“Play the whole thing,” the Voice on the Phone said in its authoritative, tinny voice.
“There’s a lot here that won’t make sense without context-” Steiner began.
“I’ve been briefed on the basics.”
“With all due respect, this situation is far from basic.”
Silence on the line.
Steiner was not a man well accompanied with anxiety. He was a titan, had been for decades, one of America’s select few men allowed to wield real power, unfettered by bureaucracy or electorate. He had made decisions, in board rooms and aboard trans-Atlantic flights, that had killed hundreds. He had overseen transfers of funds at the scale of the GDPs of small nations. He had toyed with geopolitics.
He was anxious, now. The Voice on the Phone made him anxious. Its fuming, faceless silence even more so.
“Apologies,” Steiner cleared his throat. “Of course. I’ll start it now.”
Steiner hovered over the “play” icon on a multimedia presentation he’d cobbled together himself. Normally this kind of drudgery would be the purview of an underling, but the footage contained within was not the kind a communications aide could be allowed even conditional access to.
A red dot blinked at the top corner of his screen. One viewer. Dead air crackled over the phone.
Steiner hit “play.”
An overlay displays some basic details: Person of Interest. Initial Sighting. Time To Impact minus fourteen years, six months, five days.
A blurry, glimmering ball, barely visible against a starry backdrop, hangs in low-Earth orbit. The surface of the ball is reflective, shimmers with secondhand sunlight glinting off of the Pacific. The resolution is low, the object indistinct, just a background artifact caught during otherwise unrelated satellite operation.
Person of Interest. Initial imaging attempt. Time To Impact minus fourteen years, five months, twelve days.
A clearer image of the ball, no longer an inanimate object, but a fetal, cloaked form. A green coat that appears to be woven of shining scales, composed of something like jade or emerald. Barely visible beneath the cloak, facing the planet, a shadowed human form. A hand is visible, gripping the cloak as if to pull it close against a frigid wind.
Another angle. The Earth fills the frame. Before it, the ball hangs placidly, a lump of overlapping, metallic petals.
Another angle, from the opposite side, later still. A sliver of sunlight illuminates the front of the ball. Somewhat visible, behind two edges of the scaled cloak, pulled tight: tan skin, thin hands, legs pulled against a narrow chest. The bottom half of a face, cloaked in shadow. The top half sunlit, visible. Two eyes closed in easy, pleasant sleep.
LEO Sat-Repair Probe Orpheus II, following initial recovery attempt of POI. Time To Impact minus eleven years, one month, one day.
A waterlogged satellite, dangling from the side of one of NASA’s craft recovery boats. Next to it, for comparison’s sake, an image of the satellite in operational condition, three days before its confidential launch.
The ruined probe resembles the functional one, but crumpled in on itself, smashed inward like a soda can. Whereas the full probe measured twelve feet to a side, the recovered one spans maybe three. It’s as if an immense force has crushed the machine from every direction, all at once.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Emblazoned across its front is a scorch mark in the shape of a small human hand.
“So, we’ve been aware of the thing since about 2010,” Steiner said. “Had no idea what it was capable of, where it came from, what the hell it was, so the motivation to engage was there, but not urgently so. The first attempt to make contact went, clearly, poorly, and those probes are so expensive, and the material here so classified, that any attempt at a follow-up always got tangled in red tape. Which is why we hadn’t-”
“Spare me the apologetics, Mr. Steiner,” the Voice on the Phone garbled. “This is not some sort of audit. Please don’t interrupt again unless I ask.”
Steiner cleared his throat and hit “unpause.”
Images from continued surveillance show no activity. Time To Impact minus eleven years to minus one day.
Several images of the ball, in increasingly detailed resolution and color, flicker by. In all, the object remains essentially identical: an androgynous, largely hidden human figure, curled in on itself, huddling beneath a shining green cloak of scales, backlit or frontlit by the planet’s oceans and continents passing beneath it.
First observed activity. Time To Impact minus one day, six hours, five minutes.
The ball has elongated, flattened. The cloak of scales is hanging lengthwise now, dangling from the neck of a thin human figure clothed in what looks like a shawl and knee-length dress made of rough textile, dyed cloth or wool. The figure’s face is hidden, shadowed, but pointed directly at the landmass turning beneath it and to the right: the center of the continental United States.
It -- she -- has short, black hair, hanging in a rough halo, unburdened by the limited gravity. Her hands are held out, her palms facing the planet as if it were a warm hearth.
Shortly before leaving orbit. Time To Impact minus one day, six hours, two minutes.
The figure has turned its face to the camera watching it. Her face is still shrouded, but something in its cocked angle indicates curiosity. Or indignation. Or rage.
Last recorded frames before sudden and total structural failure of surveillance satellite. Time To Impact minus one day, six hours, two minutes.
The figure’s hand is now reaching for the camera, an object that, due to its telescopic zoom, would have been at least a mile away.
The next frame: the figure unchanged. Dots and splotches of color paint the dark background: camera artifacts caused by sudden pressure.
The final frame: the figure has closed her fist.
POI sighted by Australian observatory telescope during re-entry. Time To Impact minus one hour, five minutes, twelve seconds.
A twinkling light in the sky above the Australian Outback. Magnified one hundred times, what any observer would have assumed to be a meteorite is revealed to be the green-cloaked woman. Her form is largely obscured by the poor resolution and the bright fireball of ignited atmosphere cloaking her as she, inexplicably, manages to hurtle to the planet without being instantly cooked alive.
POI seen gathering material for Impact Event. Time To Impact minus fifty-eight minutes, forty-two seconds.
Spy satellite footage of the woman, who at this scale appears as little more than a speck hovering above a barren, red desert. There’s a moment of pause, the ground seeming to swivel as the satellite flies by on its orbit. Then, gradually, a rumple appears in the face of the terrain. A gathering, swirling depression, tens of miles in diameter. Blackness encroaches on its edges as what was once an entire mesa rolls in on itself and lifts from the ground.
“What am I looking at here?” The Voice on the Phone demands.
“It’s hard to tell from the angle, sorry, it’s the only real-time documentation we have. From what we can tell, about an hour before the Impact Event, the Person of Interest,” Steiner paused the video, cleared his throat. “Well, we believe she stole a mountain. From Australia.”
A moment of simmering silence from the Phone. “She stole a mountain.”
“Lifted it from the ground and brought it back up into orbit with her.”
To illustrate, Steiner let the video resume.
Timelapse footage shows a crater yawning in the desert, a sinkhole the size of a small town. The increasingly spherical mass of rock and soil that was once a mountain quickly exits frame as it is lifted up and out, back into the edge of space.
More thoughtful silence.
“I was led to believe the Impact was caused by a meteorite.”
“That was the general consensus, until we discovered otherwise,” Steiner said. “To be fair, as explanations go, ‘it was a meteor’ was an intuitive one. Compared to… this.”
The Voice on the Phone grunted. “Continue.”
“The subject of the footage is going to change, briefly, for context. We believe this is what attracted her to Singapore initially.”
