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Table of contents
Chapter 1Journey to Giza
Chapter 2 Disappeared
Chapter 3 Annenia
Chapter 4 Welcome to Pardoo
Chapter 5 Rock ‘n’ roll
Chapter 6 Oops
Chapter 7 Grrghracksh
Chapter 8 Mayday, Mayday, Mayday
Chapter 9 Captive
Chapter 10 Mission cancelled
CHAPTER 1
Journey to Giza
The heavily conditioned air of the Oval Office was sliced by the sound of a telephone and the President picked it up.
“Yes, this is the President,” he said, leaning across the Resolute desk of the Oval office, consciously avoiding knocking over his cup of coffee for the second time that morning. The desk was made from the timbers of HMS Resolute, an abandoned British ship discovered by an American vessel and returned to the Queen of England as a token of friendship and goodwill. When the ship was retired, Queen Victoria commissioned the construction of the desk and presented it to President Rutherford Hayes in 1880. Although most presidents enjoyed the grandiose appearance of the desk, it was rather too ostentatious for this particular commander-in-chief. He just hadn’t got around to replacing it with a desk that would be less responsive to coffee ineptitude.
“Mr President?” The anxious sounding voice on the phone replied.
“This is Doctor Conway at G.A.S.P.”
“We have confirmed the trajectory of the asteroid 2534 Conway. It will cross the Earth’s path on the morning of February 14th. We believe that the probability of impact is 95%.” He hadn’t really wanted the deliverer of Armageddon to be carrying his own name, but you cannot fight centuries of tradition within scientific circles.
There was a silence that seemed to last forever.
“Hello...Mr President?” inquired Doctor Conway.
“Are you absolutely certain Doctor Conway?” asked President Daniels, “and if so, what are the implications?”
“We are certain of a 95% probable impact and the consequences are the total destruction of the planet and all living things upon it, Mr. President.” He continued, unable to hide the air of doom in his voice, tinged with a somewhat inappropriate level of excitement.
“This rock is 255 kilometres in diameter and it will split the earth open like an over-ripe tomato in two weeks. If anything survives the resulting shock wave and tsunami, then it will perish in the first half of the subsequent two hundred years of nuclear winter.”
The Global Astronomical Survey Project had been set up ten years before this incumbent had even thought of running for Congress. Following a prolonged lobbying effort by Doctor Conway and his fellow stargazers, it was finally accepted that the threat, presented by rogue astronomical bodies was tangible. Doctor Charles Conway acquired his PhD in Astrophysics at Cambridge and had spent most of his adult life trying to convince the powers that be, to take this problem seriously. Based in the Nevada Desert, they received and analysed data from fourteen observatories across the globe. Their budget was, in his opinion, inconsequential when compared to the very real danger that these nomadic rocks presented to the planet. Out of the millions of asteroids silently hurtling through space, they had managed to plot the course of about two percent. Most of these objects meandered harmlessly around the asteroid belt between the planets of Mars and Jupiter, but they had discovered an increasingly worrying number of rocks that for whatever reason had strayed into the inner solar system and would cross the earth’s orbit at varying intervals. They had begun tracking the path of the asteroid 2534 Conway, two weeks before. It had strayed out of the asteroid belt about two years before, probably after colliding with another rogue body, but had only recently become visible to Earth’s observatories. It was one of the biggest asteroids on record and was not really the type of thing you wanted careering through your solar system at over sixty thousand kilometres per hour.
President Colin Daniels had only been in office for two months. He was the son of a billionaire oil tycoon and was sitting behind that historic desk for one reason and one reason alone – to give more power to the oil companies and to stop the feeble minded tree-huggers from preventing further pilfering of the earth’s limited but highly profitable resources. He was an extremely amiable man with a good heart and an eye for the ladies that hadn’t been seen since Adam uttered the words, “mmm, nice apple.” But the impending destruction of the planet was fractionally outside of his comfort zone. He placed the phone back into its cradle and began to rock nervously in his chair.