Obelisker Adrift in the Desert
Novelette 10,408 words Recommended by 2 award/anthology sources
"Hadrian rattled with the computer equivalent of an uncontrollable laugh for all of three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. That was the time interval required for me to redirect one of those ubiquitous errant titanium asteroids from low orbit and throttle it one hundred kilometers below the planet’s surface into his macro processor cluster."
Quasar links out; the story lives on Clarkesworld, where the author gets the click.