ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Seven was being carefully tracked by Professor Martin Darby of Northwestern University, father of the famous and/or infamous Shade Darby. Shade’s father had had his security clearance reinstated, despite the fact that his daughter had used his data to locate and steal one of the earlier ASOs and had then used the rock—its universal shorthand name—to become Rockborn, a mutant with a power—the power, in Shade’s case, to move at speeds just over Mach 1.
ASO-7 had passed the orbit of the moon and was now spinning around the Earth in a decaying elliptical, an orbit that Professor Darby and counterparts at universities all over the world had calculated and recalculated with growing alarm.
ASO-7 was a large piece, roughly eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) long and sixteen meters (fifty-two feet) wide. Estimated mass, assuming the composition matched earlier ASOs, was 1,600 tons, about the weight of 550 Toyota Land Cruisers.
The size of the rock and the fact that it seemed to be moving erratically had left Professor Darby able to calculate only probabilities. He’d turned those probabilities into a simplified map, which he’d forwarded, along with his calculations, to Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense.
The map showed the likely strike zone as a pink cross-hatched area. That pink cross-hatching extended from just north of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Long Island Sound around Bayville.
But it was what occupied the middle of that strike zone that had sent alarm bells ringing throughout the US government. Because in the middle of that zone stood New York City.
The odds of a relatively safe splashdown in the water of Long Island Sound were 40 percent, which left smaller likelihoods of strikes near Elizabeth, or in Manhattan proper, which had only a 20 percent likelihood of being the bull’s-eye.
But that was a one-in-five chance of utterly annihilating the greatest of American cities, because this much was certain: if ASO-7 hit land, it would release energy equivalent to thirty-five kilotons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons. If ASO-7 was intact and hit, say, Rockefeller Center, it would obliterate sixty square blocks, and severely damage buildings and toss cars and buses around from Thirty-Ninth Street to Fifty-Seventh Street, and from Ninth Avenue almost to Lexington Avenue. If it landed on a weekday, the estimates were that it would kill as many as a million people instantly and another quarter million from fires and related injuries.
ASO-7 had the potential to be the greatest disaster ever to strike the United States.