Djedi's Device

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer

The sun clears the mountains and shines across the sylvan landscape, it’s rays sparkling from the dew on the grasses, bringing out the myriad shades of green on the leaves on the trees, lifting cries from the unseen throats of the hundreds of winged creatures, and stretching a long shadow from the black tetrahedron, a two-dimensional isosceles triangle that points toward Ibripspur, the capital city of the Vardissian Concordance.

As the first rush of cries wanes, there is a bone-jarring ‘thrum’ as the pyramid rises into the air, travels forward one length and slams down with an impact that shakes the countryside into silence. Thirty-four minutes later, it does it again. Behind it, the land is compressed by the incalculable weight of the two-hundred and fifty metre a side edifice. Nothing survives, everything pressed into a memorial rug that lays a metre below the ground’s natural surface.

It has done this without cease for the last four hundred days. The only deviation was when it landed on the military base at Tserges. It spent a day moving sideways, then ahead, then sideways to ensure the entire base was levelled.

We have thrown everything at it. Seven hundred kilometres behind its current position, there is a nuclear desert where a teraton warhead failed to even scratch the matte-black finish whilst ruining what had been the county of Sapur.

It is a terror weapon like nothing we have encountered. We know that on our nearest moon, a pyramid like this one, but smaller, has appeared. We presume that it contains the masters of this horror. They are also imperturbable by teraton nukes.

Yesterday our courier returned from Old Earth with an answer to our desperate queries. I look down at the thin metal sheet, hoping that this twentieth time of reading will yield a detail I missed: the one that will save us.

Guardian Jefflyn.

The researches you requested have proven to be correct. The Great Pyramid is indeed likely to be the remains of one of these devices. An intensive review of all records, research and apocrypha in the light of this revelation has revealed only one fact: Our pyramid was halted by the edifice we call The Sphinx. Indeed, conjecture is that the presence of The Sphinx was necessary to prevent the device’s function until the passage of time rendered it dysfunctional. We also concur with your other hypothesis; the presence of the third pyramid on the Giza Plateau indicates an attempt by the pyramid users to reactivate their weapon. As to why this failed and how the edifices functioned at all are things beyond our current scientific understanding.

Reluctantly, EarthGov agrees that your proposed action is the only viable recourse.

I bow my head, then raise my hand to summon my personal guard and aides. They assemble in a semi-circle behind me. I turn to face them, letting them see the tracks of my tears so they will feel the gravitas of my words.

“Abandon planet.”