Of course it wasn't nuclear. For a start he wouldn't be heading for it if it was, surely? Also, none of them used nuclear power, too inefficient. Even ther primative one in Roswell used antimatter. The more useful examples used sub nuclear reactions keyed to an end product that was introduced with its antimatter partner, leaving no mess. Clean, efficient, reliable.
	Though as he read his first reports he wondered if the landing procedure used nuclear power. One craft came close to that, in Syberia. Once the craft was secured and removed, the coverup was easy.
	This one would be hell. Nuclear testing could be ruled out as a cover: You don't 'test' on people. Especially other countries people. They tend to call that a decleration of war. 
	At best it could be a terroist attack, going for low key targets at random, and at worst it could be the start of an arms race, possibably even the start of...
	He didn't wan't to end that. Ending the thought on a different note, he muttered, "At least it isn't nuclear..."
	Looking out of the small jet he saw the effect of the impact. Threes had not only been knocked over, they had been compleatly stripped, and burned black, resembeling deep black hair after just being combed. Paddy fields around were empty: Their waters had evaporated instantly, and the rice burned to nothing, leaving black holes in the ground. There would be a bad harvest this year.
	His mind thought over the dimentions as they reached ground zero, where it all started. The crater was of acceptable size, beingabout a quarter of a mile in diameter, but the damage was less circular the further out you got; the shockwave traveled in a direction, instead of just smacking into the ground. It was similer to a large 2D egg, ranging from five miles wide to forteen miles across. "Musta been one hullava bang." He mused. Othough the ground still steamed in amny places, the land had cooled relativly fast, allowing them to move in before the crowds did, to remove any wreckage that remained.
	"Of all the places in the world," He asked nobody, "Why China?" To him, this could be unbeleavably bad. So far China hadn't used the crash as an excuse to throw missiles across to everyone they disliked, but how do you cover up something like this before they start those deadly toothpicks? You don't. You pretend it was smething else... if you could.
	The small aircraft shuddered. Looking over the head of the pilot, he saw the insriments go nuts. Then that all hit the roof: The altitude meter said they were in space, the speed said that they were breaking the sound barrier- several times over, the tempreture gauged that of the surface of the sun. After a second of that wild display, everything died, reading zero on all fronts. At precisley the same time, the plane bacame compleatly silent. Looking back at the wings, he saw that the engines had stopped, both of them.
	Normally about now a small jet with all two of its engines out would start to go into a dive. A steep dive. If the pilot was lucky, he might still be awake to pull up, possibably saving himself a nasty fate. If he was unlucky, he might black out from the G-force... or lose it. Either way, both of those ment death, a hot grinding death.
	As it happened, neither of these things happened: The plane glided perfectly. The pilot ddn;t even flintch when the engines died, but instead carried on as normal. The designers of this small jet had taken this situation into account: It had a habit of happening a lot.
	There were othetr places where this happened, anough for names to circulate about them. 
	It made him wonder. How many were there, buried under ground, crashed so long ago there was no trace of them, like the one that they decided should not be known, the one that crashed 65 million years ago. That would have been big, biggered then the wreackage they moved from the red sea, and showed the world another 'metorite' crater in the deep. The only difference between them and this was time: This was now.
	Here, and now. Where he flew over a land that the report in his lap said over 30 thousand people lived, and had very recently died. Where two small villages once thrived, and now layed in ruin. Looking at ground zero, where rice paddy fields had once grown in rich waters and furtile soils, and where nothing now remained unscorched, blackened, and dry backed.
	The pilot looked to his left and up at the man dressed in a black suit. "We are approaching ground zero propper." He said, his voice a mixture of formality, concentration, and grim uncaring.
	He looked across to the site. Then down the crater. The very deep crater. The report didn't mention depth, and he judged it to be about two hundred and fifty feet deep, give or take. His mechanically enhanced brain was always an asset.
	At the bottom proudly sat the ship. One glance told the man that something was very wrong. For one thing it was in one piece. Normally they either broke up during entry, or when they hit. Not only was it in the third catagory of intact, but the lights were on: Somebody was at home, and they were alive. That, and they were doing something, the whole thing was cutting into the bedrock. And what was coming out of the bedrock glowed orange.
	"Your cutting into the rock...?" He muttered. "But... why?" He sat on his luxary seat momentaraly, watching the orange liquid pour out around the crsft, not even marking it. The deep grey of the semi circular craft remained unchanged. By now the small jet had entered hover mode, almost silently.
	Snapping out of his facination, he ordered to the pilot. "Call 'em out."
	The pilot reached for a box next to the radio. They both knew that in all probability the radio was dead like the jets engines. Now the jet relied on something... special to keep it in the air. He quickly looked at the box, seeking the only button on it, and pressed it before checking on the jet again. The type of locomotion that had been fitted was not compleatly perfect yet, but it worked well with supervision. The words 'engage' lit up on the box, words that were not visable at all before. This devise, like the jets engines, didn't short out: It was... special.
	The man didn't care to watch what happened next, he had a report to file out, which he begun, while also thinking of a cover story for the world. A metorite hit sounded appropriate, the reains of the rock so hot it melted. 
	While he typed, mechanical monsters stirred around the crater. They were special. They had been placed there to quell and isolate the ship, and now they began to move in to 'disable' it as fast and efficiently as possibal. These mashines were akin to those in science fiction books, in fact, they had been designed from stolen technology, technology that was over a hundred years advanced. Technology modified for combat.
	Most of them were six or four legged walkers, but some of the newer ones incorporated the same hover system as the jet, not using air, but radiation of sorts. The weapons were ranged, too, varying from rocket launchers, to lasers and plasma weapons. It hardly seemed to be like 2005 here, more like 3005. They scuttled, and floated, towards their 'target' like ants to a round sugerlump.
	The second the shooting began, the radio in the jet exploded.
	The man looked up at the smoldering mess that they pilot had stopped burning, and asked the ship. "Who did you just call?" 
	The ship, or those on it, didn't appear to answer, either to him, or the shooting. It didn't fight back at all.
	It was all over in under 24 hours. The ship was removed, the survivors of the attack, totaling a grand total of one, put in 'containment' after a short study, and the cover story introduced. It transpired the craft had extracted some metals from below the crust, which made some in the 'establishmen' wonder if they were prospectors.
	As to who they called, and what they said, nobody knew, but some thought this might not be the end of it. The technology received was far advanced, almost too far to be understood. They had genetic engenerring to an art, it seemed.
	But it made the Technocracy stronger, at first.