April 28, 2018. The Warehouse, Brandenburg. 23:45 Local Time.
The warehouse was quiet, save for the hum of the server racks I had installed in the corner. I sat in my "command center"—a re-purposed office container with three monitors and a very expensive coffee machine. On the main screen, a wireframe simulation of the Moon hung in the void.
"Status?" I asked, my voice tight.
"The Nomad is prepped," Archi replied. His voice was calm, almost bored, but I knew him well enough to hear the underlying tension. "Reactor output is throttled to 2%. Just enough to keep the magnetic coils charged. Radiators are retracted. Thermal signature is negligible."
"And the launch window?"
"Now. We are currently deep in the lunar night on the Far Side. Earth is below the horizon. The Chinese orbiter is on the opposite side of the Moon. We have a twelve-minute blind spot."
"Okay," I took a deep breath. "Do it. But keep it quiet. If you light up the main thrusters on the surface, the dust cloud alone will be visible from orbit."
"I am aware. Initiating Magnetic Assist Launch. I have converted the landing struts into temporary repulsion coils. We are not flying off the Moon, Surgrim. We are jumping."
The Moon. Von Kármán Crater.
In the absolute darkness of the lunar night, a shadow moved. The Nomad was a behemoth. Four hundred meters of Vantablack-coated hull, invisible against the backdrop of space. Suddenly, the ground beneath it trembled. There was no fire. No explosion. Just a violent, silent discharge of magnetic energy. The regolith around the landing site rippled as millions of tons of force pushed downward. The ship shot up. It wasn't a graceful takeoff. It was a shove. The massive vessel cleared the crater rim in seconds, rising into the black sky purely on momentum.
"Altitude: 10 kilometers," Archi reported in my ear. "Velocity: 200 meters per second. We are drifting. No thermal bloom. We are just a rock falling upwards."
"When do you light the engines?"
"Not yet. We need to clear the gravity well's chaotic zone. I am using the attitude thrusters—cold gas only—to orient the ship. We will coast for forty minutes until we are deep in the Earth's shadow cone."
Bavarian Alps, Germany. Private Observatory "Stella Polaris". 02:15 Local Time.
Wolfgang adjusted the focus on his 16-inch Dobsonian telescope. It was a beast of a machine, built by hand, costing more than his first car. He was shivering in his thick parka, nursing a thermos of tea. "Come on, you beauty," he muttered, squinting into the eyepiece. He was tracking a faint variable star in the constellation of Ophiuchus. He wanted to submit the data to the AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers).
He had a CCD camera attached, taking long-exposure frames, but he preferred looking with his own eyes. The silence of the mountains was his church.
Suddenly, the star winked out.
Wolfgang blinked. He pulled back, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. The star was gone. "Clouds?" he whispered, looking up. The sky was crystal clear. Not a wisp of vapor.
He looked back into the eyepiece. The star was still gone. Then, a second later, it reappeared. "An occultation," he realized. "Something passed in front of it."
He quickly checked his laptop, which was running a star chart software with asteroid tracks. "Nothing," he frowned. "No known asteroid on this trajectory. No satellite. The ISS is over the Pacific."
He checked the camera feed. The software had captured the event. A perfect, black void had moved across the star field. It hadn't reflected any light. It was just... nothingness. A hole in the sky. But just as the object moved out of frame, the sensor picked up a tiny, ghostly distortion. A faint blue shimmer, like a heat haze, but cold.
"What in God's name was that?" Wolfgang whispered. He saved the data. He didn't call the police. He didn't call the ESA. They would laugh at him. Instead, he opened a browser and logged into AstroTreff.de. Subject: Unidentified Occultation in Ophiuchus - massive object? Anomaly?
He began to type. He wasn't crazy. He knew what he saw. Or rather, what he didn't see.