The four-hour drive back to Kiso was an opportunity for Ichirō to finally get some much-needed rest. Watching C/1998 M7 for two weeks day and night and anxiously calculating its possible trajectory time after time was exhausting. He was in no mood for discussing the meeting at all. He only wanted to close his eyes for a few hours and clear his head.

Inoue, sitting next to him, was no less weary, but sleep just evaded him. The horrible thought that this thing – whatever it was – would fall on Earth, possibly wiping entire cities off the map, haunted him. His mind constantly conjured pictures of apocalyptic devastation. Where would it fall? His beloved home city, Yokohama? Then he remembered cities he’d visited in his travels, academic or not – Edinburgh, Rome, Paris, Athens, Seoul, Barcelona… Even if it fell into an ocean, the resulting tsunami could wreak havoc upon seaside communities.

“If only this cursed thing would crash into the Moon,” he whispered, getting no response – the driver stayed discreetly silent and Ichirō was fast asleep.

Inoue drew his cell phone from his jacket’s right breast pocket to call his wife. It was already half past midnight. Although he’d told her about the sudden meeting, he feared she’d be worried sick. He dialed and waited; it took five rings before she answered.

“Hello?” she answered, her voice still heavy with sleep.
“It’s me. The meeting ended fifteen minutes ago. We’re heading back to Kiso first, so I’ll be very late.”
“I see. You’re not driving, are you?”
“No, they’re driving us back in a government car.”
“Thank goodness. Try to get some sleep on your way.” “Thank you, Kaori. I’ll try. Sleep well.” He sighed deeply.

* * *

Hayase called an emergency cabinet meeting early in the morning – the full cabinet, not just the ones Ichirō and Inoue briefed the evening before. Early in the session, they agreed to reach out to every country they had diplomatic relations with and share information on C/1998 M7, prepare for a potential atmospheric entry and fall on Earth, coordinate on providing aid to afflicted areas, and open channels for collaboration on the analysis of whatever remained of the object.

“Russia, Korea, and China will be especially difficult,” Sakamoto sighed. “We’ve always had troubled relations with Korea and China, but Russia’s worse because it has serious internal troubles of its own.”
“Indeed,” responded the Minister of Finance, Osamu Fujita. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they’ve been struggling financially and I’m not sure how well they can fund preparations for such an event.”
“If they can at all,” added Hasegawa.
“I’m pretty sure they’ll ask for money,” Fujita answered in a rather cavalier tone.
“Yes, given the state of their economy…” said Hasegawa.
“And it’s not like we can spare billions upon billions of yen,” Fujita responded. “Being in recession ourselves, there’s only so much we could do – if, of course, we wanted.”
“I’m aware of that, Fujita-san,” Hayase responded. “But, like it or not, they’re our neighbors and refusing to help in any way will come back to haunt us.”
“That’s true,” agreed Ichikawa. Fujita grimaced, visibly agitated.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Good neighbors and all,” he said in a dismissive tone, and smirked. “But you can rest assured the Russians will bring up the Kurils,¹ the Koreans will start whining about the so-called colonial rule,² and the Chinese will try to put us on a guilt trip about Yasukuni³ and all that Nanjing bullshit.⁴” Takeda nodded enigmatically, while Ichikawa remained stony-faced.
“Your reservations are noted, Fujita-san,” replied Hayase sternly and gave him and Takeda a steely gaze. “Sakamoto-san, proceed as already agreed. Does anyone else have a point to raise?” He received no reply. “Good. Then this meeting is concluded. Thank you for your work,” he added and stood up.
“Thank you, Sōri!” the ministers said and stood up. They all exchanged eshakus and the ministers started to leave.
“Fujita-san. Takeda-san,” said Hayase. “Please stay in the room.”
“Yes, Sōri,” they responded and turned back.
“Suzuki-san, close the door,” said Hayase in an ominous tone after all the other ministers and aides left. Suzuki nodded and did as he was told. Hayase walked up to the two ministers and fixed a very stern gaze upon them. “Fujita-san,” he said, his voice even deeper than before.
“Yes, Prime Minister.”
“You were out of line.”
“But…”
“I don’t want to discuss your antics any further. We may only be a caretaker government, but such speech is utterly unacceptable.”
“But, Prime Minister, the Chinese…” Fujita protested.
“Enough, Fujita-san,” Hayase cut him off sharply. “Just make sure that, for the following eleven days, you won’t make me discuss this again. And you, Takeda-san.”
“Yes, Prime Minister,” he replied, like a soldier expecting a dressing-down by his commanding officer.
“Condoning such speech is just as unacceptable as the speech itself. Is that clear?”
“It is.”
“Good. Now you may both go.”
“Thank you, Sōri,” they said and gave him an eshaku. Hayase responded with a slight nod, and watched them leave.

“As if this alien thing wasn’t enough…” he grumbled after the two ministers left, indifferent to Suzuki’s presence, and took a pack of cigarettes from his gray jacket. He lit one with his golden lighter, took a deep drag, and sighed the smoke out in frustration.

He’d long considered Fujita to be a liability rather than an asset. Detractors of the Hayase government frequently took potshots at him for appointing Fujita and keeping him – a man whose policies and, as they put it, ideological blinkers had done their part to deepen the recession plaguing Japan.

“Prime Minister, may I?” asked Suzuki.
“Hmmm?”
“I don’t know if it’s worth worrying about Fujita. We’ve only got eleven days left. After that, he’s going to be someone else’s problem.”
“He’s Japan’s problem. I should never have given him the finance portfolio,” Hayase replied and looked out the window, one arm folded across his chest, cigarette held aloft. “Or any portfolio, for that matter.”
“However, Prime Minister, Fujita-san’s position is part of the party line.”
“Do you think I don’t know this, Suzuki?”
“No, Prime Minister.”
“Listen, Suzuki,” Hayase said after taking another deep drag from his cigarette, “I know Fujita’s saying what we, as a party, have always said about Nanjing and so on. But this is no time for posturing. Whether we like it or not, our nation’s discovered an object that threatens the safety of hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions. These could be our own people. Or in neighboring countries or elsewhere. It’s our duty, not just to ourselves, but to all of mankind, to at least try not to raise these subjects as obstacles in a global effort. For once, Japan must exercise true leadership. Fujita once again showed he can’t understand basic diplomacy.”
“But how will Japan lead, Prime Minister? Your mandate expires in eleven days.”
“I know. If anything, I’ll pave the way for the next government to do what it must – hopefully.”

* * *

The following days, an unprecedented flurry of reports and analyses went back and forth among Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) and other relevant institutions worldwide to corroborate the trajectory and nature of C/1998 M7. According to the data at hand, a wide majority of scientists from around the world predicted a trajectory that intersected the Earth. The Bilateral Coordination Channel between the United States and Russia was activated, as well, as neither side wanted another false alarm-induced nuclear scare like the ones of 1983 and 1995.⁵

By the twentieth of July, C/1998 M7 brightened enough to be visible to the naked eye. It appeared as a slow, unblinking “new star” low in the morning sky, with a faint sunward plume, brightening from a –2 magnitude to a Venus-rivaling –4.

Official announcements remained carefully worded, going to great lengths to avoid any mention of the possibility that it could be artificial. But even an amateur stargazer’s optical telescope could confirm there was nothing natural its movement or its misplaced and misdirected plume. On the internet, enthusiasts and academics in Usenet newsgroups like sci.astro approximated the object’s course far more accurately than anyone who went on major media. Even the UFO conspiracy theorists at alt.alien.visitors could feel horribly vindicated. All nations scrambled to prepare their populations to evacuate any place that would be estimated as its crash site. But which place would that be? It could fall anywhere – a desert, an ocean, a city full of people.

On August 2, Ichirō started noticing severe inconsistencies in the object’s plume.

“Sensei,” he anxiously told Inoue, “you must see this!”
“What is it?”
“The plume! It’s… flickering. Like a candle’s flame struggling in the wind.”
“You’re right!” he exclaimed, looking over Ichirō’s shoulder. “I wonder… Wait a minute. Is it… gone?”
“Yes.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. It’s almost like a jet engine flaming out.”
“If it’s indeed a spacecraft with engines, this must mean they ran out of fuel.”
“Or their ship is malfunctioning badly.”
“But if it was decelerating with its engines, this means it can’t brake anymore.”
“Indeed.”

The phone rang. It was Satō. He anxiously asked Inoue if he’d noticed the plume’s disappearance.

“Yes,” responded Inoue. “It seems to have gone out.”
“If it’s a spacecraft as we suspected all along, you know what this means…”
“Yes. No more deceleration.”
“If it falls to Earth at that speed…”
“I know,” said Inoue.

Almost three hours later, the plume reappeared – faintly at first, then as intensely as before, and then even more so, as if in an attempt to make up for the lost deceleration time. Ichirō ran to Inoue’s office with the new data.

“Sensei! Sensei! It’s back!”
“What?!”
“It’s back, sensei! The plume! And this time it’s brighter than before! Here,” he said and showed him the newest captures and calculations. “It’s decelerating more rapidly than before, see?”
“This can mean only one thing, Maeda-kun,” he replied, after reading all that Ichirō gave him. “It must be an alien spacecraft.” Ichirō nodded. “Did you receive any new radar imaging from Goldstone and Arecibo?”
“Not yet, sensei.”
“What are you waiting for? Contact them at once!”
“Right away!”

From the radar imagery that came back from Goldstone and Arecibo, it became obvious that C/1998 M7 couldn’t possibly be an asteroid – its shape was too deliberate, with a perfect lateral symmetry and what seemed to be a very clear distinction of volumes on every axis. “If this isn’t a spacecraft, I don’t know what else it could be,” Inoue said.

* * *

On July 28, while the astronomers were busy making sense of the object’s trajectory towards Earth, Hayase’s caretaker government expired. He was succeeded, both as Liberal Democratic Party president and Prime Minister, by Sakamoto.

One of the first things Sakamoto did upon his ascension to power was replace Fujita, leaving him out of the new Cabinet, in a bid to appease the Social Democratic Party and gain their support in the Upper House. They had left the ruling coalition on June 1, and Sakamoto needed them. However, they viewed Fujita as persona non grata for failing to see the recession coming, making it worse with his decisions, and being diplomatically dangerous. Fujita’s propensity to make antagonistic and derisive remarks about Japan’s neighbors was widely rumored to have caused him to fall out of favor with Hayase himself as well.

According to the Asahi Shimbun’s⁶ reportage, Hayase and Sakamoto worked closely on their proposal for Sakamoto’s successor in the Foreign Ministry, and the same applied to Fujita’s and Takeda’s successors. All three candidates came from the ranks of the LDP’s more moderate faction – the faction Hayase and Sakamoto themselves belonged to.

As Sakamoto’s successor, the two men proposed Makoto Nagamori, a career diplomat; an ambassador whose ambassadorial postings included South Korea, West Germany, the European Union and the United States. He was generally viewed as a shrewd negotiator, whose recommendations to Japan’s governments were often deemed “a delicate balancing act between Realpolitik⁷ and International Law.”

To replace Fujita, they proposed Shigeru Imai, a former assistant professor of macroeconomics at the University of Tokyo who subsequently went on to work for Sumitomo Bank, the Industrial Bank of Japan, and, finally, the World Bank. For the education portfolio, their choice was Tatsuya Kiriyama, an associate professor of Japanese history at Kyoto University. All three appointments went through with little resistance from the LDP’s factions, while the social democrats gave Sakamoto the nod he needed. Other than this relatively minor reshuffle, no changes were made to the cabinet.

Hayase remained active in politics and kept his seat in the Diet⁸ and offered his services as Sakamoto’s special envoy to Russia, China, and Korea. During his premiership, he worked hard to build a personal rapport with his Russian counterpart that was unique among G7 leaders. He was also credited with the initiative to build bridges with China and Korea and attempt a “thawing” of Japan’s relations with them. Yet, while his work on improving diplomatic relations with Japan’s immediate neighbors was met with praise from other nations and the more progressive parts of the Japanese political scene, his party’s nationalist factions protested his efforts.

* * *

Up in the skies, C/1998 M7 continued its voyage toward Earth, indifferent to Terran politics. By now, more and more astronomers described it as a spacecraft in their internal communications. Still, official updates continued referring to it as an asteroid that exhibited “unique” outgassing behavior.

Between the second and the fifth of August, the flameout and subsequent restart of the plume Ichirō had witnessed was recorded three more times. Each time, the duration of this behavior differed, varying from thirty-five minutes to around five hours. Inoue’s “failing engines” theory, which was the most plausible explanation to begin with, now seemed to be the obvious answer to this riddle.

On the eighth of August, at 3:42 AM GMT, C/1998 M7 swept past the Moon, passing perilune⁹ a few hundred kilometers above Mare Orientale and shedding roughly one kilometer per second of its velocity. By now, no telescopes were needed: observers across Earth’s night side watched a second point of light, now almost as bright as the Moon itself, glide past the lunar disk – two moons in the same pre-dawn sky, one of them moving, trailing its stubborn plume. Only the largest observatories, in the most favorable observation conditions, could resolve the transit itself: a black, elongated silhouette, gliding for a few seconds across the sunlit face of Mare Orientale. In the days before the flyby, the Hubble Space Telescope had been redirected to capture images of the object; the results were classified immediately. By the evening of the same day, the orbital solutions left no room for doubt: C/1998 M7 wouldn’t harmlessly cross Earth’s orbit and continue on its way across space. It was coming down.

Then, within an hour of perilune, the plume disappeared again and an unexpected attitude change was captured by radar and light curve stations across the globe: the silhouette’s aspect rotated over tens of minutes, the massive, over a kilometer in length, hull swung end for end. Its plume reappeared, this time on the other side – for the first and only time, C/1998 M7 looked like a comet.

Space flight dynamics experts watching C/1998 M7’s trajectory immediately knew: it turned around so it could apply a prograde burn in an attempt to accelerate and leave. Indeed, astrometry showed the object’s trajectory beginning, barely, to lift. Then the plume started flickering again and, at 7 PM GMT, went out. Observers watched and waited for hours with bated breath, but it never reappeared. The ship was dead. It was left with no engines, vernier thrusters or trim. It was now a twenty-million ton hulk of metal set on a ballistic path – tragically predictable and unavoidable.

* * *

14:55 GMT. The huge alien spacecraft made its first atmospheric pass over the North Atlantic, entering the upper atmosphere at 11.2 km/s and descending to a perigee¹⁰ of forty-six kilometers before climbing back out. Observers on the ground saw a superbolide unlike any meteor ever witnessed: a massive, cyan-white fireball or, more accurately, a plasma sheath that neither terminated in a flare nor fragmented. It simply crossed the sky and left. No one saw its whole passage. Watchers in the Azores saw it climb out of the southwestern horizon and sink beyond the northeastern one, still burning. Minutes later, it passed over the Irish coast, rising again over the southwest and continuing its uncontrolled, yet stable, path, its plasma sheath shining even brighter than the mid-afternoon sun.

Ships at sea beneath the track reported double shadows swinging across their decks, while many crewmen swore they could hear it as it passed – a faint hissing and crackling from wire rigging and railings, as if the sky itself was frying. But the sound proper came later, three to four minutes after the light, with the shockwave arriving as a minutes-long rolling detonation that swept the coasts of Galicia and northern Portugal, shattering tens of thousands of windows and causing church bells to swing, although no one struck them.

In the ship’s wake, an ablation train of vaporized hull material and incandescent air stretched for hundreds of kilometers. After the fireball had gone, a twisted, self-luminous column of recombining ionized air and metallic vapor hung in the mesosphere for over an hour, sheared into helices by the upper winds. As dusk crept over the ocean, it glowed a soft sodium-and-magnesium green. Shortwave radio was dead across the entire corridor for almost an hour, leaving ships deaf and mute. All transatlantic flights already under way were urgently diverted. By nightfall, the entire airspace of the North Atlantic was empty – and remained that way.

By evening, one thing was ominously clear from all observatories’ orbital calculations: C/1998 M7 had lost too much speed in this pass. Its orbit was now closed; it belonged to the Earth and, with no propulsion or attitude control left, there was no escape.

C/1998 M7 climbed away from the atmosphere it had just left and receded along its new ellipse to a deceptive apogee of about a hundred thousand kilometers – a little more than a quarter of the way to the Moon. As it dwindled into the night, millions of people around the world breathed a sigh of relief, hoping it had left for good. But its unpowered climb over the next day and a half slowed down to a crawl. When it reached apogee on the 9^th at midday, it could be seen hanging in the sky for hours, nearly motionless against the stars, before beginning its long fall back to Earth.

In the meantime, governments around the world made every possible effort to avoid calling C/1998 M7 what it truly was. Use of the words “spaceship” and “spacecraft” was absolutely taboo. Still, they had to prepare the public for its eventual crash. “The object, whose outgassing has ceased, is now in a decaying geocentric orbit and atmospheric interactions are expected to recur. Therefore, we advise the public to stay indoors and clear of windows during transit events for safety reasons,” read the announcement of the newly sworn-in Sakamoto government. Other governments around the world issued similarly phrased announcements.

Each country’s chief astronomers and astrophysicists, de jure or de facto, exercised their skills in the art of understatement like never before, especially regarding the object’s true nature. Even when faced with persistent journalists, they consistently declined to answer whether it was an alien spaceship or how they explained why it had turned around after passing the Moon. Not everyone in the astronomical community, however, stuck to this line. Other scholars who believed they enjoyed a greater degree of independence, either implied C/1998 M7 was a spaceship or said it outright, sparking intense discussions in the media and among the people. Sensationalist commenters and conspiracy theorists had a field day, accusing governments and more reserved scientists of covering up the truth.

“The cat’s out of the bag,” Ichirō thought aloud, watching a daytime talk show.
“True,” said Inoue, catching his student’s words.
“What do you think, sensei? I know I was the one who suggested it, but is it right to continue to pretend it’s a natural object? It feels like a charade now.” Inoue let out a deep sigh.
“I don’t know, Maeda-kun,” he responded. “I keep asking myself the same question and no answer seems right.”

---

1. The southernmost Kuril Islands, called the Northern Territories in Japan, were occupied by Soviet forces in August–September 1945. The dispute over them has prevented the conclusion of a formal Japan–Russia peace treaty. ↩︎
2. Japan ruled Korea as a colony from its annexation in 1910 until 1945. Grievances over forced labor, the sexual exploitation of Korean women (the “comfort women” system), and cultural suppression remained central to Japan–Korea relations throughout the 1990s. ↩︎
3. A Shinto shrine in Tokyo honoring Japan’s war dead, including – since their covert enshrinement in 1978 – fourteen Class-A war criminals. Visits by serving Japanese officials have drawn protests from China and Korea since the 1980s. ↩︎
4. Between December 1937 and January 1938, following the capture of Nanjing, the Imperial Japanese Army massacred Chinese civilians and prisoners of war and committed mass rape. Postwar tribunals put the dead in the hundreds of thousands. Despite the established historicity of the massacre, its denial or minimization, voiced here by Fujita, is a position of the Japanese revisionist right. In 1994, a serving Justice Minister was forced to resign over such statements. ↩︎
5. Two incidents when false alarms nearly caused an all-out nuclear war: the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident and the 1995 Norwegian rocket incident. ↩︎
6. Major Japanese (one of the “Big Five”) newspaper, generally considered liberal or left-leaning. ↩︎
7. The approach of conducting diplomatic or political policies based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than strictly following ideological, moral, or ethical premises. ↩︎
8. The national legislature of Japan. It is composed of a lower house, called the House of Representatives (Shūgiin), and an upper house, the House of Councillors (Sangiin). ↩︎
9. The nearest point of an object’s elliptical orbit around the Moon. ↩︎
10. Perigee and apogee: the nearest and farthest, respectively, points of an object’s elliptical orbit around Earth. ↩︎