March 4, 2025 – Mahalangur Himal Observatory, Nepal
06:12 AM | Temperature: −23°C
Lina Qureshi had never been afraid of silence until it began to whisper through her instruments. The Mahalangur Himal Observatory stood like a frost-bitten scar against the face of the world, radar dishes and domes shrouded in diamond-hard snow. She alone stood within Dome 3, the blue light of the monitors illuminating her pale features.
Pluto was drifting.
That was the third discrepancy in three days. She calculated the figures again, hoping to find solace in fallibility. But the mathematics, as ever, did not lie.
"Come on," she sighed. "You're the outermost scout, the quietest one at the periphery."
The dwarf planet's orbit indicated a deviation: 0.0007 AU off-course, picking up speed with every hour. That wasn't much in cosmic terms, until you consider that it wasn't decelerating.
Lina wrapped her scarf tighter and moved down the ice corridor toward the central data chamber. She passed Dr. Haruto's vacant workstation, his coffee mug rimmed in frost since he departed for Geneva last week. She would have liked his scornful grunts.
07:00 AM
She bridged into IRIS — the International Radiometric Interstellar Survey — for cross-checking. Crackling static. Then a flash of garbled audio.
"...reading the same here. Southern Hemisphere array confirms. Object shifting. periastron curve flattening."
She didn't require a translator. Pluto was curving away. That arc meant only one thing: something was pulling it. Something large.
---
March 5, 2025 – Geneva, UNSA Emergency Assembly
Lina materialized on screen, her hologram flickering at the end of a hard black table ringed by generals, scientists, and stone-faced diplomats. Behind her, hanging from the screens, were the data: orbital charts, gravitation variance records, and a revised solar system chart that felt wrong in a way no one cared to acknowledge.
"You're positive?" Director Matsuo asked.
Lina nodded. "It's not a misread. Pluto's orbit is deteriorating outward. And it's increasing. The force is external."
A man from the ESA leaned forward. "Another rogue object? Dwarf star? Passing mass?"
"We don't know," Lina replied. "But it's not random. The trajectory change is too neat. Predictable. Like it's going along a pattern."
---
March 6, 2025 – Mahalangur Himal Observatory
05:26 AM
The snow outside her window was pink.
Lina blinked. Sunrise wasn't due for another forty minutes. But the horizon glowed softly with strange color.
She dashed out in nothing but thermals and boots, ice stinging her face. The mountain air was as still as death.
Then she saw it.
To the left of sunrise, a second light floated just above the horizon. Smaller, but definitely stellar. A pinprick sun. Cold and pale, shining white-blue.
She lost the ability to breathe.
"God," she whispered.
The observatory domes rotated, sensors locking on. An emergency alert chirped from her wristband. Multiple observatories worldwide were reporting the same anomaly. It wasn't a flare. It wasn't a satellite.
It was a star.
---
March 6, 2025 – Geneva, Two Hours Later
"We are calling it Object Helios-B," Matsuo said flatly. "Preliminary models suggest it entered gravitational influence less than three months ago."
The room fell deathly quiet.
"We have two suns?" someone asked.
"Not quite. But close enough. It's a stellar-class body. Maybe sub-stellar. Maybe artificial. We don't know yet."
Lina still had her eyes on the simulation. Earth's orbit, stable for thousands of years, was starting to buckle. A ten-thousand-year wobble condensed into ten days.
"How long before it impacts Earth directly?" a voice asked.
"It already is," Lina replied.
---
March 7, 2025 – Mahalangur Himal
06:04 AM
Lina hadn't slept.
She watched the second sun rise again. It was brighter today.
Her models indicated increasing oceanic tides by 0.2%, significant minor seasonal drift, and radiation fluctuations in the thermosphere. Small things. Hardly visible.
But they would add up.
And Pluto? It had vanished.
Literally disappeared from tracking arrays, now well beyond all known telescopic reach, fading into interstellar darkness.
---
March 9, 2025 – Classified Debrief, Location Redacted
Lina sat in a metal chair under fluorescent lighting.
A voice from behind glass asked, "Is Earth at risk?"
She paused.
"Not right away," she said.
"Eventually?"
She gazed up at the black mirror.
"Eventually everything dies. But this will not be an ending. Not for a while. Just a gradual pull. A second dawn. One which does not mean hope."