Although still extremely rare compared to matter, antimatter can be found in space as well. Scientists have detected a huge cloud of antimatter, roughly 10,000 light-years across, near the center of our galaxy, as well as a thin belt of antiprotons in Earth’s own Van Allen radiation belt. New equipment recently installed on the International Space Station is currently searching the universe for more signs of antimatter, perhaps even antimatter comets or galaxies.
The existence of antimatter comets has been theorized, but not proven. Sigma has reason to believe that an antimatter comet struck Siberia in 1908, resulting in the celebrated Tunguska event. Discoveries made during the Sandstorm operation support this scenario, but the theory is currently disputed by the mainstream scientific establishment.
We know better.
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Stranger than Fiction:
Perhaps the most startling element of this operation is Sigma’s encounters with the Rahim, an enigmatic tribe of female warriors who claimed descent from the Queen of Sheba herself. Eyewitness reports, verified by Sigma agents Crowe and Novak, confirm that the Rahim seemed to possess abilities that bordered on the magical, including the ability to render themselves invisible (or effectively so), influence the minds of both humans and animals, and even reproduce without any need for men.
A scientific theory accounting for the women’s seemingly supernatural abilities was developed by Novak on the basis of her observations in the field, as well as analysis of the women’s blood. According to her theory, the Rahim’s abilities derive from [REDACTED.]
Mission Designation: Map of Bones
Duration: July 22—August 18. Eight months after SS.
Key Locations: Germany, Italy, Egypt, France, Switzerland.
A massacre at a cathedral in Cologne, Germany, in which dozens of civilians are somehow electrocuted after taking Communion, spurs Monsignor Vigor Verona, a secret agent for the Vatican, to enlist Sigma Force’s help in tracking down the killers--who have also stolen a priceless relic: the bones of the Magi, the Wise Men who attended Christ as a child. Vigor also drafts his niece, Lieutenant Rachel Verona, who finds herself targeted by assassins.
It is soon discovered that the Communion wafers had been tainted by monatomic (or “m-state”) gold, a superconductive form of the metal with highly unusual properties. Evidence points to the involvement of the Imperial Royal Dragon Court (Ordinis Draconis), a cult of depraved aristocrats who see themselves as destined to rule over the masses of mankind—and who will stop at nothing to gain the legendary secrets of the Magi.
Painter Crowe dispatches Gray Pierce, Monk Kokkalis, and Kat Bryant to Cologne, where they rendezvous with their Italian allies—and come under attack by a strike force led by Baron Raoul de Sauvage of the Dragon Court and his apparent ally, Seichan. Surviving the assault, the Sigma team discovers that the stolen “bones” were actually forged of a unique amalgam of m-state metals crafted by an ancient order of mages dating back to [REDACTED]. They realize that the Dragon Court (and possibly the Guild) are searching for the lost knowledge of the mages in order to reshape the world in their own image.
A series of clues, hidden in the 14th century by the Knights Templar, lead the competing factions on a perilous treasure hunt that stretches from the catacombs of Rome to the lost tomb of Alexander the Great to a papal palace in Avignon, France, which might hide the ultimate secret of the Magi: the key to the primordial light of Creation itself. Along the way, Sigma and the Dragon Court clash violently, with bloody results, while Seichan and the Guild pursue their own cryptic agenda, working both with and against Sigma for their own purposes.
Assessment:
This is Sigma’s first major operation under the command of Painter Crowe, taking place approximately eight months after he discovered that Sigma had been infiltrated by the Guild [SS]. It also provides a crucial test of Gray Pierce’s leadership abilities as he leads his own team in the field, often cut off from Sigma Command. On a more personal note, the battle against the Dragon Court costs Monk his left hand, even as it leads to his relationship and eventual marriage to Kat. This affair also marks the beginning of Gray’s intermittent romance with Rachel, as well as Sigma’s continuing involvement with the Vatican and Monsignor Verona. Note: the writings of Marco Polo, which first point Vigor towards the secret order of the Magi, would figure prominently in a later Sigma operation [TJS], while evidence of an ancient order of magi will be uncovered during yet another crisis [TDC].
Decapitated by the death or capture of its leaders, including [REDACTED], the Dragon Court has not resurfaced since their defeat in Avignon, but Seichan and the Guild remain very much on Sigma’s radar.
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Who were the Magi, really?
Despite millions of Nativity scenes and Christmas pageants, little is truly known of “the wise men from the East” said to have visited Christ as child. The Magi are mentioned only in the Gospel of Matthew, which does not reveal their names, their country of origin, or even how many wise men there actually were! The fact that the magi gave three gifts to the Christ child—gold, frankincense, and myrrh--has given rise to the tradition that there were only three Magi as well, but, as Vigor Verona observes, this is not supported by Matthew. Nor does the Bible indicate that the Magi found the baby Jesus in the manger; a close reading of the text suggests that Magi’s visit may have taken place a few years later, when Jesus was a toddler.
Where exactly in the east the Magi hailed from remains up to debate, with Babylon, Persia, Arabia, and India all nominated by various scholars and traditions. The word magi is the plural of magus, a Latin word which ultimately derives from the Old Persian name for a priestly caste associated with astrology. Over time, the word has come to refer to astrologers, sorcerers, and wise men in general. Christmas carols notwithstanding, the Bible does not refer to the Magi as the “three kings” of song.
There are conflicting stories and traditions regarding the Magi’s ultimate fate. In Marco Polo’s famous Travels, first published around 1300 A.D., the celebrated explorer claims to have visited the tombs of the three Magi in Persia. Polo also recounted a legend that the Christ child had gifted the Magi with a mysterious stone that summoned flame from the heavens when tossed into a well. It was up to Sigma Force to discover the truth behind this legend.
By contrast, the bones of the Magi are believed by some to have been found in Palestine by Saint Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, almost a thousand years before Polo’s historic travels. These relics gradually made their way to Constantinople and eventually to the Shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral in Germany—until they were stolen by the Dragon Court under circumstances that have yet to be revealed to the general public.
Interestingly, an 8th-century parchment, long buried and forgotten in the Vatican archives, purports to be the Magi’s own account of their journeys and claims that they belonged to an ancient order of mystics descended from Adam’s third son, Seth. Known as the “Revelation of the Magi,” this document was only recently translated into English after languishing in obscurity for generations. It is unknown whether Monsignor Verona has had a chance to examine it—or whether it is of interest to Sigma or the Guild.
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Liquid armor: the future of personal protection?
When Gray Pierce first encounters Seichan at Fort Detrick, Maryland, she shoots him in the chest. His life is saved by a revolutionary new form of body armor that is currently being developed by the U.S. Military.
This innovative technology is based on a shear-thickening fluid (STF) originally developed by the University of Delaware. The STF contains fine silica particles which clump together on impact, providing protection from fast-moving projectiles, but which remain loose and flexible otherwise.
Modern body armor, which employs ceramic plates and sturdy Kevlar fibers, can be stiff and bulky. There is also the problem of leaving certain parts of the body relatively unprotected for the sake of mobility. Soaking Kevlar with STF allows for i
ncreased flexibility and reduces the need for quite so many cumbersome layers. Tests indicate that four layers permeated with STF provide more protection than ten layers of untreated Kevlar. The only drawback is that the saturated Kevlar tends to be heavier, making weight an issue.
Liquid armor has been under development at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland for several years now. It is unclear when the technology will be made available to the average soldier, but, as ever, Sigma Force is ahead of the game.
Unfortunately, so is the Guild.
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Stranger than Fiction.
Research conducted by Sigma, with the invaluable assistance of Monsignor Verona, suggests that the mysterious m-state amalgam has appeared throughout myth and history under a variety of guises. The superconductive substance, with its almost miraculous properties, may in fact be a magical white powder mentioned in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the “manna” of Moses and the ancient Israelites, the holy stone given by Christ to the Magi, the Philosopher’s Stone sought by medieval alchemists, and the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.
Although Sigma identified the amalgam as a mixture of monatomic gold and [REDACTED], the precise formula for creating it remains lost to modern science.
Mission Designation: Black Order
Duration: May 16-May 22. Roughly a year after MOB.
Key Locations: Poland, Nepal, Denmark, Germany.
Ghostly lights in the sky, and a mysterious outbreak of illnesses, bring Painter Crowe to a remote Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas, where the crazed monks descend into madness and savagery. Also caught up in the crisis is Dr. Lisa Cummings, an unsuspecting American doctor. When a seemingly superhuman assassin attempts to eradicate all evidence of the outbreak, Painter and Lisa are thrown together—and eventually captured and taken to a hidden fortress high in the mountains, where they discover a secret enclave descended from Nazi scientists who went into hiding after World War II. These scientists, who insist that they are no longer Nazis, have been working for generations on a top-secret mechanism known as the Bell (Die Glaube) which can influence the evolution of living organisms. By exposing fetuses to the strange energies of the Bell, the group has created the Knights of the Sun King (Ritter des Sonnekonig), a handful of super-humans with enhanced strength and abilities, but who also suffer from chronic degeneration. Accidental exposure to the same radiation damages Painter on a quantum level, so that he has only three days to live.
Elsewhere, on what first appears to be an unrelated assignment, Gray Pierce visits Copenhagen, where he clashes with a ruthless clique of assassins intent on capturing an antique Bible that once belonged to Charles Darwin. Gray eventually joins with Monk Kokkalis and a fifteen-year-old pickpocket named Fiona to track down the secret history of the Darwin Bible, which might contain a coded riddle from a previous owner, Dr. Hugo Hirzsfeld, a dead Jewish scientist with links to the Black Order, an occult society run by Heinrich Himmler, the infamous head of Hitler’s SS. Before his death in 1945, Hirzsfeld may have discovered the secret to controlling quantum evolution: a truth “too beautiful to let die and too monstrous to set free.” Gray and his companions follow the trail to Wewelsberg Castle in Germany, where they are betrayed by [REDACTED].
Escaping the Himalayan fortress after [REDACTED], Painter makes contact with Sigma once more. Comparing notes, the team discovers that the original Bell project split into two separate factions after the War, one in Nepal and one in South Africa, where the Waalenbergs, a famously rich and reclusive family of corrupt aristocrats, has been carrying on the work of the Black Order in order to create a master race of Aryan super-humans. They have also experimented on animals, spawning such monstrous mutations as [REDACTED]. Now they want the code hidden in the Darwin Bible in order to perfect the process.
With Painter deteriorating mentally and physically, and the Waalenbergs plotting a devastating attack on the world’s capitals, Sigma must launch an assault on the enemy’s massively fortified South African estate in order to find a cure for Painter—and stop modern-day Nazis from creating a new generation of unstoppable Sonnekonige.
Assessment:
With Painter missing or ailing for much of this affair, Sigma manages to function without his leadership until he can be restored to good health. Kat Bryant, among others, is instrumental in holding down the fort at Sigma Command during his absence, foreshadowing her future role as his second-in-command. Unfortunately, this crisis also costs the life of [REDACTED]
Painter’s near-terminal illness leaves its mark physically, giving him a streak of white hair over one ear. On the brighter side, the episode also launches his ongoing relationship with Lisa Cummings, which continues to this day. Her accidental involvement also serves to bring Lisa into Sigma’s fold, where her medical expertise will prove valuable on several occasions.
The Guild’s lack of interest in the Darwin Bible remains puzzling.
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Second only to Hitler.
Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was one of Adolf Hitler’s most loyal henchmen and a monster in his own right. As head of the dreaded Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS, he was one of chief architects of the Holocaust and personally oversaw the establishment and operation of its ghastly concentration camps and gas chambers. It has been estimated that he was responsible for the mass murder of at least eleven million people, including Jews, Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, and others deemed unworthy to live.
Driven by Nazi theories of racial superiority and eugenics, he also founded the Ahnnerbe (the SS Ancestral Heritage Society), which, among things, sponsored a 1938-1939 expedition to Tibet. Painter Crowe and Lisa Cummings would later discover the full extent of Himmler’s interest in the region.
In 1934, Himmler acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Germany. Originally intended as an “SS Leadership School,” Wewelsburg was ultimately meant to become the physical and symbolic center of the SS. Top SS leaders held meetings and ceremonies at the castle, which was the subject of ambitious renovations and expansion plans. Slave laborers from nearby concentration camps were pressed into service, although Himmler’s ultimate plans to turn Wewelsburg into “the center of the world” were doomed when the war turned against the Nazis. In 1945, the castle was torched, looted, and partially destroyed before it could fall into the hands to Allies. Later restored, it is now a museum and youth hostel—as Sigma Force discovered when they arrived searching for clues hidden in the castle’s infamous past. A “Black Sun” symbol can still be seen on the marble floor of the SS Generals Hall at Wewelsburg.
Himmler did not long survive the destruction of his dark Camelot. After a failed attempt to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, he was denounced by Hitler and later captured by the Allies while attempting to flee Germany in disguise. Rather than face trial as a war criminal, he committed suicide via cyanide capsule and was buried in an unmarked grave. Although he died over sixty years ago, Sigma later discovers that Himmler’s evil legacy lived on in the form of [REDACTED].
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Give DARPA a hand.
Monk’s prosthetic hand, which got its first real workout on this operation, may be state-of-the-art (and then some), but DARPA is continuing its Revolutionary Prosthetics program, a $100 million, multi-pronged initiative that has already spawned impressive results.
Now awaiting FDA approval is “Gen 3,” a third-generation bionic limb that boasts a remarkable range of motion and dexterity. Operated by foot controls, the motorized arm is also guided by computerized algorithms that control the force applied by the mechanical fingers—so that test subjects can even use chopsticks with ease!
Meanwhile, human trials have already begun at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on a Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) developed by scientists at John Hopkins University. The MPL, which weighs only nine pounds (about the weight of a normal flesh-and-blood arm) has nearly as much dexterity as a natural limb and is controlled by surface electrodes which pick up electric signals from any remain
ing muscles and transmit them to the robotic prosthetic. Researchers hope to someday link the electrical sensors directly to an amputee’s nerves. They also aspire to apply this technology to prosthetic legs as well as hands and arms, enabling amputees to walk on working robotic limbs.
DARPA is also funding research into Reliable Central Interfaces (RCI), which involves controlling prosthetic limbs via microchips implanted directly in the brain, allowing amputees to operate their new limbs by thought alone. Although amazing advances have already been made along these lines, DARPA is now intent on increasing the reliability of the technology and eliminating any stubborn technical glitches. The RCI project, which is now underway, is meant to move mind-controlled prosthetic limbs from the laboratory to practical application in the real world—only a few years behind Sigma Force.
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Stranger than fiction.
When a mysterious predator stalks a game preserve in South Africa (not far from the Waalenbergs’ private preserve), game warden Khamisi Taylor first thinks of the ukufa, a terrifying monster of Zulu legend. Said to be as large as a gorilla, the ukufa is feared for its swiftness, cunning, and ferocity. Also known as the dubu, the lumbwa, the kerit, or the getet, the creature is supposed to be just a myth, but certain bloody carcasses suggest otherwise. Gray Pierce and his Sigma colleagues almost join those carcasses when they discover that these particular ukufa are actually [REDACTED].
Outside of Africa, the term ukufa is largely unknown, but the same mythical monster is perhaps better known to westerners as “the Nandi Bear.” Named after a tribe in Kenyan, the Nandi Bear is described as a large, fast-moving predator that seems half-bear, half-hyena, and maybe even part baboon. Reports and sightings of the monster date back to at least the early 1900s. It has sometimes been called “the Abominable Snowman of Africa.”