Cmdr. Smegg - "Armageddon"

>***Drive room***
>
>"A huge chunk of rock is falling to the surface!" Allie screamed from the sensor computer.
> 
>Kayn, as if not already too busy piloting the ship close enough to the asteroid to allow Niples to climb on, and moving them quickly away again before >the asteroid blew up- now turned to Alotta at the communication speaker.
>"Get Smegg on the radio, tell him to get the missile launcher ready as soon as he can, we want to blow that asteroid up before it wipes out the >colonists...."
>Alotta immediately connected the correct wires and gave Smegg the message.
 
"What?!" Smegg cried. "We can't do that! That will just make lots of little asteroids that will scatter all over the planet and kill everybody even faster!" He hadn't been doing much on this mission so he'd found time the other day to watch "Armageddon" and notice all the technical errors in the movie.
 
The chief engineer heard Alota, Kayn, and Allie over the radio arguing amongst themselves frantically. Finally Alota screamed, "Well do you have any better ideas?!?"
 
Smegg's brain jumped into action, thinking about Newtonian physics and nuclear winter and all that old stuff he'd learned in high school; that was one of the advantages of having young people in charge - they actually remembered that stuff and could put it to use without concentrating for half an hour trying to remember what the difference between a sine and a cosine was.
 
"Quick!" Alota pleaded, "we've only got 2 minutes!"
 
"This just might work," Smegg mused... "We CAN blow up the asteroid safely, if we move the ship between it and the planet before firing the missile; the momentum of the missile will help to slow down the fragments, and then use our point-defense grid to hit as many of the fragments as we can to reduce them to pieces small enough to burn up in the atmosphere; it just might work, but we'd have to risk some of the fragments hitting the ship as well."
 
"That's better than nothing," Alota said. She couldn't authorize a change in orders like this, but there was no time for bureaucracy. "Let's hope this works."
 
Before she had spoken Smegg had begun the missile launcher initialization. He wondered what Mr. Spock would give the odds of success as... zero point zero nine eight four percent, perhaps?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Red: "Welcome to the antique roadkill portion of the show we call --"Mike: "Yeah yeah can you go ahead and appraise this, I've got to meet with my parole officer in 15 minutes!"Red: "Okay, let me take a look at this... Mike, that's JUNK."Dalton: "Not to mention, it's MY junk!"