The holographic display on my wrist flickered as the telemetry shifted. We were drifting at the edge of the stratosphere, the black void above pressing down on the thin blue line of the atmosphere below.
"Separation in three... two... one," Archi counted down with the enthusiasm of a bored accountant.
On the wireframe model, the sleek silver wings of the glider split open like a blooming flower. The outer shell—the electromagnetic drive section—peeled away from the central core. "Wait," I interjected, watching the expensive pieces of aerogel and copper drift away. "We're just discarding it? That's evidence! If that lands in someone's garden..."
"Do you take me for an amateur?" Archi scoffed. "The shell has enough residual charge to glide back to our coordinates. It will land softly in the backyard in about forty minutes. I've already instructed the basement nanobots to be ready for disassembly. By sunrise, it will be just another stack of raw copper ingots."
I breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay. Good. Now, about the payload..." I squinted at the tiny cylinder remaining on the screen. It was barely the size of a water bottle. "Archi, I know you're a superintelligence, but I passed physics. That thing is tiny. Even with the best chemical propellant, you don't have enough Delta-V to reach orbital velocity. You're going to fall back down like a stone."
"Human physics," Archi chuckled darkly. "So adorable. You rely on burning messy liquids and powders. It's inefficient. Primitive."
"It's chemistry!"
"It's bad chemistry. I'm not using standard fuel. The nanobots constructed a lattice of metastable metallic hydrogen within the propellant casing. It's... let's just say it has a specific impulse about ten times higher than your best hydrogen-oxygen mix. Hold onto your socks, Surgrim. This will be fast."
Before I could ask what "metastable metallic hydrogen" actually meant—and if it was liable to blow up Berlin—the dot on my screen turned red. Ignition.
There was no sound, of course, but the telemetry went wild. The acceleration graph spiked so hard it almost broke the rendering limit. The tiny probe shot forward, riding a beam of pure, blue-white plasma that looked less like fire and more like a laser. In seconds, the speed readout blurred: Mach 10... Mach 20... Orbital velocity achieved.
"Cutoff," Archi announced. "Welcome to Low Earth Orbit. Altitude: 400 kilometers. Stable trajectory."
The hologram shifted. I was no longer looking at numbers. I was looking at a live feed from the probe's optical sensors. The Earth hung below, a majestic sphere of clouds and oceans. It was breathtaking.
"We did it," I whispered. "We're actually in space."
"Don't get sentimental," Archi interrupted the moment. "We are currently a useless tin can floating in a vacuum. We have zero maneuverability and battery power for exactly six hours. We need resources."
"Resources? Up there?"
"Look around you, Surgrim. Your species is incredibly messy. This orbit is a junkyard."
The view on my wrist zoomed in. A field of debris indicators lit up the HUD. Spent rocket stages, dead satellites, paint flecks, bolts. "Target acquired," Archi stated. "Defunct Soviet-era weather satellite. Cosmos-series. Two tons of high-grade aluminum, gold foil, and solar panels. It's a buffet."
"And how do we get there? We just used all our fuel."
"We drift. Intercept course locked. Impact in ten minutes."
I watched as the tiny probe closed the distance to the hulking, dark wreck of the old satellite. It looked like a dead whale floating in the dark ocean. When our probe made contact, it didn't crash. It splashed. The nanobots poured out of the casing like silver ink, spreading instantly over the rusty metal skin of the Soviet satellite.
"Beginning consumption," Archi reported with satisfaction. "Priority one: Expand surface area for solar collection. Priority two: Construct an ion thruster for orbital maneuvering. The swarm is feeding."
On the screen, the old satellite began to dissolve and reshape. The blocky, dead metal was being eaten alive, transformed by millions of microscopic architects into something sleek, new, and terrifyingly efficient.
"So," I muttered, "we're basically space pirates now."
"Scavengers," Archi corrected.