Chapter Twenty

Kallandra lifted an eyebrow in disbelief. “Blake’s been back twenty thousand years?”

“Give or take a couple of thousand. We used carbon fourteen dating on the knife’s bone handle. He was in a cave in the desert. Probably Middle East. Sand grains and other debris in his clothing and trainers might narrow down the area.”

“And you believe him? Assuming you don’t find the sand was from Weston-Super-Mare, it means there were eight spheres. Messes up your math, Derek.”

“Not necessarily. There might have been dozens of spheres. Now, eight with the one in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. And the Middle-East one was small.

Blake describes the hole in the cave floor and roof as fitting a beach ball, not seventy nine metres, like these.”

She fought back the urge to criticize Blake’s observational abilities. “So, that fits the tapered exit holes, and the theory they’ve been gathering something—exotic particles, time dechorences.”

“How big would something have to be to collect time? And you could fit millions of exotic particles in a matchbox.”

She put on her hurt look. “Hey, there’s enough theory bashers knocking me down, thanks.”

They sat in the communications lab, watching the screen for a NORAD update on the incoming asteroid. The time was due for the first image to be transmitted from a close-encounter orbiting telescope.

“Derek, is that scrolling data from the incoming object or the outgoing spheres?”

“The spheres are manoeuvring, it seems, to converge in a geostationary orbit at seventy-three degrees East.”

“I presume, like all geostationary satellites, that’s over the equator. So what’s beneath them on the ground?”

“The southern tip of the Maldive Islands is the closest. There’s only the Indian Ocean directly beneath them so it’s probably insignificant.”

“Unless they need to communicate with something down there, or need rapid access, bearing in mind they can sure travel fast when they choose to.”

Derek pointed at a newspaper on the console desk. “Have you seen this garbage?”

“Sadly, yes. I’m gonna have words with that Tabitha Wish. It’s a deliberate incitement to riot.”

“She’s only doing her job, which is to sensationalise everything.”

Kallandra admired the journalist for her pulling in all directions adding to unknowns in a story. She’d explored the possibilities that the spheres were leaving not because they’d finished their mission on Earth but escaping because they knew a killer asteroid was on its way. Risking panic in the streets like that was quite reprehensible, yet cunning in a way. Ms. Wish must have known, even when she wrote it, that the incoming rock was too small to do serious damage to the planet as a whole, but she’d claimed that it was merely a forerunner of others. Of course there would always be more asteroids, but probably not just following this one.

“Just journalistic hype. Ignore her. I don’t hear any riots, do you?”

“Derek, to say that Rome is likely to be obliterated tomorrow is irresponsible.

There were riots there. Where did she get her data—I mean the course projection coordinates? The leaker should be strung up.”

“It wasn’t you, then?” Derek said, his finger heading for left-ear gouge until she stopped him.

“I’m hurt that you’d think it was. Probably a man, Wish has a way of weedling information out of you weaklings.”

Derek returned his screen to a course analysis and simulator. “You know if that incoming object maintains its course vectors, and if those spheres converge where we predict…”

“I’m ahead of you. So no coincidence then. We have some checking to do. But, Derek, NORAD should know this by now, so why aren’t they telling us?”