Clark suspected he was dreaming. Or maybe he was high. Or maybe he had eaten poisonous mushrooms. Otherwise, how could someone have driven a nail into Earth?!!!
The thing looked like an oversized rivet, narrow at the bottom and thick at the top. With Clark's super vision, he could see that it had been driven incredibly deep. It had definitely pierced the crust, and he could barely see any farther down.
That faint tremor earlier had been the thing drilling through the crust. That violent jolt had been it locking into place. It had shaken upon activation, triggering an earthquake across the entire East Coast.
Clark hovered in midair for several seconds before accepting reality. Then he suddenly realized what Schiller had meant by "direct impact."
The murder cases, the Martian list, even proving that Martians existed—none of that mattered. What mattered was keeping him occupied, forcing all his attention onto the killer so he never noticed someone was about to hammer nails into Earth.
No exaggeration: Clark's scalp was tingling. He did not even dare imagine what that thing was for. It could not possibly be that Earth had illegally occupied public land and was about to be demolished, right?!
But he found out soon enough. At that very moment, every screen on Earth displayed the same face—a green Martian face.
"Hello, dear human friends. I imagine you have already noticed the little gifts I sent you. The space stations we just launched into Earth's orbit are not actually space stations. Even with your shallow understanding of engineering, you should be able to tell that they look more like gun barrels than space stations.
"Congratulations, you guessed correctly. Those are the launch tracks for the Reproductive Gene Activation Towers. At present, three towers have been placed near Asia, Europe,