A cheer went up around the small meeting room as the real-time holographic image showed the Antithesis controlled planetoid started to break up.

  No one was quite sure how the Antithesis had managed to hijack one of Mars’ moons and throw it at the earth during the battle of Mars, but they managed it. The samurai on the red planet, many of our strongest members, were unable to catch up to it, so it fell to the terrestrial samurai to deal with it.

  Several different groups had been bombarding the thing for weeks with superweapons, slowly wearing down the rogue planetoid. Even though they managed to strip 90% of its mass away, it looked like the thing was going to survive and hit the atmosphere in one piece.

  Until today.

  “About fucking time,” a girl in an old-school duster and cowboy hat yelled. She was one of the dozen or so Samurai who had awakened during the global incursion and who I hadn’t introduced myself to. “That should make the cleanup easier.”

  “Don’t celebrate too soon,” Nora, my cybernetic-legged, kickboxing friend, replied as she sat back and took her feet off the table. “We have no idea how resilient these chunks are going to be. They may all survive planetfall.”

  “If that’s the case, it means more cleanup and more points for us, right?” the girl grinned.

  I ignored the banter and focused on the hologram, my eyes narrowing. “Why did the hologram get so fuzzy? Somehow I doubt it’s because the Family cheaped out on the projector.”

  Nora shrugged. “Maybe it’s because that last railgun round kicked up a lot of dust or micro asteroids?”

  “Maybe?” I replied skeptically. “The railgun might have been throwing rounds the size of midsized cars at that thing, but it never created a lot of debris before. I guess it could have been caused by the breakup…”

  “If that’s the case, we just need to wait until the next time the Germans fire their storm generator thing, right?” the girl asked. “That’ll evaporate all the small debris.”

  “You’re not wrong,” I mumbled.

  I was still staring at the display when the door to the conference room burst open, flooding the dark room with light.

  “The Family technicians are currently networking our surveillance satellite network with the supercomputers, so we can estimate where everything will hit,” Charlotte exclaimed as she rushed into the room. Her usually neat and tidy power suit was wrinkled, and she had black bags under her eyes.

  “I thought you were finally going to try and get some sleep,” I said.

  “I was, until I received a notification that Phobos had finally broken up. It seems like the Antithesis are conspiring against me, trying to prevent me from getting any rest,” she replied wearily.

  “You could have let someone else take charge of the mapping,” Nora exclaimed.

  “Could have, but I’m in charge of this operation until everyone gets back from Mars,” Charlotte replied. “I would have felt guilty if I placed all that responsibility on someone else.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Why? The others didn’t feel guilty when they went to Mars and left you to manage everything here alone,” I replied.

  “I probably wouldn’t have this problem if someone would volunteer to help me around here,” she said, glancing towards me.

  “No way! You already berated me for trying to do too much around town, and besides, I promised the kids I’d try to be less of a workaholic. When we were on vacation, they finally realized that I didn’t have to work all the time,” I told her. “Looks like you need someone around to tell you the same thing.”

  “I’ll have that once Benedict gets back from Mars. Until then, I’m in charge,” she grumbled. “Anyways… We should be getting the telemetry data any moment now.”

  Charlotte waved her hand towards the hologram, and it shifted, zooming out until it showed both the planetoid and Earth. Seconds later hundreds of lines lanced out from Phobos, entering a decaying orbit around the planet before performing planetfall.

  More than ninety percent of the lines flashed red, then were removed from the display. The vast majority of the remaining lines were yellow, which seemed to be jittering, jumping about erratically.

  “Uhhh… Is there something wrong with the tracking system?” a young boy dressed as a stereotypical ninja asked. “It seems to be having trouble figuring out where everything is going to land.

  “That’s because the system is still calculating,” Charlotte explained. “The satellite grid is having problems getting clear readings through the debris field, so they’re having to estimate the position of some of the larger asteroids through the movement of the smaller debris.”

  “What? They’re having trouble penetrating the debris field? Why?” Nora asked.

  “We don’t know,” Charlotte admitted. “Even with the Class III and Class IV arrays left behind by our members that went to deal with Mars, we couldn’t fully penetrate into the core of Phobos. Whatever the Antithesis did to the inside of the moon completely baffled our sensors. Now that Phobos has broken up, that same substance has dispersed among the debris field.”

  “So that’s not micro debris? We just don’t know what’s in the middle of that fuzzy mess?” I asked.

  “We’ll know soon enough. Even if they try to block our sensors, we’ll still be able to figure out what’s inside based upon the movement of the other debris. We just need enough time to monitor it,” Charlotte replied. “Besides, once the next drone swarm hits, we should be able to get a better look inside that mess.”

  “I know it’s a little early to be sure, but how are we looking for impacts in our area? Anything we need to be concerned with?” the girl with the cowboy hat asked.

  “It’s a little early, but we should be able to get a general idea of the initial impact sites,” Charlotte replied. She waved her hand in front of the display again, and it zoomed in on Earth, and flattened. The previous trajectories became nothing more than small colorful x’s on the map. A lot of colorful x’s on the map.

  “Does this include the ones we expect to burn up in the atmosphere?” I groaned. “Please don’t say no.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. These are only the sites where we expect the Antithesis could survive impact,” Charlotte replied. “Granted, there might only be one or two, but they’re still locations that’ll have to be swept.”

  “How about just major impact sites, ones that you’ll need me and the bears or Nora to intervene in?” I asked before glancing around the room. “No offense to anyone else, I just want to know where the biggest pieces are going to hit.”

  “No offense taken. I’m hoping to get a piece of the action too,” a young boy answered. Many of the others nodded.

  Charlotte nodded and waved her hand one last time. Most of the x’s disappeared, just leaving a handful of medium and large ones. Only one of the three largest pieces was landing in North America, somewhere on the east coast. The other two were landing in the ocean, and somewhere in Africa. There were a handful of moderate-sized impact sites on the west coast, but nowhere near as many as I expected.

  “There better be more than half a dozen Antithesis crawling out of those sites,” I muttered. “I’d hate to have rushed back here for nothing.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “Based upon what was crawling around up on Mars, I would be surprised if anything smaller than a model Twenty came out of there. More likely Model Thirties.”

  “The big boys, huh? Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” I muttered, squinting at the display. “The nearest will be up by Edmonton, but I’m guessing the Samurai up there can handle that one. The next closest would be those two just to the South-West, in the rockies. Why do I keep ending up in the mountains?”

  “That’s what you get for growing your strength so quickly,” Nora giggled. “You think you can handle the two outbreaks out there?”

  I glanced back at the display and smiled. “Two relatively small outbreaks in a relatively isolated area? Of course, what could possibly go wrong?”

  Discord!

  Check out my Stories:

  Support me!

  Finally: Big thanks to all those people that review my draft, the chapters would be a lot rougher without your feedback!