Chapter 18: The Light Curtain

At its core, most evil comes from the desire to survive.

Who doesn’t want to be stronger, smarter, or live longer? With Jason standing there as living proof of what was possible, the greed of the survivors had reached a fever pitch.

But the reality was brutal. The supply of the Perfect Element was limited, just enough for less than one-tenth of a percent of the population of earth. If the secret had gotten out on Earth, it wouldn’t have started a golden age. It would have started World War III.

Looking back, the Federation’s secrecy wasn’t just paranoia; it was a desperate attempt to keep the peace. The conflicts of the last decade made sense now: they were shadow wars fought over who got to live forever.

Eventually, the superpowers made a deal: “Stop fighting, build the base together.” The Federation was born, the Element was locked in a vault under heavy guard, and the secret was kept.

No one planned for the planet exploding.

Now, those conspiracies were dust. Chasing the crimes of a dead government felt pointless. The people who ordered the cover-ups were ash, and the few survivors left were just paper-pushers following orders.

The tribunal, which had started with so much anger, lost its momentum. Calvin didn’t even get a sentence. The court adjourned indefinitely, pushing the judgment to “a later date.”

The population chose to forget. Morale was too fragile for an execution. Anything that wasn’t about immediate survival was pushed to “tomorrow.”

——-

Work at the base continued. It was just paperwork in the face of extinction.

In the observatory tower, Dr. Thomson rubbed his eyes.

Thomson, thirty-three year old, was a brilliant physicist from Switzerland. He had published dozens of papers in top journals like Nature

. He was also the base’s top astronomer, tasked with monitoring the space around them.

Since Earth’s destruction, the sky had turned into a Shooting Gallery.

The explosion had blasted billions of tons of debris into space. When those fragments drifted near the Moon, gravity grabbed them, turning them into meteors.

In space, the balance point between two bodies is called a Lagrange Point . At that line, the pull of the Earth and the Moon cancel each other out. But if a rock crossed that line, it fell into the Moon’s gravity well.

On the first day, over three thousand meteors hit the lunar surface. Most were small, causing minor tremors for the survivors at the South Pole.

But for the astronomers, it was terrifying. They watched their screens, hearts pounding, knowing that a single large rock could end the human story right there.

Sixty-five million years ago, a rock ten kilometers wide hit Earth. It wiped out the dinosaurs.

If a rock that size hit the Moon, it would trigger a massive quake. If it hit the Bailly Crater directly, the energy release would be like a hundred trillion tons of TNT. It would vaporize the South Pole.

There were eight “World-Killers” currently in unstable orbits. The largest was over twenty kilometers wide.

The Base’s nuclear missiles were useless against rocks moving that fast. All Thomson could do was pray. It was a humbling, terrifying position for a man of science.

However, as the weeks passed, Thomson began to relax. The odds of a catastrophic impact were dropping.

Earth, though destroyed, was still surrounded by a thick, turbulent cloud of gas and dust. As the meteors passed through this cloud, friction slowed them down. Dragged back by gravity, they fell toward the ruined Earth instead of shooting out toward the Moon.

The South Pole was shielding them. Humanity had bought itself some time.

“Professor, the latest satellite data just came in,” his student, Timothy, messaged him.

“Got it.” Thomson opened the file.

The image on the screen was haunting. The blue marble was gone. In its place was a hazy shroud of dust, gas, and water vapor. You couldn’t see the planet’s core at all.

The cloud swirled with violent winds. In millions of years, gravity might pull it back together into a new planet. New life might evolve. But for now, it was a tomb.

“Spectral analysis puts the core temperature at 2,000 degrees Celsius,” Thomson whispered. “Nothing survived. Not even bacteria.”

The massive mushroom cloud from the explosion had spread out, turning into a thin, beautiful white curtain that stretched for half a million kilometers behind the planet, catching the sunlight.

It was ethereal and vast, though incredibly thin, far less dense than Earth’s old atmosphere.

“We are about to pass through the tail of that cloud,” Thomson noted, checking the Moon’s orbit.

A bad feeling settled in his stomach. It was a vague anxiety he couldn’t explain.

“Just stress,” he told himself. The cloud was just dust and water vapor. It was too thin to hurt the base.

He distracted himself by re-watching the footage of the explosion. Like every other scientist on the base, he was obsessed with how.

What kind of weapon could do this? Antimatter? A black hole?

He ran the simulation again and again. There was always one answer.

Kinetic Energy.

Every calculation pointed to the same conclusion: A projectile with a mass of about one hundred tons, traveling at near-light speed, striking the Southern Hemisphere.

[Relativistic Kill Vehicle]

It was a theoretical weapon concept. A “light-speed bullet.”

If it was a weapon, the technology behind it was godlike. Humanity’s fastest ships crawled at 20 kilometers per second. Light speed was 300,000 kilometers per second. The gap between the shooter and the victim was the gap between a caveman and a stealth bomber.

The more he understood, the heavier the despair weighed on him. The ocean of truth was vast, and it was full of monsters.

“Professor! Look!” Timothy shouted from outside the lab.

The sixteen-year-old prodigy ran in, holding a plastic container.

“I caught ice!”

A few days ago, Timothy had rigged a plastic film trap outside the airlock. In a vacuum, it shouldn’t have caught anything.

“The Moon is passing through the debris tail,” Timothy beamed, shaking the container. “There’s a thin atmosphere forming near the surface! It’s not breathable, but it’s wet! The water vapor is sticking to the film!”

“Youth is wonderful,” Thomson thought, smiling at the boy’s enthusiasm. Timothy was a genius, but he was still a kid excited about a science project.

Wait.

Atmosphere.

Friction.

Thomson’s smile vanished. His heart stopped. He finally understood what the anxiety was trying to tell him.

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