“What the hell?” Decker frowned. He had expected the machines to scribble widely as they either registered the massive hammer-blow to the earth, or the sensors were destroyed – the digital feeds registered neither result.

“What’s going on here? What just happened?” He turned to the room and was met with confused stares.

“Goddamnit, give me the VELA feed, now.”

Decker’s screen flipped to high-altitude images from the satellite, and he drilled down to the black stain over the Kentucky landscape. He had expected to see a towering mushroom cloud of heat, and the debris of the earth, the burrower beneath, and vaporized human souls rising into the atmosphere. There should have also been a massive shock wave obliterating everything in a giant ring growing out from the detonation point. Decker knew that a nuclear detonation of that size would have achieved temperatures of around 180 million degrees, about ten times that of the surface of the Sun. Everything should have been slag. Ground zero, the melt zone, should be nothing but a crater like something only seen on another world.

But instead, it was as before. Decker leaned forward, squinting – not quite. The ground moved and heaved, like a monstrous blanket stirring with a waking sleeper beneath.

“Did we not get burn? He spun left and right. “Well? Talk to me.”

A military technician at another bank of screens shook his head. “No, it detonated. It just…” he stood back “…I don’t know…but the device definitely triggered.”

“Jesus Christ.” Decker felt like his head was going to explode. “Give me the VELA feed from the time of the drop – back it up.”

In a few seconds, the data froze and then swapped back to a silent view from space. A timer at the bottom of the screen counted down from the bomb release until it reached zero – impact. The digital counter continued, but this time it measured progress as the massive B83 bunker buster drilled its way down through the rock and soil. But just when it was milliseconds away from its target depth, the ground below it appeared to open. There was a surge as something huge grotesquely blossomed like a gargantuan tentacled flower, and then the counter stopped. There was an orange glow, and the oily smudge of the underground monster visibly swelled, but then, nothing.

Decker fell back heavily into his chair. “It…swallowed it.” He leaned forward and clawed his fingers up through his hair. He looked up into the screen, now back to real-time, and his mouth dropped open. “Oh god no.” As he watched the earth became a window into Hell. The massive stain was still there, closer and now with substance. A miles-wide head could be made out, and surrounding it, titanic arms moved beneath a surface that was still as yet unbroken. But what horrified Decker the most was the giant single eye the size of a city block.

General Decker opened his mouth, ready to issue his next orders. Instead, he stayed silent, his mouth hanging open for several seconds. He slowly closed it. He had no more options.