Unknown Object

By William Soppitt

Today could be your last.

An unknown object impacts in a remote Moroccan town. Nothing prepared humanity for what happened next.

As cities fall, continents shift and the human race struggles to exist, one woman fights against her own demons as well as the people charged with the very survival of the human race.

Will Vivienne's belief in a young mute woman salvage what's left of humanity?

Do we even deserve to survive?

"I am responsible for ending our world. Nothing can save us. When the end comes, believe in the afterlife for there will be nothing left here to believe in. It's coming. We knew it would. We knew it could not be stopped."

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Soppitt
• Release date: Jul 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781505468601

Book preview

Contents.

Chapter One.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three.

Chapter Four.

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six.

Chapter Seven.

Chapter Eight.

Chapter Nine.

Chapter Ten.

Epilogue.

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I’m the one responsible for ending our world. Nothing can save us. When the end comes believe in the afterlife for there will be nothing left here to believe in. It’s coming. We knew it would. We knew it couldn’t be stopped.

CHAPTER ONE.

The object approached the welcoming glow of the Earth at a relatively slow speed before hitting the atmosphere in a burst of colour. A large oblong shape of ice and rock, about half the size of a commercial airliner, passed the international space station at 06:35 on the 7th of March. Undetected from the ground, the astronauts were the first to sound the alarm as it silently headed toward the earth below. The moment the object hit the atmosphere, debris peeled and dropped away burning and flaring in the night sky. Analysts and engineers at various ground stations were frantically checking and re-checking systems, trying to determine why all the equipment had failed to detect what they could clearly see.

Debris continued to fall away and disintegrate from the object. The rock and ice gave way to what appeared to be an egg-shaped, off-white structure, which had a flat, slightly indented front.

The trajectory marked the impact site as North Africa, Morocco, in the Western Sahara, about 500 miles southwest of Marrakech. A small population with little infrastructure.

Satellites tracked the object with cameras, picking up, enhancing, and screening them to an eager and confused scientific community. All were watching and waiting for the moment of impact.

Then it all changed.

The object tilted on its axis, and then it began spinning. The indented end slammed into the ground at an angle with the resulting shockwave sending sand and dust flying into the air, blocking the object from view.

Through the dust and rock fragments, seemingly held in mid-air, the object emerged. The oval tip pierced into the clear air then tilted, forcing the indented end skyward at a 70-degree angle to more than a mile high. The object travelled at least thirty miles southwest before the indented end again tilted and slammed into the ground and again the object emerged through the dust and debris tilting and turning as before.

A thin blue haze, an almost electric sheen, covered the object briefly as it rose above the dust. Still no instruments registered the object as existing, yet it was there for all the fixated scientists to see.

Fifteen minutes after the first impact, news channels and internet sites were already carrying video of the crater and surrounding wreckage. Reported as two separate meteor strikes, onlookers told how, without warning and no sound, they had witnessed something burning white-hot slam into the hillside. A crater, 200 meters wide and a quarter of a mile deep, was all that remained. With no official announcement, speculation had taken over as the population stood, motionless, heads tilted towards the orange and blue of the morning sky, waiting and watching for any sign of more to come.

The object had now been travelling for over 20 minutes, covering a distance of 48 miles, and, as yet, showed no sign of descending for another impact. Calculating where that would be was virtually impossible. The best anyone could do was to plot the trajectory. Knowing the trajectory would at least allow the analysts to prepare for possible scenarios.

Along the current heading of south-west from the last impact, lay the desolate expanse of the Western Sahara, the Atlantic Ocean, several island clusters, and then the densely populated area of northern Brazil.

Silently the object entered airspace over the ocean, just over five miles out from Cape Verde, it descended rapidly, striking the ocean with the indented end turning forward and hitting first. The resulting fountain of water rose over half a mile high, like a spike piercing the clear blue sky overhead.

When the wave hit the islands, it was large enough to cover the entire land mass, destroying buildings and decimating life. Fire raged over the surface of the water with bodies and debris littering the area. The tip of the object emerged, piercing the water, causing everything in its wake to spread outwards on the waves forming a circle of bodies and possessions. A large explosion shook the water where the object had appeared. The low sound reverberated under the surface as, within seconds, the whole area was bathed in a blinding light. The object, still rising, disappeared in the resulting mushroom-shaped cloud as two million tons of seawater, sand and debris lifted into the air.

As it climbed, it turned and twisted, as it had done before, pointing the indented end skyward and away from the devastation. The mushroom-shaped cloud started to disperse and gravity reclaimed the remains of what belonged. Where once stood the islands and its people, now was just a wash of debris, lapping on the low surf. No one cried out, nor was there any movement beyond the shallow breath of the ocean.

The object carried on into a dusk sky, heading toward the dark cover of night on its projected path. The next landfall would be Brazil and the area of São Luis.

The media coverage of the first two sites revealed footage taken at the first site showing a glowing white object. The video itself was blurred and unsteady, lasting less than a minute. It started moments immediately before impact, capturing the object, as it fell through the air and smashed into the buildings below. Raised voices could be heard shouting in Arabic with frantic camera movements, jerking and re-focusing, making it difficult to see what was happening. The blast and resulting debris vented into the area around the impact, masking the rise of the object. Then the shockwave pushed the person taking the video to the ground. Screams and cries pierced the smoke and dust as it engulfed the area. After that the footage stopped.

Analysis of the first impact had started to take place the moment the emergency services had arrived. Once a clearing zone was established and the crater tested for residual radiation, a search for survivors and for any remains of the meteor got underway. Not much of the original structure, which had occupied the area, remained. Twisted and melted frames rose at angles from the ground like trees with the life torn from them. Occasionally a short segment of wall still stood, but no more than three bricks high. Little hope remained of finding survivors, but a few grieving and distraught people still clawed at rocks, searching frantically for any sign of life.

As the search continued, the object reached further out across the Atlantic. Slowing down, it eventually hung in mid-air about 500 miles from its last impact and approximately four miles above the large swell of the ocean. The indented end of the object continued to point southwest towards Brazil some 250 miles from where it now stood, suspended. Despite its stillness, the object appeared far from motionless. The slight blue haze that covered it faintly pulsed like a heartbeat.

The cameras watching it from various satellites beamed the pictures back to the operation centres in several different countries. Analysts studied what they could see, some mumbling under their breath, others hunched over monitors trying to understand what they were looking at. It was anybody’s guess as to why it did not register on any equipment. Despite each of the communities trying to gauge why, and trying to come up with a theory, the invisibility it maintained to detection remained a mystery.

The object had now been motionless for nearly seven minutes. Then, the indented end slowly pivoted northwards. After a brief pause, it began moving again, smoothly accelerating until it reached a speed of 200 mph.

High above the dispersing clouds, the object’s speed fluctuated as it moved erratically from side to side.

Then, darting again to the left, a glint of bright light caught in the distance ahead. As the object got nearer, it became apparent that it had found the same flight path as a large passenger jet, the sun glinting off the tip of the plane’s tail.

Following, the object began to speed up. Then it lurched to move along the left side of the aircraft.

On the aircraft, a twelve-year-old boy shouted excitedly as he peered through one of the rear windows alerting the other passengers to the presence of the object. The cabin crew frantically looked to calm the situation as people moved to the windows trying to squeeze phones and other devices through any space they could.

A passenger on the right side of the plane called out that two fighter jets were coming in on his side. No sooner had he said it than the two Jets were alongside. One jet lifted over the top of the passenger airliner and slowly moved towards the rear of the object. Without warning, the object lurched to the right, slamming into, and through, the passenger airliner, splitting the large plane in half. The large rear section spun and caught the small jet fighter, side on, smashing the wing and top, trapping the pilot and causing the jet to tailspin towards the ocean. Passengers and debris from the plane littered the sky as the two sections spun, seemingly in slow motion, towards the ocean below.

The remaining fighter jet, on seeing the impact, quickly banked left and managed to avoid the wreckage in its path. With a swift lurch of the controls, the jet rolled right and lined up behind the object. A brief pause and two missiles streamed towards their target, each one trailing its white line of vapour like a guideline through the open sky.

Watching the trail left by the two rockets, the pilot slowed the aircraft putting enough calculated distance between him and the object and waited for the moment of impact. When the rockets hit, there was no large explosion, no explosion of any kind. The rockets simply glanced off the cone-shaped rear, then, without power, they dropped like a thrown stick, twisting and spiralling out of sight.

The pilot calmly watched as they fell, reporting over the radio, to central command, the sequence of events as they unfolded. Lining up again behind the object, he watched as the tracer rounds from his twin 25mm guns began to light a fiery trail toward their target. Again, the pilot calmly reported no effect as he banked right and throttled past. Once he had gained enough distance, he banked right again and headed back towards the object. With the target on his screen, he fired his two remaining rockets at the indented front. Reducing speed with a bank turn left, he watched as they reached the object and then, seemingly held suspended for a moment, fell away.

The pilot reported his attempts had been on target, but that the object showed no sign of damage. A sober voice communicated for him to shadow it from a safe distance for as long as possible and report any further activity.

For over an hour, the pilot had kept on the left shoulder of the object before two other jets arrived to take over. With the fuel warning buzzing in his ears, the pilot breathed a deep sigh of relief, as he ended his pursuit and headed back to base.

With different missiles attached to the replacement jets, both fired two rockets at once. Despite the change, the results were the same. The object carried on its course north over the Atlantic, seemingly oblivious to the attempts to stop it.

Daylight was starting to fade when new orders were issued to the pilots. Positioning themselves on either side, they watched as an RAF Raytheon Sentinel came into view and moved close to the rear of the object.

From a base on a small mid-Atlantic island, the Raytheon Sentinel was scrambled as the nearest surveillance aircraft in the area. As it climbed higher it attempted to analyse, measure and photograph every possible aspect of the object. Despite the visual confirmation, no equipment recognized anything other than the two escorting jets.

With the object continuing on its heading north over the Atlantic, the present course and speed would take it another six hours to hit land. An immediate order excluded all civilian air traffic out of the area while a two-hundred-mile moving exclusion zone was put in force around the object.

Without warning, the object suddenly dropped. It had slowly been climbing along its course and had reached 31000 feet. Now it spiralled towards the ocean. The two jets pursued with difficulty as they tried to maintain a safe distance and, at the same time, keep the object in view.

When the object hit the ocean below, it quickly disappeared. The three aircraft above circled like vultures over the area looking for any sign of movement.

After twenty-four minutes, the object appeared from exactly the same place it had entered the water. Rising slowly, it hovered two meters above the ocean swell. As the cameras from the Sentinel locked on to it, the object began to rotate and then came to a stop, like a beacon pointing at the ocean beneath it. Slowly, turning clockwise, it built up speed as the water underneath began forming a large yawning whirlpool, surrounding it like a pebble in a bowl.

Light shone from the object, a glowing, intense, bright white, temporarily blinding the cameras and the aircraft crews. As quickly as it had formed, the whirlpool crashed onto the object and the light was gone.

Immediately, the object started lifting and heading on a trajectory northeast of its position. The indented end pierced through the low spray of the ocean and narrowly missed the Raytheon Sentinel. As the various institutions watched, they began to recalculate the possible course and targets in its path.

In the Science Institute of London, a large computer screen showed the path the object had taken along with each impact and timeframe. A thin red line glowed on the map plotting the possible trajectory of what lay ahead in its current path. A yellow line trailed behind, displaying the earlier path of the object.

The timeframe along the red route projected that landfall would occur in the United Kingdom, at Plymouth, in two hours and thirty-seven minutes. Approximately forty miles further along the line was the Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station on the Bristol Channel coast.

As the red line turned yellow, a large digital clock, on the right of the screen, counted down the time before it was due to reach land.

George Watson was one of the figures watching the screen. Tall, with a swift thin figure and pale complexion that hid his forty-seven years, he stood at his desk, one of many in the room. His dark suit, which hung on his frame as if it were still in his wardrobe was topped by his red tie, lassoed untidily around his neck. He glanced at one of the three displays at his workstation. The middle screen showed the live video feed of the object, with its large white indent pushing through the air. The pictures from the Raytheon Sentinel, now half a mile in front of the object, were only a couple of seconds delayed, as it bounced the signal from a low orbit satellite.

Taking off his jacket and placing it on the side of the desk, George moved his hands over the keyboard and one of the screens flashed to show a smaller version of the data on the large screen. The other monitor flickered and started to show text, graphs and charts forming the total of the information collected by the Raytheon Sentinel.

The data showed the usual background noise and technical readings that would have been listed for an uneventful sweep of the area. Nothing showed that a large, white, deathly object, with a shape similar to that of a jet engine, was hurtling through the air. No sign of any type of propulsion or means to keep it in the air was apparent. No heat signature or cold spot.

Thinking the object may be rotating, he clicked on the rewind and sped backwards through the video, looking for the moment that the rockets had hit the object. He watched frame by frame as the tips pierced the faint blue haze surrounding it, but as they fell away, he still could not discern whether or not there was any rotation.

As he replayed the video, he sat back, running his fingers through his short dark hair. With no readings, there was no way to establish any sort of frequency or polarization of the blue haze that surrounded it. All the equipment was useless when every analysis was telling you nothing was there.

After several minutes gazing at the images, he decided to analyse the impact zones for any patterns or clues as to why