READ THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS OF ZERO FREQUENCY FOR FREE

WHAT ZEUS DELETED FROM THE CASE FILE

A real police report, written the way an officer would write it, with the details of a key scene from The Loop that never made it into the novel. Sent by email, and only to those who ask for it: one-off access, no spam, no leaks other than this one.

Chapter 1

AT FIFTEEN THOUSAND METERS, the world had narrowed to mathematics and fear. The commander pressed the oxygen mask against his face, hunting for air that tasted of something other than burnt rubber and recycled metal. The bomber shuddered beneath his seat, a constant tremor that climbed his spine and reminded him they were flying over an open grave.

“Two minutes to target,” the copilot’s voice sang over the intercom. It sounded metallic, stripped of any trace of hope.

The commander glanced at the panel. August 9. The date blinked in phosphor green on the HUD. What macabre irony, he thought.

The same day as Nagasaki. Eighty-seven years later, humanity was trying to correct its destiny with the same fire—only this time the enemy wasn’t in another city, but beneath the Earth’s crust.

Below, the island of Delos was no longer the cradle of Apollo. It was a scar. The Harbinger crater had devoured it, a red ring on the tactical map that throbbed like an infected eye waiting for them to blink.

“Systems online,” the commander confirmed. His voice didn’t waver. He had spent the last of his fear months ago. “Remember the procedure, son. We go in, drop the package, and turn away. If we brush their radius of influence one second longer than we have to, they’ll snu# us out like a candle and we’ll fall into that mouth.”

“Understood, sir. One minute. ARM in position.”

The copilot, a lieutenant who could barely have been twenty-five, wiped the fog from his visor with the back of his glove. The commander saw the gesture. He knew what it meant. They had no family waiting on the ground; that was exactly why they had been chosen. They were ghosts piloting a coffin of carbon fiber and titanium toward the end of the world.

“Arm the package.”

“Armed and ready. The Night is set.”

The Night: that was what they called the bomb, for it was a matte black cylinder in the bay, loaded with the nuclear wrath of a species that refused to die in silence.

The bay doors opened with a hydraulic groan, and the frozen air of the stratosphere howled as it received humanity’s gift.

“Descending to ten thousand meters for the attack run.”

“Confirm target.”

“Target confirmed, sir.”

“Drop it,” the commander ordered, and for the first time he let go of the stick to trace a quick sign of the cross over his chest. “And may God forgive us for what we are about to wake.”

A metallic crack rang through the fuselage as the shackles released two tons of death. The commander felt the subtle shift in the aircraft’s balance and, without wasting an instant, banked the stick left while pushing the throttles to the stops. The bomber wheeled into a hard onehundred-eighty-degree turn, clawing for every meter of distance between them and the hell about to break loose at their backs. There was no music but the afterburners and the creak of the harnesses under the G-force.

“Beginning escape maneuver!” he shouted over the roar of the engines. “We have one minute forty seconds until detonation!”

The engines howled at their limit; the fuselage hummed.

“We have just enough time to clear the lethal radius of the shock‐ wave,” the commander reminded him, teeth clenched beneath his mask.

The horizon, a clean line of steel and blue, tilted dizzyingly. Below, the black-and-white map of a country with its lights out. In the cockpit, the smell of hot plastic and sealant. The HUD ticked o$ clean figures falling at full speed; the clocks kept their discipline. Through the inter‐ com, small clicks, static. Near any of the holes there was always some‐ thing in the air, as if the world were chewing on sound.

The commander jutted his chin toward a figure penciled on the canopy frame: “Safe distance: fifty kilometers.” Below it, the panel chronometer counted down.

The second o#cer sank his thumb into the chronometer on his thigh and breathed through the mask until the hiss of oxygen faded away.

The commander laid his glove on the younger man’s forearm, one brief squeeze. He muted the intercom; the noise of the engines filled the space where words had no intention of going. They eased their shoul‐ ders half a centimeter into their seats, the way a man braces before a wave. A dry smile, a slight nod, and each returned to his instruments.

And they waited as the countdown ran to its final digits. The plane $ew on, $eeing at supersonic speed, cradled only by the constant drone of its own engines at the limit.

The two men sought each other’s eyes. They had known before the mission began that the distance would not be enough to spare them the e%ects of the detonation. Both had accepted their fate: for their country, for their planet. It was a suicide mission.

That eye contact was a mutual farewell. It wasn’t words; it was an old covenant: if this goes wrong, it still goes right, because it closes the door.

“Ten seconds to package contact, sir,” the lieutenant sang out.

“Braced for impact.”

“Two… one… contact.”

The commander closed his eyes and felt an unnatural dread, just before the detonation. A mental anguish that did not belong to the imminent end. He had set out on this mission with his death already accepted, yet now, this close to the end, he could not help being afraid. He shut his eyes waiting for the $ash that would bleach the sky white, for the concussion that would tear apart the very atoms of the air.

But there was no light. There was no thunder. Physics surrendered to the will of the hole. The world did not shudder.

The plane was still intact, and the sky was still that sickly gray.

The commander opened his eyes. It was as if someone had heard his wish to live and ruled that the explosion was not permitted there. And the universe obeyed.

“Detonation failure?” he asked. His voice sounded strange, too loud in the sudden silence of the headphones.

“No… it can’t be,” the copilot stammered, typing frantically at his console. “Telemetry confirmed the arming sequence. The bomb’s altimeters were working. There should have been… there should have been something.”

“Package telemetry?”

“Data shows impact at exact coordinates. But there’s no flash, no pressure, no nothing.”

“Check visual.”

The lieutenant scanned the onboard imagery, jittery. His trembling hands kept missing the buttons.

“Visual confirmed: no e#ects, sir. We sank a three-pointer, Commander—nothing but net, first try—but there’s no detonation inside. There wasn’t even a seismic impact; the hole absorbed the kinetic energy and the mass as if we had tossed a feather into a void.”

The commander slammed his fist against the instrument frame. A short blow, so as not to break anything that still worked.

“Damn the Harbingers,” he spat. “If this doesn’t touch them either, we are well and truly screwed, Lieutenant. Transmit to High Command: the bomb has been nullified like the rest of our arsenal.

Neutralizing field active on target.”

The lieutenant switched to the secure channel and sang out the defeat in the key of routine. Then he stopped talking, and the cockpit became a small room again, with two men inside and an entire planet down below, motionless.

“So what now, sir? Nothing works against them.”

“Are you a religious man, Lieutenant?” He tapped the gold crucifix he wore under his shirt. The lieutenant shook his head. “Might be time to start, son.”

He didn’t say it lightly. That silence held everything: the bomb that never was, the missiles that never detonate near the holes, the artillery that falls mute in their shadow. Those pits swallowed everything without chewing. This mission had been the final gambit to seal one of the mouths, the last nail. And the mouth had yawned without deigning to bite.

“Hold your heading. Don’t enter the radius again,” the commander ordered, mechanical. “Don’t hand them the plane.”

The younger man stole a glance at the chronometer. Twenty-six seconds had passed since “contact,” and they were still alive. And yet that survival tasted of desert.

“High Command confirms receipt,” the lieutenant said. “They request we maintain station at a prudent distance and transmit field data.”

“Copy. Holding station outside their range.”

They banked into a wide arc. From that altitude, the Harbinger hole didn’t glow or roar or emit anything at all. It simply was. A perfect, unnatural circle imposing its silent law: here the rules change. Here fission learns to hold its tongue. Here technology remembers that it is the lesser thing.

“Do you think something will come out of there?” the young man dared to ask.

“Months of attempts without an answer,” the commander replied. “If they have intentions, they’re keeping them. If they have mercy, we haven’t seen it.”

The plane #ew on, small against the sky. Below, the alien pupil kept staring upward, patient. And for the first time, they understood that “nothing happening” can also be a form of threat.

And so they left Delos behind, the island where, according to legend, it was forbidden to be born and to die.

And as they pulled away, the commander understood the true nature of terror: it was not fire, nor death. It was indi$erence. The enemy did not hate them. To the enemy, they simply were nothing.

Chapter 2

TWO YEARS ON, we still knew nothing about the visitors. We never saw them. They never made contact. Even so, we knew they were there, hiding inside those caverns.

That ignorance of everything happening inside the gigantic pits changed the planet beyond repair. After the Irruption, a strange wave of unease began to spread across the globe. Subtle at first, but as the months passed it grew until it had taken hold of nearly the entire planet.

It didn’t affect everyone equally, of course; the social decay wasn’t uniform; it gathered like gangrene around some countries more than others, but you could feel it everywhere, in the very air. Like a plague you can’t trace to its source and that, however far you run, never lets you go.

Even so, life managed to carry on with a certain normality under the omniscient eye of those deep pits in the earth. The tunnels seemed inert, but the ignorance surrounding them bred paranoia in certain govern‐ ments, and paranoia led to wars. Other countries sealed themselves o"

from the outside world. And a few kept up a delicate balance of normal‐ ity, waiting for the visitors to decide to make themselves known.

There were two kinds of people: the defiant, who refused to accept the visitors’ superiority, and the resigned, who swallowed with bitterness the presence of the new intergalactic tenants.

Miguel Reyes Brooks belonged to the latter, the resigned—an inves‐ tigative journalist, once fairly well regarded, now running out the last of his unemployment benefits. Not that he cared anymore; since the furrows had appeared on the surface, few things had kept any real meaning.

Today was a normal day, or as normal as one could hope for after the Irruption of the Harbingers. As he did at the end of every day, Miguel occupied his usual stool at the pub. The bartender set another pint in front of him without being asked. It wasn’t a true Celtic pub, but the polished version executives imagine.

The place sat two streets o# Camden Town. Outside, black-painted wood, a neon shamrock over the door, and two bouncers checking bags without raising their voices. Inside, more club than tavern: sticky $oor, the smell of fresh bleach and bar metal. On the wall, a chalkboard reading “2-for-1 Jägerbombs till 1:00 AM” and a muted TV running subtitled news of armed con$icts breaking out in several countries in the wake of the Irruption.

Miguel ignored it all as the glasses piled up in front of him: burnished zinc and chromed Guinness taps with a mirror behind them. Colored bottles lined up like soldiers. To his right, the rattle of a slot machine reminded him of the money he had lost in it. It seemed to call to him, but tonight Miguel wasn’t exactly $ush with pounds. There were no druids or bagpipes in the background, only a disco kick drum that made the screens vibrate and set the kids in university hoodies danc‐ ing. In one corner, a couple of o%ce workers drained pints in suits without ties.

Every two minutes, the beep of the card readers marked contactless payments; every ten, someone shouted a line from some hit of the twenties.

Miguel, between sips, watched everything around him. On the door he read the usual warning sign: “Respect the curfew, citizen.” The ministry’s new emblem prominently displayed. A grimace of disap‐ proval formed on his face.

Post-Harbinger London: the city faked normality, as if a discount on drinks were enough to hold it up.

Elbow on the bar’s edge, a Guinness half gone and two shots already in. Miguel drummed his fingers on the counter, turned the coaster to line up its logo with the pint, and ran his thumb along the wet rim of the beer. It was a ritual he performed every time.

The wood of the bar struck him as cheap stage dressing—an art dealer’s son, the critical eye never forgives—but he liked the place: enough noise to become anonymous, enough green lighting to make new things look old. The bartender, his Irish accent softened by years in London, slid another round over with precision: pint, shot of scotch, glass of water.

The contactless reader beeped; Miguel smiled. Beside him, a darkhaired woman in a wool coat and worn-soled boots was talking half a centimeter from his ear. The conversation was going nowhere, like most at that hour, but that hardly mattered here: outside, the damp cold of Camden High Street waited for him, and the N29 gliding past like a whisper. Inside, while the music played on, London did what it did best: kept up appearances.

“So you’re a journalist, eh?” she said with playful mockery, savoring her drink, as if this were a little game meant to impress him.

“One of the good ones, too.”

“Come o" it. You’re winding me up.” The young woman toyed with her hair and took a small sip of her drink. “Am I in the presence of someone famous?”

Miguel let out a lukewarm laugh, more forced than anything.

“Remember that whole business a few years back, the catacombs under Notre-Dame?” She nodded. “That was me. I discovered them— or rather, I wrote the article vouching that they were real. Though you’ll remember they said afterward the whole thing was a hoax.”

“Was it?”

Over the pounding music there was a brief silence between them.

Then Miguel, with a false smile, went on:

“What does it matter?” He twisted his mouth and took a swallow of his scotch.

“Not much matters anymore, does it?” Another little sip.

“You said it, Abigail,” he whispered, leaning closer. “Any day now they’ll get tired of us, come out, and wipe us o" the map. Best to enjoy the moment…”

“But what if they never do?”

“Then everything will go on as always.” He drained his glass in one swallow and chased it with a long sip of water to soothe the ache in his stomach.

Then he let a hand fall over hers. After that, an innocent smile, which the young woman returned in kind. A brief silence before their fingers laced together. A wink revealed a thin scar tracing discreetly along his right eyebrow, the legacy of a fall in his youth.

Still, the minutes went by and, between drinks and shots, laughter and poorly disguised caresses, the courtship seemed to have worked. And so, amid questions and answers as trivial as her favorite color or how she got on with her parents, the party wound down toward its end.

The bartender, Miguel’s faithful confidant every night, watched it all from behind the bar as he cleaned up before closing. He #ashed Miguel a knowing little smile; Miguel played dumb and went on stroking the young woman’s soft hair while she whispered something in his ear.

Miguel leaned toward the barman and, with a careless gesture, asked him to put it all on his tab. The barman nodded with a blend of weari‐ ness and resignation; he had spent nights piling up Miguel’s debts, but he chose not to interrupt the elaborate choreography unfolding before his eyes. Miguel rose and, with a wink at the bartender, made to leave. Dawn was close and the curfew had ended. It was safe to be on the street again.

Meanwhile the young woman, steadying herself with one hand, gripped him hard around the waist, as if she feared Miguel might slip away at any moment, while the other hand stroked the man’s chestnut hair. They were leaving the place together when Miguel’s jacket began to vibrate. His phone.

Slightly dizzy, the man pulled a hand from his pocket and checked the time on his old analog watch. Past six in the morning. Who would be calling at this hour? he wondered. The screen showed an unknown caller. Reluctantly, he slid his finger across it.

“Who is this? I’m in the middle of something important,” he answered, in #awless English despite his Toledo roots.

In that instant, silence took over. Miguel let go of the girl abruptly and stepped several meters away. His face began to change, as if gravity itself were burning off the drunkenness that had ruled him until then.

He answered in monosyllables and at last put the phone away.

The street was sunk in half-light. The stone roadway of Soho gleamed wet under the faint glow of the streetlamps, the sign of a recent downpour. The young woman waited for him eagerly on the other side of the street, but he was submerged in his own thoughts.

“Miguel, let’s go to my place,” the woman suggested, her tone thick with sensuality as she beckoned him closer.

Still trapped in his own thoughts, he took several seconds to react.

Then he lifted his gaze and answered in a flat voice:

“I’m sorry, Abigail, but I have to go.”

Without another word, he turned and set off down the street at a brisk pace, toward Westminster.

“What’s going on?” the woman shouted into the shadows.

There was a silence. Then Miguel’s voice echoed through the narrow streets.

“My father is dead.”

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