The general looked grave, “OK, Colonel we have the report on-screen now,” he said, his eyes looking to the left of the camera to something the colonel could not see. “Let’s see, Incident ID: ‘ColonelMiltonBl’…yes, well then,” the colonel flinched, but the general moved discreetly past the title, “yes, I see the atmospheric entry location estimates. Colonel, why don’t you tell us how you reached these conclusions?”

The colonel went to speak and then thought better of trying to explain it, saying instead with a cautioning glance, “Mr. Danielson, maybe you would like to go over the details of the new trajectories.”

Neal took a breath, noted to himself that he really was every bit as pigheaded as his ex-girlfriends used to say, and then, after arranging his thoughts more cohesively, he began: “General Pickler, sir, what Dr. West, Colonel Milton and I decided after reviewing the data available was that there was a potential that this meteoroid cloud wouldn’t follow the same mass estimating theories established in the past. You see, sir, there is a notable lack of both a central mass and a gas cloud. This is important here because we can see…”

Neal continued with his cogent explanation and found himself finally beginning to see how much easier it would be if he behaved a little more like the intelligent person he purported himself to be.

Chapter 4: Their Eyes Upon Us

300,000 miles out from Earth along our equatorial plane, the cluster’s speed, though diminished, is still faster than any craft we have ever manufactured as it rushes to meet us, our gravity bending its path gently inward. It flies past the orbital radius of the moon without preamble and over the next few hours it enters its final approach to Earth. The vast majority of the chunks of matter are lifeless astral rock, the leftover building blocks of a trillion planets and suns. They are, as predicted by Neal Danielson, less riddled by the scars of gaseous escape and freeze-cracking than would typically be expected, but bar that, they are mostly unexceptional.

As the cluster’s leading edge starts to brush the outer limits of the troposphere, the paths of eight specific pieces distinguish their trajectories in ways not dissimilar from the predictions of some of the more astute scientists at the various radar arrays and observatories monitoring the cluster’s approach. Though far from smooth or regular, close inspection of these particular eight masses would show that in some of the cracks and dents that do dot their surfaces there appear to be patches of a smooth, matt material, as though inside these eight blocks something dark is hidden.

All eight rocks form part of the leading edge of the cluster as it dips farther into the atmosphere, and they begin to trace long, slow arcs across the night sky of Earth, rapidly approaching the dawning sun that is seemingly coming to meet them over the horizon.