Feb 20, 2057, 0658 Hours (UTC +3)
Aš, Sudan
75km South of Goshabi, Sudan
Araari saw nothing of interest as the RQ-35 drones picked to observe the top swept the dome of the lumbering Monolith, but she kept this opinion to herself for fear of appearing foolish.
“Damn, it’s just more rock. I was expecting… I dunno, something more crazy,” Tarik said.
“No, gentlemen, look,” said Dr. Abdullahi, thrusting his finger in front of the drone operator’s eyes to gesture at the screen. “They’re small, but these lines, they’re fissures, faults where the lower parts of the Monolith’s domes are subducted under the higher parts. And look at the regularity! The fault lines run all the way across and appear at intervals of— analyze it already, fool!”
The operator looked to General Zenawi who nodded at them to oblige the brusque geologist. With his CO’s approval, the drone pilot pressed a button to have the drone’s AI adjust for all of the vectors which could confound naked eye analysis.”
Dr. Abdullahi whistled. “Every five meters! Our Earth, she isn’t that regular. My area of expertise is the Weyn Sulurifa Qinelek'o and the rifts do not appear every five meters exactly, nor run in straight lines. Gentlemen, do you know what this looks like to me?” He excitedly tapped his gnarly fingernails on the display screen. “Plates of armor. And armor is only worn by those who expect to be attacked.”
Araari wasn’t sure yet whether she liked the geologist or not. Everything he did seemed pointed in some way, so his choice of the Hornya term “Weyn Sulurifa Qinelek’o” for the Great Rift Valley pleased her, while his reference to everyone as “gentlemen” did not. Regrettably, Abdullahi seemed, much like herself and Tarik, to be one of those individuals given unlimited bypass of social cohesion due to their raw utility. He was a genius, in other words. No doubt Dr. Abdullahi was why they already knew the sediment comprising its armored dome came from the Sahara.
“Armor…” General Zenawi said, stroking his thick mustache. “So we think it’s alive, then? Not just a freak geological force of nature?”
Dr. Abdullahi chuckled as though privy to a joke only he knew. “Oh, it can be both, General. Now, let’s see the underside.”
The last two drones floated underneath the Monolith and found a glittering firmament of luminescence; silvery-white, gold, and copper lights shone down amongst dots of bright red, blue, green, and purple.
“Gwad! It’s full of stars!” Tarik said.
“Minerals,” Dr. Abdullahi corrected.
That word had more of an impression on General Zenawi who nodded approvingly. Minerals were something he was acutely interested in.
“Metals. Gold and copper. And gems,” Zenawi said.
“So it seems to be. But look again, they aren’t distributed randomly,” Abdullahi said, tracing his finger across the screen where veins of ore spread across the concave dome like a nervous system.
Once she knew to look for signs of life, Araari noticed the veins grew thicker near the spiraling appendages and in several, equidistant clusters on protrusions hanging from the dome.
“Organs?” she asked, pointing at a cluster.
“Perhaps,” Dr. Abdullahi said dismissively.
“So it has veins of metal,” General Zenawi said, eyes fixed on the screen. “Partly copper, partly gold. Lithium, perhaps?”
“We’ll need a geological sample to be sure. Can your drones do that for me?”
“And fly back? No.”
“Pity,” Dr. Abdullahi said. “Perhaps we might—”
“Sir!” the operator interrupted, “something’s moving.”
The movement was small enough it would’ve been missed if the drone’s gyroscopes didn’t hold its high resolution cameras perfectly stable against wind, wake, and turbulence. But they could see, in high resolution, rocks shifting to create new gaps. Black holes in the glittering cosmos of minerals.
“Take them up to—”
The first camera went dark. The display pronounced its radio connection dead a split second before the other drone captured the stomach-churning sight of the world wildly vibrating as some force overpowered its internal gyros.
“Aim it down! Give me sight on the ground!” Zenawi screamed.
The drone tilted down and got a quarter second glance at a receding crater before it went dark as well. The other four drones were ordered to turn around and fly back to camp, but more dark openings appeared on the outer dome. The operators attempted evasive maneuvers, but each was killed in turn by something invisible.
“What the hell was that!? What does the AI say!?” Zenawi demanded.
“Analysis from the crater suggests kinetic and thermal energy. Size of crater gives an energy release of 4.76 megajoules. Location and extent of thermal damage consistent with kinetic to thermal energy conversion, sir,” the operator said, reading the output given by the AI image analysis from the drone computer.
“Can it tell us how fast?” Zenawi asked.
“Asking it now.”
The operator plugged the query into the briefcase terminal and it spat out an answer which the operator relayed: “Above hypervelocity. Estimation based on picture is a 1kg projectile moving at Mach 9 or above.”
“Hit the ground!” Zenawi screamed and the whole camp except for Araari and Dr. Abdullahi dropped.
Tarik was the first to realize why she had remained standing and pulled himself into a crouch so he could ease the pregnant pilot below the sand bunker. She waved him off.
“If it wants us dead, we’ll be dead,” Araari stated.
Dr. Abdullahi cackled at that. General Zenawi ordered everyone up and made a brief stroll onto the sand dunes, making a show of witnessing the Monolith with his own eyes, though likelier it was to walk off the embarrassment. Not that Araari blamed him. His duty was to get his men home in one piece, and if the Monolith had fired at their camp as well, the projectiles would be arriving right that second.
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But it wouldn’t have mattered. As the interval passed and no 1kg stones descended from the heavens to vaporize them, Araari muttered, “alhamdulillah.”
Dr. Abdullahi snickered at that and said in Hornya, “I thought you were only muslim for the papers, Colonel.”
“And why should that be the case?” she asked curtly.
“No reason,” the geologist said, glancing over at Tarik who was beating dirt off his service uniform and voicing his astonishment at the Monolith in vulgarity-laden Amharic. His eyes then traveled to General Zenawi who was coming back to his men having walked off his embarrassment.
“What are your beliefs, doctor?” she asked in Hornya.
“Pan-Democratic,” he replied. “Or do you mean religious and spiritual?”
“The latter.”
Dr. Abdullahi’s face froze in what was part way to becoming a sneer, but then it fell. “No, actually, I do have an answer for why I thought you were a fake muslim. Because in Somalia, it’s the muslims going on about the need to return to tribe and clan, and how silly this new “Hornya” ethnicity is and the fake, Frankenstein language the invaders are forcing on our children. As if those “invaders” weren’t the ones who finally cleaned up our goddamn mess so you can go from one town to another without being shot dead! As if Pan-Democracy didn’t finally give us a real goddamned state! And now they want to roll back the clocks and go back to herding sheep and killing each other. Religion of peace, hah!”
Araari stared blankly at him. Never in a million years would she consider being that frank and untactful with a stranger. The thought of it gave her second-hand embarrassment on Dr. Abdullahi’s behalf. Tarik was visibly dumbfounded at the scientist’s outburst and had a very dumb, very scandalized grin on his face to match. Everyone else, including General Zenawi, respectfully declined to acknowledge the civilian scientist’s rant.
“It seems against the Pan-Democratic spirit to single out a religion for othering,” Araari said, knitting a tight smile onto her face.
“Not a single religion, Colonel. All of them. The Christians are only marginally better by virtue of having a better hold on power,” he said with a glance at General Zenawi, “but the splitters and ethno-nationalists in Ethioipa come from Coptic and Orthodox stock. And from the muslims among the Oromo. I admire you as a Pan-Democrat and a Lion rider, Colonel, but Islam is a blemish you would be better off without.”
“Your opinion has been noted, professor,” Araari said, staring past him at the Monolith still rolling towards the town of Goshabi. “I wish you the best of luck in protecting our Pan-Republic from the Monolith.”
He squinted as though attempting to find some hidden barb beneath her tact and poise which would give him casus belli to continue his rants. Finding none, he turned towards the Monolith. “And to you and Captain Haile both, Colonel.”
After the excitement of the drone destruction and Dr. Abdullahi’s humble opinion-offering, the observation post quieted. General Zenawi restricted information gathering to only those instruments which could observe the Monolith from a distance of 50km or more. The three drones they had left were kept in reserve for the Monolith’s collision with Goshabi, the thought of which became more distasteful to Araari as the minutes ticked by.
Eventually, she sought General Zenawi and asked, “is it necessary for me to be present for this, sir?”
He tore his eyes from binoculars to glance at her. The hand not holding binoculars flattened his mustache. “I am of the opinion that we would benefit from having you see what the Monolith is capable of with your own two eyes. You could read about it later in a report, but if you and Captain Haile have to fight this thing, I would prefer you see it in action first.”
Her stomach turned, but Zenawi was right. She had to weigh the lives of a small town to those of the entire Pan-Republic. She saluted and gave him a “yes sir” and returned to her task of hurrying up and waiting alongside Tarik.
Just before 0930, Zenawi organized a select detachment to follow the Monolith. Five desert-pattern electric motorcycles with wide tires were brought out of a camouflaged pit and loaded with observation equipment, water, and the three remaining RQ-35 cases. Tarik and Dr. Abdullahi were placed on the back of two of the bikes along with two men whose only responsibilities were given by the rifles on their backs. Araari was placed on the sole motorcycle with an attached sidecar.
Even in the side-car, the fifty-minute journey over rock, scrub, and sand was far from comfortable. Nonetheless, it was discreet. Electric motors purred beneath Araari at a volume low enough she could hear churning rock and whistling air as they drew closer to both Goshabi and the Monolith. One of the brave motorcycle pairs who was not bearing a Lion Rider or genius geologist split off to investigate how close they could get to the stone creature without incurring its kinetic wrath. Confirming the Monolith did not react to them from a distance of a kilometer, the other four rejoined their comrades.
The recon party stopped on a ridge overlooking the outskirts of Goshabi from where they could see an expanse of dusty green-and-brown fields loaded with irrigation equipment before a scattered, decentralized town of blocky square compounds. In the far distance was a wall of trees and orange orchards abutting the Nile. To Araari’s immediate relief, there were lines of trucks and cars streaming out of the city on highways headed east and north.
Greeting the approaching Monolith was a line formed by a handful of tanks, APCs, and rocket artillery spread out across the outskirts of a sorghum field. Soldiers on foot were screaming in Arabic at civilians pulling up in trucks to watch the Monolith approach.
Seeing the Monolith up close, Araari was as stunned with awe as the civilians. Even Dr. Abdullahi had ceased to make verbal observations and was cowed into an open-mouthed gape at the enormity of the skyscraper-sized mountain suspended on columns of spinning rock.
The Monolith came upon the town of Goshabi with all the majesty and force of a crackling thundercloud, and the sandy ground rumbled and cracked and groaned so that Araari thought the Earth might crumble and swallow them. But even greater than that was the cocktail of anger at Zenawi for sending her out here and fear for the baby in her womb being exposed to the quaking earth.
She grabbed the man who drove her. “Drive me back! Get me out of the vibrations!”
“Ma’am, I can’t—”
“That’s an order!”
The man hopped onto the motorcycle which had fallen over from the rumbling and drove Araari off until they could no longer feel the Earth shaking. She could tell what was going through the man’s head: That she was being silly and irrational and that she had impeded the mission. But she had lost two children to miscarriages and she would not lose a third.
As she was biting her fist and staring off in guilt, a flash caught her eye. The Sudanese military’s assault on the Monolith had begun, opening with a salvo of rockets and tank fire blooming like a garden of red-and-orange flowers against the rock creature. The light from the fire blinded any attempt to see what was happening. Then, one-by-one, the flowers wilted into black clouds.
At first Araari thought the Sudanese had ceased fire, but the volley was ceasing incrementally rather than all at once, and as the cacophony of ordnance dimmed, another sound became audible: Sonic booms cracking in the dry air. The projectile was invisible, but she could tell the Monolith was eviscerating whatever piece of military hardware it aimed for.
Spooked by the damage, the rest of the reconnaissance team radioed that they were moving eastward along the ridge to put distance between them and the Monolith. Araari and her rider rejoined them and she was finally able to see the carnage.
The Sudanese armored platoon was not, as she had seen in the unification wars in Eritrea and Somalia, a bunch of smoldering and burned chassis. Instead, there was a vaporized sludge of machine and body parts in a well-ordered line.
Ignored by the approaching Monolith, the Sudanese foot soldiers and the civilians they had been screaming at broke and ran. The sight was such a macabre display of precision destruction that the drone pilots forgot entirely their task of collecting data and watched in stupefied awe as the Monolith reached the first outlying farms of Goshabi and began sucking in tilled soil and dismembered irrigation pumps into its appendages.
“Yallah,” Dr. Abdullahi uttered, pointing at the section of dome facing Goshabi where the Sudanese armor had fired. “It’s fixing itself.”
It was a slow process, but the craters the artillery and cannon fire had blown in the face of the Monolith were being first sucked downwards and then replacing themselves with more sediment. Abdullahi was quick to point out that it was local sediment.
All that was left for their team to do was witness the Monolith do what it would with the rest of Goshabi. The three drones were sent up to capture the event in high-definition.
Initial damage was wrought solely by the Monolith’s appendages as they tore up irrigated soil and left barren rock behind. But as the Monolith reached the first structure, a masjid with a brick dome roof, it slowed and trembled before an enormous number of the small black holes opened in its dome.
A second later, a sound like the gates of Jahannam split the desert air in two, forcing the recon team to cover their ears. The sound came from sheets of the hypervelocious stones peppering the town of Goshabi, mowing it down block by block, quadrant by quadrant. With all her heart, Araari hoped the Sudanese had evacuated the entirety of the town in time.
“Inshallah,” she said, her voice drowned under the cracks of sonic booms.