Tiny Horror

The Flight Director sat at his central console, his hands hovering over the keypad but his fingers refused to move. He was staring up at the main panoramic monitors, his face ghostly in the reflected blue light of the lunar feed. Around him, the room was a cemetery of sound. Mission controllers were frozen at their stations, some with headsets slipping from their ears, all staring at the same silent, high-fidelity footage of Kaito Sato’s remains.

"Artemis-1... Marcus, do you copy?" The Flight Director’s voice was a jagged, hollow whisper. "We saw. Oh god, we saw it all. We have... we have no words here."

He took a ragged breath, closing his eyes for a second as if he could wipe the image away. "Marcus, listen. I have analysts and specialists working right now... we’re trying to determine what to do next. We’re looking at every contingency, every protocol. Just... just stay in the habitat. Do not open that hatch."

A sharp, panicked shout erupted from the back of the room. A technician at the long-range telemetry station stood up so quickly his chair clattered to the floor.

"Director! I'm picking up multiple contacts!" the technician screamed, his voice cracking with terror. "At the Lagrange points—L1 and L2! They’re blooming! Hundreds... maybe thousands of unidentified objects."

The Flight Director turned his head slowly, his eyes widening as the orbital tracking map on the main screen began to fill with geometric streaks.

"They aren't just orbiting, sir," the technician gasped, his fingers flying across the terminal. "They’re moving at high speed. They're accelerating. They're vectoring toward Earth."

The Flight Director looked back up at the main display, at the three astronauts still in the lunar command center, and for the first time in his career, he didn't know what to say.