Ragnarok

Chapter 28 - Reflection

Micah came back to his body just as it was finishing a workout in the centrifuge, followed by a low-gravity jog through the tunnels of the colony. As his visual input switched back to his real eyes, he was in a large atrium with hardened duraglass windows, looking up at Earth. It was mostly in shadow, however, and all he could really see was the clusters of lights, self-sealed metropolises underneath airtight domes.

He wiped sweat from his forehead and regained his bearings, picking a tunnel that headed back towards his room. As he started jogging again, he wondered what Rei had been wanting. His VI assistant had been trying to get his attention several times during the evacuation of Valhalla, but as one of the guild leaders, he needed to stick around at least until the last refugee was through.

Vladimir had been the last one to cross. Micah remembered the look on the Russian's face as he paused at the very edge of the Bifrost's gate, then drew his sword and spun around with a deliberate, two-handed slash. The edges of the circular gate shattered like thin glass, and with a terrible crashing sound the gate slammed shut, closing the Rainbow Bridge permanently.

Micah sighed as he reached his room, feeling exhaustion hit him now that he was back in his flesh-and-blood body. He shook his head, moving over to his favorite chair, and blinked twice to summon Rei. She phased into view in her usual spot, floating benignly at his right side. She smiled at him when he turned to her and yawned, trying to shake off the feeling of enervation that was slowing his thoughts to a crawl.

"Welcome back, Master. Quite a bit has happened since you logged in," Rei said, raising her hand and hitting invisible buttons in the air, bringing up several windows in which video started playing. Micah reached out to his bedside table, only half paying attention, and ordered up a Moon Dew, the latest soda fad among the colonists. All he cared about was it was sweet and fizzy, with lots of caffeine. He never had gotten a taste for coffee, far too bitter for his taste.

When the soda had been dispensed into one of the magnetized steel cups, it floated over to his hand, and he drank deeply, sighing in bliss as the sugary carbonation invigorated him, along with a surge of energy from the caffeine. He lowered the cup, belched loudly, grinned sheepishly at Rei's mild look of reproach, and then concentrated on the videos, starting on the upper left. It was the shortest one anyway, so it had already looped around twice.

"Is that the Sephirot?" he asked, pointing to a swifly moving point of light near the edge of Jupiter's atmosphere. He glanced at the corner of the window and saw that the video had been recorded by an autonomous camera on Callisto. "Looks like this was earlier tonight ... woah!" Micah reached out for the screen with caffeine-enhanced speed. The virtual screen 'clicked' when his finger reached it, and then with a sideways motion he was able to rewind the feed. Then he just stared.

"Where on Earth did that gigantic meteor come from? I'm looking for signs of it before the 1:03.45 mark, and there's nothing. It's like it just appeared out of nowhere."

"Officials suspect that there may have been some kind of interference field shrouding the object up until that point. Then for whatever reason, the interference stopped, and we saw ... this."

The video scrolled forward to the moment the meteor appeared, and it was incredible to think that something so huge could be hidden so thoroughly. The rock approaching Jupiter's horizon was gigantic, almost a moon in itself. And it had appeared directly above the Sephirot, just as it had been about to exit the gas giant's upper atmosphere and complete the gravity-assisted slingshot maneuver.

"Were there any craft detected by the observatories nearby the object?" Micah asked, taking another swig of his Moon Dew.

"None, but if there were craft capable of manifesting a cloaking field large enough to hide this beastie, it should be child's play to make a small spacecraft undetectable." She paused it again, then duplicated the window so that she could rewind one of them.