She couldn’t bring the relic home. So she would bring home the thing it was attached to. The asteroid would enter the atmosphere as a fireball, but the monolith would survive the fall. It would land in the Pacific, and its energy—she prayed—would still dampen the flare.
She closed her eyes. Seventy-two hours became seventy-two minutes of oxygen. The asteroid was tumbling toward the sun. If she left without the relic, Earth burned. If she stayed, she burned with the asteroid, and Earth still burned. remove failed
But the monolith wouldn’t let go. It had fused itself to the rock, to reality itself. Her extraction device had whirred, sparked, and then died. She couldn’t bring the relic home