Firecrackers kept going off, and fireworks went shooting up into the sky.

The Super-Thunder Wave station was still being built. On this lively night, Shen Cong turned down the base leaders' invitation to celebrate New Year's Eve with the settlement's residents.

Instead he was with Brother Dao, Ma Changsheng, Zhou Zuohai and the others, discussing the Gate of Cybertron.

A projector cast a sketch onto the screen: a pitch-black starry background, blue arcs forming a ring-shaped wormhole gateway, and an irregular celestial body flying out of the gateway.

Click.

The next slide.

A close-up of the whole celestial body: one face very flat and smooth, the other rough and uneven.

"This is the world-ending comet as our artist drew it, carefully corrected from Brother Dao's description. Boss Huang, look at this smooth face. In our judgment, it absolutely did not form naturally," said a researcher who was working the projector.

Shen Cong studied the whole comet and frowned. "You think someone did this?"

"There's no way to tell. Brother Dao only saw the world-ending comet once, after all, so it's hard to judge exactly how the cut on the smooth face was made. All we can say is that it didn't form naturally. Look especially at where the smooth face meets the rough one. There's a sharp break in the body's structure."

Zhou Zuohai added, "As if a knife had sliced it down the middle."

The researcher said, "There's no way to determine the world-ending comet's size. We can only estimate it from the little data Brother Dao could give us. Its diameter was roughly one to two kilometers. But the energy it carried was tens or even hundreds of times that of the asteroid in the theory of how the dinosaurs died out."

Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs, rulers of the Earth, suddenly went extinct.

Some experts believe an asteroid hitting the Earth caused it, and in sedimentary rock from the time of the extinction they found high concentrations of iridium. This metal is very scarce on Earth and is thought to have been brought from outer space…