# Chapter 31: Project Last Orbit

**60 days until keyhole crossing**

Project Last Orbit became official only after everyone had already given it everything.

The name appeared on a joint declaration signed in Suryan, Earth Standard, and the reformed Kharos script Liora insisted on using. It named the plan plainly: kinetic impactors complete, surface mass drivers active, fusion-standoff array armed for final correction. It did not say miracle. It did not say salvation.

Aravel read it from the valley floor while machines towered behind her.

"We do not destroy The Wanderer," she said. "We move it. A little. Early enough that a little becomes life."

Across Earth-2, people listened from lit cities, oil-lamp villages, refugee camps, former Kharos shrine towns, polar stations, and ships pulled above strange tides.

Jonas stood inside the final alignment simulator and watched the tumble model refuse automation for the ninety-third time.

The flaw was not one flaw. It was surface jets, loose regolith, anchor flex, thermal bloom, and the ugly fact that the final standoff devices had to fire in a sequence that changed as the body responded. A machine could do it if the machine trusted bad data. Jonas did not.

Mira entered quietly.

"You found the manual case."

"I found it years ago."

"I know."

He looked at her then. "Then we stop pretending."

Neither said who would stay. That would have made the future too small too soon.

On the valley broadcast, Ilyon explained momentum to children using a stone, a bowl, and a grin tired enough to belong to an older man. In Kharos, Orrek the miner rebroadcast Aravel's declaration over illegal radios. In the funeral towers, Senn listened.

For the first time, he did not know which side the dead were on.