One hundred and forty million miles across the vast expanse of blackness and prickly white stars, on the planet we call Mars, the red sand shifted, and out of it rose a magnificent, blue-black, oily, machine with twenty-six enormous barrels. The barrels were cocked and loaded.
The barrels fanned wide, greased gears rotated and lifted them into their trajectories. Then there was a sound in the thin Martian air like twenty-six volcanoes erupting simultaneously. The great guns spat shiny silver cylinders dragging blue-red flame toward our Earth at a blinding speed.
From Earth the eruption was noted by astronomers, but there were no definite conclusions as to the cause. Nothing like it had ever been seen.
Twenty-six objects sped toward Earth. They were observed in our day and night skies as twenty-six flaming streaks.
They all smacked the Earth or its waters. Several in America, several in Europe, one just outside of London, one in a lake in Darkest Africa, another in India, several in the Siberian wastes, four in the Atlantic, four in the Pacific. One in the Sandwich Islands.
There were all kinds of guesses as to the source of these objects, but no one knew at the time that it was the beginning of an invasion from Mars, or that more flashes of light would follow.
And no one knew about another problem.
The very fabric of time and space was in jeopardy.