FEBRUARY 19, 1944
THE GIZA PLATEAU, EGYPT (GERMAN-OCCUPIED)
The air was thick with a million years of dust and the sharp, acrid smell of dynamite residue. Dr. Aris Thorne, a British geologist "requisitioned" by a Wehrmacht archaeological detail, coughed into his handkerchief. The red-faced German commandant, Oberst Herzog, merely waved the dust away with an impatient hand.
They were deep beneath the sands, not in one of an inof the great pyramids, but in a newly-unearthed, un-plundered mastaba, a tomb so old it predated the usual cartouches of Khufu and Khafre.
"This is madness, Herzog," Thorne said, his voice muffled by the cloth. "This is a simple burial chamber. You will find nothing but pottery shards and dried viscera."
"Your opinion is noted, Doctor," Herzog sneered, his torchlight playing over a section of the western wall. "My men noted... an anomaly. The air pressure here is wrong. And this stone... it is not limestone. Tap it."
Thorne, wary, pressed his ear to the wall and tapped it with his geological hammer. It didn't thud with the dead finality of solid rock. It returned a faint, hollow ring.
"It's basalt," Thorne whispered, his academic curiosity momentarily eclipsing his fear. "Dressed basalt. That's impossible. The tools to cut this so finely..."
"Exactly," Herzog grinned. "Soldaten! Bring it down."
Two soldiers with heavy sledges struck the wall. It cracked, and with a groan of displaced millennia, the perfectly-fitted plugs gave way, revealing a black, square opening. The air that escaped was not foul; it was cold, sterile, and carried a faint, metallic tang, like ozone.
Herzog pushed past Thorne, his Luger drawn, and shone his torch into the black.
It was not a tomb. It was an orrery.
The chamber was circular, its ceiling a domed vault of polished obsidian. Set into that vault were not painted stars, but thousands of pinpricks of what looked like cut crystal, catching the torchlight and scattering it in dazzling, alien constellations.
But the centerpiece, the focus of the entire room, was a massive, three-dimensional carving suspended from the ceiling. It was a model of the solar system, but one that was terrifyingly wrong.
There was the Sun, Ra, a sphere of dull gold. And there, orbiting it, was a small, beautiful sphere of brilliant blue lapis lazuli, unmistakably Earth. But circling in the exact same orbit, locked to Earth like a monstrous twin, was another planet.
It was a terrifying sphere of mottled red-brown jasper, carved with intricate, swirling patterns. And it was, by any measure, at least two-and-a-half times the size of the blue sphere.
"Apep," whispered the team's captive historian, Dr. el-Masri, his face chalk-white. "The Serpent Who Devours the World."
On the walls, the hieroglyphs told the story. They didn't depict a mythological battle. They depicted a history. A repeating cycle. The carvings showed Apep in the sky, a blood-red "second moon." They showed the Nile flooding, the skies raining fire, and the people bowing in terror not to their Pharaoh, but to the monstrous red eye staring down at them.
"It wasn't a myth," Thorne breathed, walking forward. He touched the blue sphere. "This... this is a record. A warning."
Herzog was silent, his torch fixed on the final, chilling carving: a depiction of the red planet... and stick figures descending from it on what looked like ropes of light.
_____________________________________
PRESENT DAY: 09:00 GMT
DECEMBER 15, 2011
SECURE CONFERENCE ROOM 4, UN HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK
The room was soundproof, windowless, and cold. The only warmth came from the glowing screens embedded in the polished mahogany table. Seated around it was a collection of the most powerful and secretive people on Earth.
General McCaffrey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, sat stiffly in his dress uniform. Beside him, Director-General Ivanov of Roscosmos stared at his hands. China's Minister of State Security, Mr. Feng, watched everyone with an unreadable expression. And at the head of the table, representing ISRO and the Indian government, was Chairman K. Nair, the man who had taken the 3 AM call.
The screen at the front of the room lit up, displaying the 1944 photograph of the Giza orrery.
A man in a sharp Savile Row suit, Sir Malcolm Hayes, head of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee, stood up. He looked more like a university dean than a spymaster.
"Good morning," he said, his voice calm and precise. "For centuries, organizations that predate all of our modern governments have been aware of... anomalies. Whispers in the historical record that were treated as mythology. The 1944 Giza discovery was the first hard confirmation. It was immediately classified 'Umbra-Omega' by the Allies, and its discovery was 'sanitized' after the war. The original research team, including Dr. Thorne, were unfortunately lost in a bombing raid."
He clicked a remote. A new slide appeared, showing a scanned page from a notebook.
"This is from the private codex of Leonhard Euler, 1776. In it, he describes calculations for a 'binary partner' to Earth, a Zwillingswelt, whose gravitational mathematics he claimed were 'divinely impossible' and 'a terror to the mind.' We found similar, veiled references in Mayan codices, in the lost logs of the Ming dynasty's treasure fleet, and in the private diaries of Isaac Newton."
Sir Malcolm let the implication hang in the dead-silent room. This was not a new threat. It was an ancient, cyclical one.
"These findings," he continued, his voice dropping, "were classified. Anyone who stumbled upon them, any academic or astronomer who got too close to the truth, was... redirected. In rare, persistent cases, medical amnestics were administered. The truth was deemed too destabilizing to the human psyche. We were protecting civilization from a concept that could shatter it."
General McCaffrey snorted, his thick fingers drumming on the table. "Well, so much for that. The 'concept' is currently decelerating on a hard burn and will be in our sky for every man, woman, and child to see in five days. The question isn't what Euler wrote. The question is, what the hell do we tell people?"
Director Li, representing China, spoke for the first time, his voice smooth and measured. "We must tell them. Immediately. A controlled release. We announce the discovery of a 'large, rogue object.' We express 'cautious scientific optimism.' We leak data, we let the media debate it. We let the shock explode now, and then cool down. By the time it arrives, the world will have processed the initial panic. A gradual burn is preferable to a global firestorm."
"That's insane," McCaffrey shot back, his face reddening. "You can't 'control' this! The moment we say 'planet,' the markets will vaporize. We'll have food riots in twelve hours. The 'what-ifs' will collapse our global supply chains before a single alien... thing... even shows up. No. We maintain total information black-out. We use every cyber-warfare and intelligence asset at our disposal to scrub the web, to disinformation campaigns. We buy ourselves every second of normalcy we can to prepare our forces."
"Prepare for what, General?" Chairman Nair asked, his voice heavy with the dread of the man who saw it first. "You've seen the mass calculations. It is 2.5 times the size of Earth. Why hasn't its gravity already flung us into the sun? Why isn't it tearing the Moon from its orbit? The laws of physics, as we know them, have been... suspended."
A new voice, a woman's, cut through the argument. She sat at the far end, under the sigil of the United Nations. Director-General Kurosawa, head of the newly-formed, black-budget agency: the Global Defence Initiative (GDI).
"We are preparing for the unknown," Kurosawa said. "The GDI, in coordination with NATO and every national command here, is on standby. All global nuclear-missile defense systems are being re-tasked for orbital tracking. We are moving to DEFCON 2 and its international equivalents. This is not a drill. This is, as of this morning, an official standby for... intercontinental and interstellar intervention."
The argument raged for an hour. In the end, secrecy won. McCaffrey's argument, backed by the Russians and the GDI, carried the vote. The world would be kept in the dark, kicking and screaming, until the last possible moment.
_____________________________________
SEVEN HOURS LATER
AN ARROYO NEAR EL PASO, TEXAS, USA
"Dude, shut up, shut up! I'm getting a signal lock!"
Leo Ramirez, nineteen, skinny as a rail and wired on cheap energy drinks, adjusted a knob on a complex-looking rig of wires, salvaged server parts, and a massive, dented parabolic dish spray-painted matte black. His two friends, Miguel and Sarah, huddled around the laptop.
They called it "Project Aether-Watch." A homemade software-defined radio telescope. Their goal was to find... well, anything.
"It's not a pulsar, Leo," Sarah murmured, pointing at the waterfall display. "The frequency... it's not natural. It's... a thrum. A deep-bass... thrum."
"I know, I know!" Leo's fingers flew, routing the signal through a new algorithm. "I'm cross-referencing it with that data fragment that got leaked from some Indian observatory last night. The one that got scrubbed in, like, ten seconds. I saved it. And... holy..."
The screen flashed. A 3D orbital plot, rough and pixelated, resolved itself. It showed Earth, the Moon... and a third, massive vector line. A plot that screamed "powered burn."
"No way," Miguel breathed. "That's... that's not possible."
"It's real," Leo whispered, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and triumphant discovery. "Dude... it's real! We found it! We found it!"
Without a second thought, he packaged the data—their raw signal capture, the algorithm, and the orbital plot—and uploaded it.
FORUM: r/space
USER: AetherWatcher19
TITLE: HOLY SHIT - CONFIRMED 'OBJECT' BRAKING FOR LEO - DATA INSIDE - WE ARE NOT ALONE
They watched the post. In thirty seconds, it had ten upvotes. Then twenty. A comment appeared: "WTF is this real?" Another: "Data looks legit..."
Then, the post vanished.
"What?" Leo frantically hit refresh. "Page Not Found." He tried to log in. "Account Suspended."
"They... they deleted it," Sarah said, her voice small.
"Who's 'they'?" Miguel asked, looking around the empty, sun-baked desert arroyo.
The sound of tires on gravel answered him only a couple of hours later.
Three identical black Chevrolet Suburbans crested the ridge, descending on their position with professional, silent speed. They crunched to a stop, surrounding the teenagers' pickup truck.
Doors opened. Six men in identical black suits fanned out, their movements economical and precise. A woman in a matching pantsuit stepped out of the lead vehicle. She had sharp features and cold, analytical eyes.
"Leo Ramirez, Sarah Jenkins, Miguel Diaz," the woman stated. It wasn't a question. "You will surrender your equipment and come with us. Do not resist."
"Hey, this is America! You can't just..." Miguel started.
One of the men produced a small, silver canister and pressed a button. A high-frequency hiss filled the air, and Miguel clutched his head, dropping to his knees.
"Don't. Resist," the woman repeated, her voice bored.
They were ushered into the back of the center vehicle, the doors locking with a heavy, final thunk. The men outside were already, with shocking efficiency, dismantling Project Aether-Watch, packing it into sterile, foam-lined cases.
Leo, always the smartass, couldn't help himself. He leaned forward, his voice shaking. "So... what is it? The object. What is it?"
The woman, Agent Thorne, didn't even turn around from the front passenger seat.
"You are ordered to remain silent."
"C'mon, lady, we're not stupid. We know what we saw. Is it... is it aliens?"
Thorne sighed. She turned, her eyes devoid of all emotion, and nodded to the man sitting beside the teens. "They're compromised. Amnesic protocol. Wipe the last 48 hours."
The man pulled out a medical kit and a hypospray injector that looked like something from Star Trek.
"Wait, wait, no!" Sarah screamed.
As the man grabbed Leo's arm, the terrified teen yelled at his friends, a desperate, pre-planned code word they'd joked about if they ever got caught.
"NINJA BREATHING! COMMENCE NINJA BREATHING! NOW!"
Leo and Miguel shut their eyes, inhaling and exhaling in a rapid, controlled, and utterly pathetic pattern they'd read about online, a half-baked theory that hyper-oxygenation could fight a sedative.
Agent Thorne watched, unimpressed. "What are they doing?"
"Some kind of breathing technique, ma'am," the agent said, pressing the hypospray to Leo's neck. It hissed.
Leo's eyes rolled back, his "ninja breathing" turning into a soft snore.
Thorne turned back to face the front as the agent moved to the other two. "Pathetic. Dump them in Hobbs, New Mexico. Let them wake up with a hangover and no memory of how they got there."
The Suburban's engine roared to life, leaving a cloud of dust in the arroyo.
High above, in the darkening twilight sky, the first, faintest sign of the new visitor was already beginning to resolve itself, visible only to the most powerful, classified telescopes.
Only... 5... days... remain.