There had been no change in the two hundred years since CST’s exploratory division had performed its quick scan.

“Our survey records check out, such as they are,” Mac said; he turned to look at Natasha Kersley in the couch next to him. “There’s nothing alive around here. Is that what you wanted, Doc?”

“Looks good,” she said.

“Can I begin the satellite launch?”

“Yes, please.”

Mac sent a flurry of commands into the ship’s RI. Modified missile launch tubes in the Moscow’s forward section opened and spat out eighteen sensor satellites. Their ion rockets pushed them into a bracelet formation orbiting the nameless moon, allowing them to cover the entire surface simultaneously. Once their coverage was established they’d be able to determine the exact power of the quantumbuster they were here to test.

“So far so good,” he muttered.

“Absolutely. Here’s hoping we don’t have a Fermi moment.”

“A what?” Mac really didn’t like the uncertainty in her voice.

“During the Trinity test of the very first atom bomb, Fermi wondered if the detonation would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. They just didn’t know, you see. We think the quantum disruption won’t propagate. If it does, then the whole universe gets converted into energy.”

“Oh, great, thanks for sharing.” He gave the doomed moon a deeply troubled glance.

“It’s really not very likely,” Natasha said.

It took two hours until Mac was satisfied the satellites were correctly placed, and their communications relay systems were locked together. “Okay, Doc, you’re on.”

Natasha drew a quick breath, and fed her launch code into the prototype quantumbuster warhead. The missile was hurled out of its launch tube by a powerful magnetic pulse. When it was ten kilometers from the starship, its fusion drive ignited, accelerating it hard toward the moon.

“All systems functional,” Natasha reported. “Target acquired. I’m authorizing activation.” She sent another code to the weapon, and received confirmation. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Amen to that,” Mac muttered.

The Moscow opened a wormhole and quickly slipped inside. Five seconds later, and two million kilometers out from the moon, the starship slid back out into real space.

“Receiving satellite data,” Mac said as the communications dish picked up the signal. “Switching to high capacity recording.”

“Two minutes to impact,” Natasha said. “All systems operational.”

“We’re going to see it from here, right?” He was aligning the starship’s sensors back on the moon.

“Oh, heavens, yes. The quantumbuster field will initialize just before the missile hits the surface. That should give us an intersection over several hundred meters of the moon’s mass. It works out to quite a substantial volume.”

“And the whole thing just turns to energy?”

“Any piece of matter inside the field, yes. That’s the theory: the effect completely breaks down quantum-level cohesion. The discharge radiance will be on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

“Discharge radiance,” Mac said with a smile. “You mean explosion.”

She gave him a nervous grin. “Yeah.”

Mac turned his whole attention to the visual spectrum image that was being projected in front of his face. The moon was a simple dark circle framed by stars. All the sensor satellites were watching eagerly. They showed a tiny purple-white spark sinking toward the surface.

Mac had brought the Moscow out of hyperspace on the other side of the moon from the target zone. If the Seattle Project weapon worked as advertised, the radiation blast would be lethal even at two million kilometers. The Commonwealth would have a decisive weapon to use against the Primes.

“Do you think they’ll negotiate?” he asked.

“If they see this in action, they’d be truly crazy not to,” Natasha said. “I don’t care how bizarre their motives are, they face extinction if we use this against them. They’ll talk.”

Mac desperately wanted her to be right. The way he’d worked his way to the navy’s vanguard, he was pretty sure he’d wind up with the mission to take a quantumbuster to Dyson Alpha.

He checked the moon again, worrying about the whole Fermi moment idea. The missile was seconds away from its brown and black mottled surface. I should have positioned the Moscow on the other side of the gas giant.

The quantumbuster activated its effect field. Light flared around the moon, creating a perfect white halo. It was as if the ancient sphere of rock was eclipsing a white dwarf star. The edges began to dissolve as the glare poured across the cratered surface like an advancing tsunami. Dazzling cracks appeared, opening deep into the moon’s interior. Low rolling hills heaved, transforming into volcanoes that jetted debris hundreds of kilometers out into space. Dusty plains crumbled as they separated ponderously from the highlands surrounding them.

Slowly and inexorably, the moon disintegrated inside its cocoon of lurid stellar light.

“Jesus, Doc,” Mac barked. “You were just supposed to blow the bloody thing out of orbit.”

***

Giselle Swinsol herself was sitting at the front of the bus when it arrived to collect them. It was a fifty-seater Ford Landhound, with luxury seats and a small canteen in front of the washroom cubicles. Two other families were sitting in it, looking lost and vaguely apprehensive. Mark recognized the expression. He’d seen it in the bathroom mirror that morning.

Giselle waited until the porterbots had loaded all the Vernons’ bags and boxes into the luggage compartment at the back. “Don’t look so worried; this isn’t a long trip.”

Mark and Liz swapped a glance, then tried to settle the excited kids.

The bus drove back down the highway toward Illanum. It joined a convoy of vehicles, slotting in behind a forty-wheel transporter carrying one of the completed starship compartments, and in front of three standard container trucks, empty after dropping their loads at a factory. Once they had passed the back of Rainbow Wood the compartment transporter turned off along a long curving slip road; the bus followed it. The slip road fed onto another three-lane highway wide enough to handle the transporters. After another eight kilometers, another slip road joined it, bringing more of the giant transporters.

“I didn’t know there were any other towns on Cressat,” Mark said.

“There are five assembly centers here,” Giselle said. “Biewn and two others are responsible for life support and cargo; one is fabricating the hyperdrives; and the last provides general systems, the starship’s spine if you like.”

Mark began to reevaluate the project yet again. The scale was larger than he’d imagined. So was the timescale; this had to have been going on for a long time prior to the Prime invasion. As for the cost…

The highway was heading directly for the base of a low hill where a circle of warm pink light was shining at them. Mark felt the slight tingle of a pressure membrane as the bus passed through. Then he, Liz, and the kids were pressed against the window, anxious to see the new world.

They’d emerged high up in some mountains, giving them a view out over a flat plain that must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. It had strange yellow rock outcrops, and a jagged volcanic canyon running away diagonally from the mountains. The ground was completely bare, with a thin covering of gray-brown sand scattered over dark rock. Right away on the far horizon were some rumpled dark specks that might have been more mountains; the planet’s lavender-shaded sky made it difficult to tell.

They were on a broad ring road that curved around the human settlement, whose clean new buildings stood out against the mottled brown landscape like silver warts. The town had an outer band of factories, similar to those that Mark had worked in back in Biewn, several condo-style accommodation blocks, and five sprawling housing estates. Construction sites made up a good third of the area, swarming with bots. A wormhole generator and four modern fusion stations dominated the skyline opposite the gateway back to Cressat.