James Axler - Oblivion Stone

“We’ve checked sunspot activity,” Bry told her. “In fact, it was one of the first things that Lakesh suggested—but there’s nothing.”

“Do you have footage?” Brigid asked.

At a nearby desk, lanky Brewster Philboyd overheard Brigid’s request and called up something on his own computer monitor with a quick tapping of the keys. “This is what we’ve got,” he told her.

Brigid dropped down from where she perched by Bry’s desk and stepped over to watch the footage playing on Philboyd’s monitor. It was a fairly standard satellite photo, showing an unspecified terrain of yellow-brown color, coupled with the dark blue edge of water to one side, and a white blush of clouds drifting across the center. Brigid watched for a few seconds, noticing the slightest movement of the shadows of the clouds on the terrain beneath, confirming that it was not simply a static image. After fifteen seconds, the image abruptly cut to static.

“15.37.08,” Brewster told her.

“Play it again,” Brigid instructed, her eyes still on the monitor’s recorded satellite feed.

Brewster tapped at his keyboard for a moment, and then the image seemed to reset itself before the sequence repeated. He ultimately played it a further seven times before Brigid caught what it was she was searching for.

“There’s a shadow,” Brigid told him.

By this stage Donald Bry and several of the other techs had joined them to watch the sequence for themselves, wondering at what Brigid’s eerily insightful mind might discover that they had missed.

Brewster ran the fifteen-second sequence once more, and Brigid closed her eyes and counted it down in her head. “Sun’s roughly overhead. Watch the cloud to the bottom right of the screen,” she instructed, not bothering to open her eyes. With her exceptional memory, Brigid was able to reconstruct the sequence with incredible accuracy in her mind, and she used that facility to focus in on the information she wanted, magnifying the image in her head. “Twelve, thirteen,” she counted to herself, and then she pronounced in a louder voice, “shadow.”

Then the feed went dead once more, the clock indicator showing 15.37.08.

A smile played across Brigid’s lips as she opened her eyes and saw Donald, Brewster and the others turning from the static-filled screen to stare at her in openmouthed bewilderment.

“It’s there for a second,” Bry said.

“Less than that,” Brewster corrected. “What is it?”

Brigid’s brow furrowed as she thought it over, trying to transform the half-second shadow on the uneven surface of the cloud into a three-dimensional object. “Pass me your notepad,” she instructed.

Brewster Philboyd did so, handing her a pen, as well. Still standing, Brigid bent over the table and sketched hurriedly on the pad until she had roughed out a side view of a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Then she drew the shadow that they had seen upon it, recalling the details from her mind while Brewster brought up a static frame for reference for the others. Sketching three quick lines out from the shadow, she extrapolated its form, interpreting the shape of the object that must have cast it. It was roughly circular, fat at its girth so that it appeared to be more like a flattened or squashed circle. The edge seemed ragged, deliberately so, for Brigid’s penmanship was precise. When she had finished she showed the others her sketch, and the notebook was passed around the handful of technicians standing around the desk.

“What is that?” Donald asked as he gazed at the ragged, circular object that Brigid had drawn.

“Unless it’s been severely damaged, it’s almost certainly nothing mechanical or man-made,” Brigid said. “It’s too irregular. I think it’s a meteor.”

“Couldn’t be,” Bry muttered, shaking his head with disbelief. “It would have to be pretty big to knock out both satellites so completely.”

When he looked up, Donald Bry found Brigid staring at him with her piercing emerald eyes. “Is there a new rule?” she inquired coquettishly.

“What do you mean?” Bry asked.

“Meteors can only get so big now?” Brigid suggested.

In spite of himself, Bry laughed at her comment. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just so unbelievable. We’ve had trouble coming at us from every which way since Cerberus was established—aliens and parasites and insane tribal killers. I just never expected to lose everything so suddenly because of a natural phenomenon.”

“Meteors don’t always travel alone,” Brigid pointed out. “Could be a storm, with two separate rocks knocking into our equipment.”

As the discussion continued, Lakesh, Kane and Grant came over to see what the commotion was. When Bry explained Brigid’s extrapolation based on the data, Lakesh looked concerned.

Kane sidled up to Brigid as the others discussed the implications of her theory. “You wouldn’t have thought a big chunk of rock would cause so much upset,” he muttered.

Brigid looked at him. “An impacting meteor could fall into the class of an extinction-level event, Kane,” she told him quietly.

Kane made a show of looking at his hands, checking he was in one piece before looking back at her with a lopsided grin. “And yet we still stand.”

Brigid shook her head in despair. “A meteor killed the dinosaurs, darling,” she told him sarcastically.

“An’ if it takes out lizards, I’m all for it,” Kane assured her.

Afternoon was beginning its soft surrender to evening, and the moon could be seen high in the pale sky, a white orb peering down from the curtain of slowly darkening blue.

Peter Marks sat contentedly on the old bench that rested on the stoop outside his front door, his glasses perched on his nose, his faithful hound Barney dozing at his feet. It had been a long day, just like any other, up at 5:00 a.m. to work the fields. Now he was happy just to sit in the cooling breeze and read while his wife toiled in the kitchen to prepare dinner. Today, Peter Marks was reading a dog-eared history book that outlined the establishment of the Program of Unification and told of the horrors of the beforetimes. It was a strange thing to read about, up here in the north, so far from the mighty villes and their sophisticated ways—almost like reading about an alien world. Here in the place that the old maps called Saskatchewan, Canada, the villes and their strictures seemed like something from another planet.

Peter Marks had worked these fields for as long as he could remember, and before that the fields had been worked by his father, who had still called him Junior until the day he died forty years ago. Two years shy of his sixtieth birthday, Peter was still powerfully built with the strength of an outdoors man and the thinning white hair and tired eyesight that came with age. The Marks Farm had stood out here in the middle of nowhere for longer than anyone could remember, yielding crops of carrots and beets and potatoes that Peter and his wife would take to market fifteen miles away and trade for everything else they needed. It was a hard life, but it had an honesty and a simplicity that Peter enjoyed. As his father had told him so many times as they sat down at the dinner table to enjoy the food he had grown, “There’s a truth to growing things that won’t ever be found in any ville.” Peter agreed, though he found himself fascinated by the literature that the villes produced, so caught up in their little worlds and their narrow worldviews.

As Peter’s eyes worked over the page, reading slowly and carefully, following the line of his finger, Barney suddenly woke up and let out a bright yip. Peter reached down and stroked the old mongrel on his flank as the dog stood and peered at the sky above the fields.