capture

After spending over half a month as a cosmic janitor, Xiao Yu realized a fundamental truth: comets are all bluster and no substance.

In terms of sheer size, comets near the sun are among the largest celestial bodies in the universe. Their tails can stretch over a hundred million kilometers, resembling colossal brooms sweeping majestically through space. But up close, it's apparent just how fragile they truly are.

After navigating the comet's tail for more than half a month, Xiao Yu managed to gather less than five kilograms of water—a testament to how sparse the material in the tail actually was. This efficiency left Xiao Yu thoroughly exasperated. If he still had hair, he would've been pulling it out in frustration.

Xiao Yu now found himself about 30,000 kilometers above—or below—the ecliptic plane. In the vastness of space, directions like up and down lose their meaning; either way works.

The so-called ecliptic plane is an imaginary flat surface, easily understood as the plane on which most of the solar system's planets orbit. This plane is the ecliptic.

He was already quite close to the original Earth's orbit. Through an optical telescope, Xiao Yu could see countless dark, small meteoroids above, radiating an eerie, ominous glow.

Xiao Yu had adjusted his orbit, planning to follow the Earth's meteoroid cluster around the sun for a while. After all, gathering materials was the priority, though the pace was admittedly slow.

As the lens of the optical telescope slowly swept across space, an unremarkable figure entered Xiao Yu's view.

It was an irregularly shaped meteoroid, approximately thirty meters long, seven to eight meters wide, and five to six meters high. Light reflected from nearby celestial bodies illuminated it, then the light was collected by Xiao Yu.

Xiao Yu's heart stirred, and he immediately conducted a quick analysis of the meteoroid. The results instantly lifted his spirits.

The analysis revealed that the meteoroid consisted of about thirty percent water, sixty-nine percent iron, and trace amounts of nitrogen, silicon, hydrogen, oxygen, potassium, and other elements. Among these trace elements, hydrogen and oxygen were the most abundant.

"Is this... a gift from the heavens?" Xiao Yu was instantly elated.

This meteoroid had a volume of about a thousand cubic meters and a mass exceeding three thousand tons! Even if hydrogen and oxygen each accounted for just 0.1% of its mass, the total would still be more than six tons! That much fuel could accomplish many things.

Especially considering the over nine hundred tons of water it contained! Once near the sun, this water could be ionized into hydrogen and oxygen through solar ionization, providing a substantial resource. Moreover, with over two thousand tons of iron, Xiao Yu could repair his spacecraft significantly.

"Capture it! I must capture it!" Xiao Yu made an immediate decision.

At that moment, the celestial body blocking the meteoroid moved aside, and sunlight directly illuminated it.

Under the sun's heat, the solid water and hydrogen-oxygen compounds on the meteoroid's surface began to rapidly vaporize, with plumes of gaseous material jetting out, shrouding the core in a thick white mist and leaving a long tail behind.

Xiao Yu grew anxious, "These are all precious resources, I can't let them just evaporate into nothing."

He quickly maneuvered his spacecraft between the meteoroid and the sun, using his solar panels to absorb the heat. Without the sunlight, the near-absolute-zero temperature of space immediately cooled the meteoroid, and its white tail dissipated visibly.

Xiao Yu breathed a sigh of relief and began contemplating how to bring this heavenly gift fully into his possession.

When a delectable cake is placed before you, there's plenty of motivation to prepare the necessary utensils. Xiao Yu no longer worried about energy consumption, manipulating the robots to scour the storage bay for materials. He even dismantled some less critical equipment, planning to repurpose them.

The manufacturing bay, second only to the control room in terms of protection, housed the essential machinery Xiao Yu had collected to ensure he could continue production once he had raw materials. Fortunately, the manufacturing bay hadn't suffered much damage in the previous catastrophic collision.

After the robots worked tirelessly, a mechanical claw attached to about three hundred meters of high-strength cable was swiftly produced.

Xiao Yu was now only a few thousand meters from the meteoroid. In astronomical terms, this was extremely close, but it was still a bit far for his capture capabilities. He had no choice but to carefully pilot his small spacecraft, adjusting the engine to its lowest power setting, inching closer meter by meter.

This was a risky maneuver. A few thousand meters was the minimum distance Xiao Yu needed to dodge. If another meteoroid were to strike this one, sending it hurtling towards him, he wouldn't have time to evade and would be crushed.

"Fortune favors the bold. Damn it, if I pull this off, I'll be living the high life!" Xiao Yu steeled himself, his actions growing even more cautious.

Gradually, the distance closed—two thousand meters... one thousand meters... five hundred meters...

Just as success seemed within reach, an unexpected shadow flashed into Xiao Yu's view. Startled, he saw the figure collide with the target meteoroid at several hundred meters per second, causing a burst of fire and sending the meteoroid tumbling. The impact's heat triggered a violent outgassing of its solid water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen-oxygen compounds, engulfing it in a massive cloud.

Worse still, the collision altered the meteoroid's trajectory, sending it hurtling off in another direction, disappearing from view in an instant.

Furious and desperate, Xiao Yu cursed the offending meteoroid a thousand times over, then pulled himself together and began scouring the skies with his telescope in search of his lost prize.

Xiao Yu knew that with the combination of outgassing recoil and inertia, it couldn't have gone far. Sure enough, after two hours of searching, he found it about six hundred kilometers away, still within the ecliptic plane.

He cautiously approached, maintaining a relative speed of fifty meters per second—around one hundred and eighty miles per hour.

A hundred and eighty miles per hour on Earth would be considered blazing fast, but here, it was akin to a snail's pace. It took Xiao Yu over three hours to close the distance to within three thousand meters.

"Damn it, if any other fool dares to ruin this for me, I'll waste the energy to blast them with a laser gun." Resolute, Xiao Yu continued his careful approach.

The distance steadily decreased, tightening Xiao Yu's focus with each meter. Finally, the gap shrank to two hundred and eighty meters!

This was within the range of the grappling claw he'd fashioned.

Xiao Yu aimed the claw at the meteoroid and decisively issued the launch command.

The recoil from the launch caused the spacecraft to shake, throwing off the claw's accuracy. It shot out like an arrow but missed the target, passing fifty meters wide of the meteoroid.

Undeterred, Xiao Yu retrieved the claw, adjusted the recoil settings, and tried again.

Failure. The claw missed by twenty meters this time.

He continued to tweak the settings and fired once more.

At last, Xiao Yu succeeded! The claw struck the center of the meteoroid, piercing its fluffy outer layer and locking onto it securely, tethering it to his spacecraft.

The meteoroid, reacting to the impact, began to drift in the opposite direction. The high-strength cable snapped taut, pulling Xiao Yu's spacecraft along with it.

In zero gravity, such phenomena are commonplace, defying terrestrial logic. On Earth, if you shot a grappling claw at a rock, even if the claw held, the rock wouldn't budge due to gravity. But in space, without gravity's pull, the meteoroid responded to the force, moving away.

This outcome was something Xiao Yu had anticipated, so he remained calm. He didn't dare to stop abruptly, as the force would exceed the cable's tensile strength, snapping it. Instead, he gradually applied pressure, slowly reducing the meteoroid's kinetic energy.

After three hours, covering nearly a thousand kilometers, Xiao Yu finally subdued the meteoroid. He then began towing it away from the ecliptic plane.

Just like a lion stealthily capturing a calf from a herd, only to retreat to a safe distance before feasting, Xiao Yu refrained from indulging in his prize too soon. The area was too perilous.

Over three days, Xiao Yu dragged the meteoroid to a location forty thousand kilometers away from the ecliptic plane. Now, his field of vision was free from other meteoroids. Staring at the feast before him, Xiao Yu let out an excited roar, "Time to eat!"