Feb 20, 2057, 0422 Hours (UTC +3)
Pan-Republic of the Horn
Somewhere over Benishangul-Gumuz
What Major Amare described to her convinced Araari that either he or General Zenawi or both had gone insane.
“I’m sorry, sentient rocks? Do you know how that sounds?” Araari said.
“I do, Colonel. That was our reaction when our man in the Sudanese Defense Ministry told us. Here are the photos.”
Amare passed a stack each to her and Tarik.
The pictures were of a rock formation like a cross between a gazebo and a crab, and running up its pillar-like appendages were craggy veins, giving the formation a strangely organic appearance. The photos were taken aerially from several different angles in the light of sunset, the series showing the rock formation emerging from the sands of the Nubian desert before moving northeast, somehow without lifting its appendages.
“This was yesterday?” she asked.
“Affirmative,” replied Amare. “We got a hold of the photos around 0000 hours this morning. The Sudanese are trying to keep it under wraps for fear of either us or the Egyptians using it as a pretext for intervention. Unfortunately for them, their OpSec is on par with children playing imaginary war. We know for a fact Egyptian moles have the same photos and if they do then so do America, China, and the USE.”
“And we’ve ruled out the Sudanese making some incomprehensible geopolitical play with photo manipulation here?” she asked, wondering if drawing Egypt and the Pan-Republic into a proxy war made somebody richer.
“We haven’t. That’s why we’re breaking international law to see for ourselves,” the major replied.
“Are we fighting this thing? Shit would be wild, gwad!” Tarik said.
“Not in Sudan we’re not,” Araari said. “But I imagine this… rock, it doesn’t care about borders, does it?”
“That is what we are assuming,” Amare replied.
On that matter, Araari sympathized with it. Thirty years of a Nile water cold war had convinced her that borders were increasingly vestigial. The problems of the 21st-century knew no borders. And truthfully, she had always considered Pan-Ethiopianism nothing but a stepping stone to Pan-Africanism and from there to Pan-Humanism, a project she accepted might not be completed in this millennia. Nonetheless, she kept the idea private to not complicate the already messy process of galvanizing Ethiopians, Eritreans, Djiboutians, and Somalians and all the various ethnic groups thereof into a single identity of Hornya.
Her fear, should this bizarre rock formation prove to be an international issue, was precisely the same as the Sudanese: That the Pan-Republic and Egypt might turn it into a proxy war. Despite her very public statements about the need for peace and brotherhood amongst the people of Africa, not everyone in the military and government agreed with Araari. Not even all the Pan-Democrats.
After another two hours of flying, Araari felt a thunk underneath her seat from the tiltjets shifting. A second later the V-30 rocked against an uneven surface and the cargo doors opened to a rolling expanse of rocks and sandstone extending to the horizon. The expanse was broken by three things: A plateau in the far distance, a cluster of camouflaged tents and soldiers in desert camo near the landing site, and in the vast desert between them, a dome of rocks on four craggy columns moving ponderously through the scrub and earth
“Ya Allah…” Araari said.
“Holy shit,” Tarik said.
Even in person, the rock formation did not seem real. Araari imagined this must be how animals who had not evolved alongside humans saw them. There was something both alien and familiar in the giant being, being both a sight never before seen by human eyes, yet bearing resemblance to a crab, a spider, and the desert landscape all at once. Its size was enormous, though the desert it ambled through made it impossible to quantify. Even then, it must have dwarfed her 38-meter tall TOCU.
As they entered the observation camp, General Zenawi emerged from a tent.
Araari and Tarik saluted.
“Good morning, sir,” Araari said.
“It is undeniably a morning, colonel. We’ll see how good it is,” he replied.
Zenawi took them to the edge of the camp where a pit had been dug and covered with a desert-pattern tarp. Two spotter-observer pairs scrutinized the moving rock formation and were so entranced by it they didn’t notice the arrival of the general.
“What do we know about it so far, sir?” Araari asked.
“Not a lot beyond its dimensions,” Zenawi replied, standing with his hands behind his back. “We know it’s around 150 meters tall, 300 meters long, with an ovaloid, convex top representing about 40 meters of its height from base to apex. Its method of locomotion is four equidistant appendages, four stacks of rock, each measuring roughly 15 meters in diameter, which push it through the sand without ambulation. This suggests its body is partly subterranean. Its external body composition is homogenous, made entirely of sedimentary rock. However—” General Zenawi pointed at the thing and then swung his finger towards the west. “The composition is consistent with Saharan sediment, not Nubian.”
Araari raised her eyebrow at that. She suspected she might already know the importance of that, but she asked anyway.
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“What are we to take from that?”
“That if this becomes an international incident, the African Herd is implicated,” Zenawi said, using a less-than-complimentary term for the African Federation. The joke was that the “federation” were a bunch of sheep being shepherded by Nigeria. Admittedly, it was mostly true.
Despite Araari predicting this observation, it blew Tarik’s mind.
“I didn’t even think of that, gwad! That’s some 4-dimensional chess,” he said, making a gesture of his mind being blown.
In a vacuum, Tarik’s informality would’ve been rude and inconsiderate even in civilian society. “Gwad” was not what you called a general. However, Tarik had a way about him that made most people—including Araari herself, though it pained her—wave his antics off with an “oh you rascal!” General Zenawi was no exception, chuckling at the young man’s excitement and clapping a hand on his shoulder and squeezing.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste. You know who said that? Winston Churchill,” Zenawi said, and this wisdom awed Tarik even more.
It was Saul Alinsky, thought Araari, though she would never correct a general.
Araari cleared her throat of the dry desert air. “In the long-term we might draw the AF in. But I note that this pile of rocks—”
“We have taken to calling them Monoliths,” Zenawi interrupted, using the same Hornya word that referred to rock-hewn churches.
“Yes sir. But I note that this Monolith is very close to our border, and that Niger is not,” she said.
“No. But see, it moves northwards,” Zenawi said, pointing towards the horizon.
At the very edge of her vision Araari could see a rise in the desert and splotches of darkness indicating floodplain farms. She knew without being able to see that just behind the dunes and farm was the Nile. And the Nile meant humanity.
“About 125 klicks north of here there is a town called Goshabi. Our Monolith is moving at a pace of about thirty-two klicks an hour, meaning it will arrive in Goshabi around 1030 hours,” Zenawi said.
Araari’s eyes widened. “You’re waiting to see what it does when it reaches human civilization?”
Zenawi smiled a patronizing smile, as though internally debating whether a podunk Sudanese town counted as “human civilization.” Relationships between the average Sudanese and Horn person were cordial, but Araari had noticed an increasing trend among Pan-Republican leadership of viewing Sudan as nothing but a poor manager of rightful Ethiopian resources, be they mineral, petrochemical, hydro, or organic. A poor manager who might unwittingly give these resources away to the Egyptians. The trend was concerning to Araari, who considered Sudan and her people potential participants in a Pan-Republic of East Africa.
Zenawi did not share this vision, though he had the tact to notice the Colonel’s discomfort with his chauvinism and added, “well, it is fortunate for everyone that it’s such a small town under threat rather than Khartoum where the Monolith could do more damage. I am sure their government can at least orchestrate an evacuation effort.”
His tone of voice sounded as though he doubted it would be a very good evacuation effort.
“We ought to help them blow it up or something,” Tarik said. “I wanna fight this big rock, of course. Who wouldn’t? But a couple cruise missiles oughta crumple it, yeh?”
Zenawi laughed. “Don’t forget whose land we’re standing on. If this were an official Pan-Republican mission, we would be breaking international law right now! But of course, we were never here and we don’t know anything about this strange geological phenomenon, do we son?”
Tarik seemed to genuinely think about it for a second before catching on that General Zenawi’s question wasn’t a question but an order to not spill military secrets in the club. Tarik had been advised numerous times that some of the women filling up his glass of honey brandy in the club were foreign spies, and although he claimed to be in control while drunk, it was a constant source of anxiety for military leadership.
To Tarik’s credit, no information leaks had been traced to him, but if he wasn’t a Lion Rider he would have been court martialed years ago. He was lucky being a TOCU pilot was a genetic fluke that made him irreplaceable.
“It’s unfortunate, but he’s right,” Araari said, biting down her own distaste for leaving the people of Goshabi at the mercy of nature. “We’re on someone else’s sovereign earth at present.”
General Zenawi left the two pilots for a moment and came back with a half dozen soldiers hauling large briefcases. What these were, as Araari well knew, were carrying cases for RQ-35 Eyestalks. Portable stealth drones. The soldiers popped the latches to reveal the control and display computer as well as the thin, rod-like drone itself. Taking them out of the case, the pilots pressed a button on the briefcase controls and the drones unfurled paper-thin rotors whirring like hummingbirds and flew off.
At a distance of a kilometer, the pencil-shaped drones were easily mistaken for eye floaters. At a distance of ten, they were invisible.
The gigantic Monolith, however, became more visible. On the drone control displays, the Monolith’s innumerable crevices and protrusions were brought into high-definition relief along with an up-close look at the sheer force and energy involved with its motion as the geological features zoomed by at twenty miles an hour, forcing the drone pilots to synchronize their drone’s velocity to the Monolith’s. Once they had, General Zenawi gave orders.
“You two fly above, you two below, you investigate the closer leg to the right, you the far one to the left.”
The nearly-identical screens the drone pilots were watching abruptly diverged in what they displayed. The drones who went towards the legs filled their screen with a rotating pillar of stone.
“Keep it steady,” Zenawi ordered.
“The drone is steady, sir. The legs are spinning,” the pilot responded.
Drawing back until the landscape behind the leg came into view, they could see that the appendages they’d taken to calling legs were rotating. AI analysis calculated their angular velocity at 1.19 rad/s, or about one revolution every five seconds, consistent with the Monolith’s forward velocity of 32kmh. As the drone zoomed back in, it became obvious that the legs weren’t spinning on a perfectly flat plane, but that the sandstone was drawn upwards into the Monolith’s body in a clockwise spiral. The drone on the diagonal leg captured a similar sight, except the clockwise spiral moved downwards, plunging into the ground like a drill.
“Move to the leg across,” Zenawi said.
The rotation on the opposite leg on each end was reversed, but the upward-downward direction remained the same, as did the angular velocity.
“So we can tell its directionality by which two columns are spiraling upwards and which are spiraling downwards,” announced a voice from behind the assembled reconnaissance party.
Araari turned and was greeted by a hunched, balding Somali man with bright, watery eyes in slippers and a lab coat held closed with a sky-blue sash. Despite knowing the entire research staff by name, she didn’t recognize him.
“Colonel, this is Dr. Abdullahi, Director of the Institute of Geophysics, Space Science and Astronomy,” General Zenawi said.
Dr. Abdullahi smiled and bobbed his head in a way that vaguely resembled a greeting before walking around Araari to stand over the drone monitors.
“Though we have yet to see it do so, I suspect the Monolith can change direction by switching which way the spirals are rotating,” he said. “And it is almost as though it is moving by creating extremely powerful faults in the Earth and somehow condensing the upward thrust to a localized area to propel itself forward and upward. Though, how it is doing so, and while kindly placing the Earth back where it found her, I do not know. Fascinating stuff, truly fascinating.”
Though not one to search for religious explanations for unexplained phenomenon, Araari couldn’t help but regard the miracle in front of her with spiritual awe. “Fascinating” fell short of the biblical forces at play before her.
Dr. Abdullahi clapped. “So, gentlemen and lady, shall we observe the rest?”