun than rifle, a dozen smaller beams rising in loose, random formation. Most fly harmlessly into the void, but some of them slash hard against Red Steel and batter him around. By themselves, not enough to do much but drag this out.

Another half-second to double-check my feel of the telescope before I grab its momentum and heave—

It’s like no sensation I’ve felt before. The hot, buzzing thrum of power is more energy than I’ve ever channeled, and at these speeds, it’s not simply a difference of scale, it feels like a phase change between ice and water, between water and steam, between steam and plasma, but all of that compressed into a single still moment. For a moment, just a moment, I’m back where I was on that day I changed. I can see everywhere. I understand everything. Life is beautiful. We are all beautiful, all one, all linked in a joyous harmony. Even as I’m realizing it, the epiphany is fading.

—the Hubble off its course, and I haul it down and to the side by a few crucial degrees. By reflex I’m squirting up, up, out of line with Red, and the Hubble is already here, from a dot to a colossus in the time to blink an eye.

Red Steel encounters the Hubble Space Telescope the way a baseball encounters a home run derby. The telescope disintegrates into flayed sheets of aluminum and a huge constellation of shattered glass. Red goes spinning away, completely out of control and shooting towards Earth.

My back screams, every muscle between the bottom of my skull and the top of my pelvis howling in outrage. Smothering clouds of fatigue try to blot out my mind. For a moment, I think I’ve lost consciousness.

Almost over. I can do this.

With one last hard push I blast after him, crash through the spiraling debris, and get ready to finish this.

When I catch up with Red Steel he’s still whirling in all three directions, and still he somehow feels me coming and greets me with an emerald blast. My chest, neck, face light up with pain and then impact. I punch him like an angry god, the kind of punch that would shatter windows for a dozen yards in every direction if we were down on Earth. Again, and again. He gives me one on the chin, and I knock aside the follow up. My left leg is stiff with pain, but I wrap it around his neck and use my other ankle to lock it down so I’ve got him pinned. His eyes start glowing, and I clap my hands over his face just as he fires. My palms light up with scalding agony, but what hurts for me is torture for him, his whole body convulsing as the energy is reflected back into his skull.

- Sovereign, Chapter 23