Dead Reckoning

For many millennia the towering Matterhorn of Mount Everest had stood for fertility and strength. The Ice-Age sierra of glaciers, particularly those making up the great range of the Himalayas, had bestowed fresh-water streams and lakes to the earliest settlers of the Indus Valley. But something was buried deep beneath the jungles of Borabi, beneath the piedmont of the world's tallest mountain. It was estimated that the alien spacecraft had been there for thousands of years, something that had crash-landed around the time of Jesus, something which caused the ancient Hittites in their midst to pay homage through sacrifice. And for the next 2,000 years the alien vessel remained buried in a mountainous wash of foliage and vines, its deadly inhabitants tunneling deep into the mountain in search of nitrogen-rich phosphorous, a critical element needed to ensure their survival. And they'd been feeding on the peasant population. But when the hydraulic shovel of a Caterpillar bulldozer struck the top of the foreign alloy the lines of survival were drawn in the sand. And there would be no shielding the truth from the world's panicked masses. It was an epiphany which put the planet's ingenuity and resolve to the ultimate test. The metallic hump discovered in the Borabi forest was, quite literally, just the tip of the iceberg. And as the vessel gradually emerged, there appeared an imminent threat to planetary sovereignty.