In front of them the sodium-vapor arc lights illuminating the landing pad began to grow brighter, brighter, pulsing—and then they exploded, a simultaneous flash that left drifting echoes lingering on everyone’s pupils even as the tarmac was plunged into darkness. Fighting to blink away the effects of the unexpected flare, the captain struggled to clear his vision. The chopper was still there, only—it wasn’t. That is, there was definitely still something there, but it no longer looked like a chopper. It was changing, shifting, metamorphosing even as he squinted and stared in its direction.

  It had feet, and arms, and a head. It also had a name: Blackout. But Lennox could not see or sense that, and the machine that had made itself out of the chopper did not choose to identify itself. The captain was not sure of what he actually was seeing, because what his eyes told him did not square with reality. It made no sense, no sense at all.

  Then there came a thunderclap, a moving wall of air knocked him off his feet and backward, and he could not see anything at all.

  The blast blew out every window in the control tower and sent those inside staggering backward or knocked them hard to the ground. Shattered glass cut and scoured exposed flesh, sending drops of blood splattering across the cleanly vacuumed floor. Instruments shorted out and the monitors closest to the windows crackled and went dark. So did every light inside the building, until the emergencies came on. A still-functional speaker began to call plaintively for a response from those who had been stationed inside, but none was forthcoming.

  In response to the rising whine of the general alarm, soldiers poured out of barracks and other buildings in time to see a series of energy blasts vaporize an entire row of neatly parked C-17 cargo planes, shattering fuselages and wings with unnatural precision. Men and women ran for cover or dove behind anything standing and solid. Screams and shouts of confusion punctuated the periodic explosions. Making everything worse, fire and smoke combined with the darkness to reduce visibility to near nothing.

  Inside the command center, those who had not been deafened by the electronic shrieking and subsequent detonations found their attention drawn upward as the roof was ripped from its support beams by an unseen force. Reactions ranged from utter panic to stunned fascination as a gigantic hand reached down and in. Technicians and support personnel rushed to scurry clear of its descent. Metal fingers probed consoles and walls, seeking and eventually finding what they were looking for. Punching into one bank of still-functioning consoles, giant smooth-surfaced digits ripped out a handful of cables. These somehow came alive, snapping upward like snakes to wrap themselves around the massive metal forearm. Actinic light flared as one cable after another melded itself to the huge downthrusting limb while electronic shrieks and howls continued to reverberate through the violated command center.

  Dragging himself out of the rubble of the destroyed ceiling, the watch commander found himself staring at a still-intact screen. It should not have been active, but it was. Something had broken or bypassed the code that controlled the drives locked into the console that was purposely isolated from every other system in the tower. Files were being run. Files that should not have been active or generally visible. He was not even authorized to view them himself. During one pause he was able to read a title.

  PROJECT ICE MAN—TOP SECRET SCI—SECTOR SEVEN ACCESS ONLY

  What the hell was Sector Seven? If it was so secret he had never heard of it himself, it certainly shouldn’t be visible or being run now. Feverishly, he struggled to pull himself clear of the rest of the restraining wreckage. Something across his legs was still holding him back. At least, he told himself, he could still feel his lower limbs. Movement on the other side of the room drew his attention, and he yelled across to a senior airman. The soldier was cautiously picking his way through the rubble while careful to avoid the enormous metal limb that remained shoved into the room.

  “It’s going after the deep files,” the watch commander yelled, “accessing off-site information! Cut the hard lines, cut the hard lines!”

  A moment passed before the airman indicated that he could hear his superior officer’s shouts, and that he understood. Nodding sharply, he began hunting through the debris. Several moments passed before he found the fire axe still secured to the wall. Using a chunk of concrete to break the case, he removed the axe, drew it back over his right shoulder, and rushed forward. He was a big, husky guy and when he brought the axe head down hard it smashed right through the coil of critical cables. Sparks flew and lights flared—but the essential link was severed.

  To the relieved watch commander the electronic shriek that followed the shearing of the connection sounded almost like a howl of outrage.

  Amid the chaos that was rapidly overtaking the entire base, Lennox and his team found themselves racing through the camp’s motor pool. As he ran, he found himself wishing that for once one of his fellow soldiers had screwed up and left the keys in the ignition of a parked Humvee. No such luck. They ran on, hoping to intercept someone riding a working vehicle.

  Flanked by two lines of parked Abrams tanks, they sped out beyond the last one in line—only to find themselves running directly between the rampaging monolith’s towering legs. Lennox looked up and stared. The interloper was some kind of robot or robotic automaton, he immediately decided. Human-like in its general appearance, appropriately bisymmetrical, but in many respects strikingly and ominously different. Too different. The monster did not look like anything he had seen at the movies lately. A foot rose and descended nearby, shaking the ground as it crushed an unhooked trailer to scrap. This was no cinematic special effect, he realized, and it was most definitely not some perverse manifestation of reality TV. Not even the PR flaks on contract to the Pentagon could dream up something like this.

  Neither he nor any of the men with him was carrying anything more lethal than a sidearm, but the fast-thinking Epps had grabbed up a thermal imager before they had fled the unloading area. Leave it to Epps, Lennox thought even as he ran and dodged, to be the one to reach for the latest electronic gadget instead of a rifle. He tried to keep an eye on what his friend was doing but was too busy dodging elephantine robot feet.

  Behind him Epps dove to avoid being squashed, then he rolled and swung the thermal imager straight up. Even as he took the shot he was unsure what it would show, but since the sky above him was completely blotted out by the amok machine, he felt optimistic that whatever it revealed would prove useful. Then he was on his feet again, running to catch up to his buddies.

  Lennox was not the only one to take note of the thermal imager. Alerted to its presence when Epps snapped the picture, Blackout’s targeting system located and homed in on the tracking device. Weaponry was unleashed.

  At the sound, Lennox tackled Mahfouz and brought him to the ground as something shot past overhead to explode beyond them. Epps ran wildly in and out between pallet-loads of supplies and parked, useless vehicles. Figueroa was there, too, trying to unlimber the scattershot he had strapped onto his back. Lennox saved him the trouble. Relieving the warrant officer of the cylindrical burden, the captain unlocked the launcher, raised the muzzle, and fired. With the vista before him consisting entirely of looming, oncoming metal he correctly concluded that speed was more important than aim.

  The spray of phosphorus-magnesium flares the launcher spit forth lit up the night like the coda of a D.C. fireworks display on the Fourth of July. All that was missing were the final bars of the relevant Tchaikovsky overture. Several of the wildly spinning flares actually struck the oncoming monster—and astonishingly, brought it to a halt. The robot took a couple of giant steps backward.

  In the midst of all the flame and fire and confusion no one saw the thing that disengaged from the mechanoid’s back to drop to the sand. Turning a swift circle, it surveyed its chaotic surroundings. Like its cohort it, too, was made of metal and strange alloys, but unlike the much bigger bipedal mechanism to which it had been clinging it did not look in the least humanoid. Taking its shape from several much smaller creatures that were native to the region and had already sensibly scurried underground, its powerful mechanical limbs began to dig it into the ground. Just as no one saw it arrive, none of the base personnel saw it go.

  Having succeeded in reaching the camp’s perimeter, Lennox felt that he and his men had at least managed to escape the worst of the confrontation that was ripping the heart of the base to shreds. Neither he nor his comrades saw the arachnoid metallic skull that emerged from the sand behind them. Glistening lenses scanned the darkness, effortlessly differentiating between sand and sky. They quickly hit upon and locked onto five heat signatures moving fast toward the eastern horizon. Dropping back into the sand, the horrific head vanished. From the place where it had emerged a curving line of mounded sand arose and sped off rapidly to the east.

  Skorponok had located the indicated target and was on the hunt.

  Some high schools are named after famous scientists, others after important historical figures. Some are renamed for local sports heroes or helpful philanthropists. A few are given the names not of people but of important events in history, or even animals.

  Tranquility High School was simultaneously blessed and cursed with the anonymity of its nomenclature. In truth, the student body tended to be as bland and middle-class as its name. Except for the occasional opposing cheering section at Friday-night football games that once referred to their opponents as “the Fighting Transvestites,” it’s difficult to make much that is untoward out of a name as vanilla as Tranquility. It was named, of course, for the town in which it was located—though student advocates liked to insist that it was named after the site of the first moon landing: Tranquility Base. Or as one frustrated wag on the school paper referred to it, prior to her being permanently dumped from the staff, Free Base.

  Inside one classroom, Captain Archibald Witwicky was gazing out of an ancient newspaper clipping that was presently being displayed on a laptop screen. Beneath his stern formal seaman’s portrait a considerably less restrained caption screamed, ARCTIC ADVENTURER ALLEGES ICE MAN FOUND! The clipping was in service of an ad on eBay selling a pair of old spectacles that had belonged to the captain. Spectacles that had been recovered under circumstances not detailed in the accompanying sales pitch. Had the exact details been known, it was likely the glasses would long since have been sold. Those details, however, had perished along with the much-vilified captain himself.

  None of which was known, of course, to the present owner of the spectacles, who had put them up for auction online. The glasses were important to Samuel Witwicky because they had belonged to his great-great-grandfather. According to the advertisement he had carefully composed, they were being put up for auction along with a number of other relics by one of the captain’s own descendants—i.e., him. This was true, insofar as Sam had been able to ascertain. He did not really want to sell his great-great-grandfather’s glasses, but he needed the money. For something more important than a remembrance of a relative he had only read about but had never met.

  After casting a quick glance toward the front of the classroom to make sure Mr. Hosney was not looking in his direction, Sam checked for progress on the sale. The relevant software informed him coldly, BIDS PLACED: O. With a sigh he looked up from the screen and across the room. The girl on whose outline his gaze fell was Mikaela Banes. She was a screensaver made real: beautiful beyond description, mesmerizing of voice and gesture, and utterly, utterly, out of his league. As if that weren’t enough she was seated beside her current paramour, one Trent DeMarco. Mr. DeMarco was fashioned of muscles, jaw, and attitude: all jock, all the time. Unfortunately, Sam had concluded resignedly, there were at present no state or federal laws that he had been able to discover to prevent creatures like DeMarco and his ilk from reproducing their kind.

  Score one for the devolutionists, he muttered silently to himself. If ever there existed an irrefutable argument against intelligent design, it was seated across the room alongside Mikaela Banes.

  From the front of the class the voice of doom (or at least of terminal boredom) trumpeted forth. “Mr. Witwicky,” the social studies teacher boomed out in the voice of a football announcer calling a 9–6 game in the fourth quarter, “you’re up.”

  Leaning slightly over from his seat at the desk next to Sam’s, his best friend, Miles, softly snapped his fingers in front of the glowing laptop screen. “Sam. Dude—Earth. Now.”

  Closing the laptop’s clamshell, Sam gathered himself and his backpack along with a cardboard chart whose title spelled out in neat if undramatic letters MY FAMILY GENEALOGY. Embarking on a march no less painful than that endured by the prisoners of war at Bataan, he slowly made his way from his desk to the front of the room. Along the way he was showered with derisive laughter from teenage girls who had not yet succeeded in suppressing the germane giggle gene that usually faded in women once they reached adulthood, along with assorted handy objects of shame such as crumpled papers and the occasional carefully molded spitwad. Reaching the front of the room having lost blood only from his face, and that from embarrassment, he carefully propped his cardboard visual aid against the blackboard and turned to face the usual assortment of friends and hecklers. The latter outweighed the former by a distressingly large margin.

  “Uh, yeah,” he began unpromisingly. From behind his desk, Hosney looked on with a mixture of subdued expectation and pharaonic patience. “So, for my family genealogy report, I picked my great-great-grandfather Captain Archibald Witwicky—one of the first guys ever to sail north of the Arctic Circle.”

  Deep within the bowels of the class, Trent DeMarco leaned over toward Mikaela Banes and whispered a derisive comment with practiced smarminess. The beauteous Banes responded to this characteristically juvenile attempt at wit with a slight smile, though whether from tolerance or out of genuine amusement it was impossible to tell. Turning to open his backpack, Sam made an effort to ignore them both. He even managed to disregard the rubber band that DeMarco, with an athlete’s skill, fired in his direction. It stuck in his hair. Briefly roused from the stasis of teacher’s Purgatory, Mr. Hosney nearly detected the latex launch.

  “Quit it,” an irritated Mikaela hissed at DeMarco.

  “What?” The team’s star tight end feigned innocence. He was not good at it.

  An acquiescent Sam plucked the rubber band from his hair. Determined to get something for the old junk that had been left to him, if not via eBay then in person, he maintained his composure as he laid out an assortment of old navigational instruments. Battered, broken, missing parts, and badly worn, they had thus far proven of little interest to collectors. Collectors wanted gear that was in pristine condition, not stuff that looked as though it had been left outside—well, outside in the Arctic—for years and years. He had promised himself that once he had used them to (hopefully) get a good grade, he would give them a couple more weeks on eBay before dumping them at a secondhand store for whatever they would bring. Family sentiment was all very well and good, but it didn’t get you wheels.

  “So, like, here are some of the tools of a nineteenth-century seaman.” He ignored the anticipated flurry of giggles and continued without pausing. “This here is a quadrant. Worth about seventy-five bucks today. This one is called a sextant, used for fixing a ship’s location by taking sightings at sea. A steal at fifty bucks or best offer even though it’s missing a part. Look great on your desk at home.” As he spoke, his hand moved from object to object. “This is obviously a portable compass. Yours for eighty. And these were his actual glasses, worn on the actual expedition, actually in the Arctic. Price on these is negotiable.”

  A dry-voiced Hosney peered over his own glasses at him. “This isn’t ‘Show and Tell,’ Mr. Witwicky, or even the Shopping Channel. It’s the eleventh grade. Need I remind you that this presentation constitutes a significant portion of your final grade in this class?”

  Normally intimidated by Hosney’s typically disapproving tone, Sam uncharacteristically chose that moment to speak up and defend himself. “I’m not just trying to make a couple of bucks here, Mr. Hosney. There is a serious purpose behind it. I’m selling this stuff to put toward my car fund. Getting a car will expand my horizons and allow me to experience the world at large, thus greatly adding to my education.” Turning back to his fellow students, he indicated his collection. “These are also on eBay if you wanna tell the folks—I take Pay-Pal.” His hand danced over the meager display. “They’d make really cool gifts. Like the compass, for Columbus Day …”

  Hosney inhaled dangerously. “Sam …”

  “Right,” the youth responded quickly. “Anyway, I guess years of suffering through bouts of recurrent hypothermia froze Captain Archibald’s brain, and he ended up going blind and crazy. He was put in a psycho ward, where he spent all his time drawing weird symbols and babbling about a giant ice man.” A few “oohs” and “aahs” came from students too enervated to do anything other than actually listen to him. Encouraged, he pressed on.

  Turning, he pointed to a blown-up copy of the newspaper clipping he was using to promote the sale of the old instruments online. Below the captain’s picture was another photo, this one of some of the crude symbolic sketches with which the old explorer had been obsessed during his institutionalization. Though easy to see in the surprisingly sharp old photograph, they made no sense to Sam, or Mr. Hosney, or anyone in the class. Just as they had made no sense to the doctors who had attempted to treat Archibald Witwicky. Just as they would have made no sense, in fact, to anyone.

  On Earth.

  As Sam prepared to continue, a most miraculous event took place: the bell rang. The last bell. Ask not for whom the end-of-the-school-day bell tolls, a blissfully relieved Sam mused: it tolls for me.