The collision lasted less than a second.

Two bodies, each the size of a small mountain, had been drifting through the asteroid belt for a billion years when a subtle shift in gravitational forces nudged them toward each other. The closing speed was nearly eighty thousand miles per hour. There was no sound. No witness. Only the silent violence of rock meeting rock in the void between worlds.

The impact spawned a cloud of debris that expanded outward across an ocean of space. Most of it would drift aimlessly for eternity. But two large fragments were different. The collision had given them something the others lacked.

Direction.

Both were aimed, with the indifferent precision of physics, toward the third planet from the Sun. The first arrived sixty-six million years ago. It did not arrive quietly.

The second rock is still coming.

Terminus Station 20-August-2033

Daan de Vries was awake before anyone else on the first-shift crew this morning. Everyone had become accustomed to the constantly howling winds of winter at the station, but Daan had been awakened by thoughts of home, and his new bride. Just a few more months on the station and he would have a ninety day leave to enjoy at his home in Amsterdam. He used his pocket communicator to send a brief text message to his wife. No answer. He hadn’t heard from her yesterday either. He did the math in his head again: 4am here equals 11am in Amsterdam. Where could she be and why wasn’t she responding?

The event was at the Palais des Académies, all champagne and polite applause for a room full of people who’d spent careers waiting for a night like this. Daan had just been named chief scientist for the new Antarctic Research Station. He had been rehearsing a toast in his head instead of listening to the minister’s speech when a woman in the second row caught him smiling at nothing. Afterward she found him by the window, still holding his glass like a prop, and asked him to explain his own research back to her, plainly, no jargon, “the way you’d tell it to your grandmother.” He tried. She corrected two of his numbers before he’d finished the sentence.

Her name was Noor Bakker. Oxford, then ETH Zurich, then snapped up by the European Space Agency, where people had already started saying her name the way they said names that would matter later. They talked past midnight, past the last of the champagne, past the point where either of them was still discussing orbital mechanics. Three months later they were engaged. He never did meet her parents before the wedding, there wasn’t time, or so it seemed then. Everyone said it was the perfect union of two people married to their work and, apparently, to each other.

The hundred-billion dollar Terminus Station project was funded by a consortium of wealthy European leaders and investors weary from dealing with the West and its wild political gyrations. The group was investing heavily in multiple science projects. This new remote outpost was to be a state-of-the-art observation platform keeping close watch on threats from space. Wayward rocks that might threaten life on the planet. Though it wasn’t clear what precisely would be done if a threat was identified, the concept was this station would provide advanced notice, perhaps years earlier than existing lookouts and sentries. It would be worth the cost they believed, and could help pay for itself in other ways that hadn’t yet been relayed to the handful of researchers who were selected from literally thousands of applicants.

It had been a particularly rough winter following a years long effort to finalize the herculean tasks required to assemble and activate the new research station. Terminus Station, code named Sentinel, became the 81st scientific outpost on Antarctica. Most of these outposts were clustered around coastal areas of the frozen continent, Terminus was a thousand miles inland, far from any man-made radio interference, and away from prying eyes.

The collection of six high-tech modules with raised hydraulic legs were joined by “tubes” giving the overall station the appearance of an incredibly expensive habitat for pet hamsters. Two of the modules were dedicated living and dining quarters for the fourteen person crew who would call this place “home” for nine months at a stretch. One other module was dedicated for storage and did double duty as the station’s sick-bay. The other three modules housed scientific equipment and office space for the working crew.

Nine dish antennas were installed around the perimeter of the station that sat on a snow-covered plain at an elevation of nearly 3,000 meters. Six of these antennas were directed at different parts of the sky. Two others looked like typical ground-mounted satellite dishes, with one exception, these never moved. They were for communication via satellite and their signals could be directed using electronically phased arrays. Not having to physically move large antenna hardware in -45°C winds was a major benefit from this antenna technology.

Not many scientific outposts warranted a private satellite. This one did. Two of them in fact. High inclination geosynchronous satellites parked 15 degrees south of the equator. These satellites typically have an inclination of around 63.4 degrees, which helps them maintain a stable position relative to the Earth and provide more than enough bandwidth for basic communication and the wide-band transfer of incredibly large amounts of research data.

By the time breakfast was served Daan had determined he would find someone to locate Noor. The unusually long silence was feeding his growing concern that something wasn’t right back on the continent.