“Newton’s cradle,” she said with a tired smile. “You push one ball, the other moves. Except we were the ball that didn’t want to move. We just had to push harder.”
Two hours later, the meteors flashed past—a glittering river of stone and ice, missing the hull by barely three kilometers. The crew watched in silence. action reaction and momentum conservation
“We need a second push,” she said. “Conservation of momentum requires that the total momentum of an isolated system remains constant. We’re the system. We have to throw something else.” “Newton’s cradle,” she said with a tired smile
She suited up and floated to the engine bay. Beside the seized rotor housing was the emergency spin-dump valve—a massive, explosive hatch designed to vent the rotor’s angular momentum into space as a last-ditch stabilization measure. We just had to push harder
On the command deck, the trajectory plot updated. The ship’s vector line bent away from the red swarm. It was working.
“You used a seized rotor as a reaction engine. You used batteries as reaction mass. You conserved our momentum by throwing our own ship apart.”
Mira placed six shaped charges at the rotor’s stress points. Her hands were steady. She pressed the detonator.