“Jesus Christ,” Hartle said. His body was unmoving as he watched her, as if carved from granite, his contempt etched on his face.

Deeke said, “Tell us about Clementine, Ms Fahy.”

“Right…” Fahy scanned ahead through the slides on her soft-screen, and began stumbling through a hasty presentation on a space mission called Clementine II.

Clementine had been an experimental 1990s deep-space mission cooked up by NASA and the Air Force Space Command. Clementine’s primary purpose had been to serve as a test-bed for the performance of advanced defence technologies in deep space, up to ten million miles from Earth. But it was also a test of techniques for asteroid interception. It had been sent to close rendezvous with three asteroids and had been equipped to fire probes — yard-long cylindrical missiles — into the asteroids’ surface. In the event, Clementine had failed after the first rendezvous, but that first mock-interception had gone well.

“Clementine was essentially target practice,” Fahy said. “It was criticized by the science community for that reason—”

“Fuck the science,” Hartle said. “Why the hell didn’t we follow this up?”

Fahy felt even more nervous. “Sir, the scientists won the day, in the end. They argued that the money would be better spent on ground-based instruments that could detect an Earth-bound incoming. Better to survey the problem, rather than try flying spaceborne weaponry at this stage. Then there was opposition from the liberal lobby, who argued that the build-up of a deflection capability might be a simple cover for the continuation of weapons programs, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, by vested interests: the military labs, the defence suppliers. Carl Sagan at Cornell was vocal in—”

“Carl Sagan,” Hartle growled. “Miss Fahy, for once in your goddamn life, get to the point. Listen up. Right now money is no object, for NASA. I’ll give you what you want: Delta IVs to launch up as many nukes as you could wish for, all the ground-based resources you ask for. Now. Tell me about 2002OA. What options do we have for deflecting this goddamn incoming?”

She frowned. “I’m sorry, sir. I thought you knew. We don’t have any options.”

Hartle seemed baffled rather than angry. “There is always an option, damn it.”

“Not in this case. We detected it too late. We’re already in the terminal interception phase. Right now, 2002OA is only four times as far away as the Moon. The delta-vee we would have to apply is more than three hundred feet per second. It is impossible for us to achieve such a deflection, no matter what we threw at it. The best we could achieve would be to break the rock up. But then you’d have a multiple impact instead of one, along with an immense cloud of dust and debris hitting the upper atmosphere…”

Gareth Deeke said, “Like it or not, we no longer have the Delta IVs in the inventory anyhow, Al. We’ve run down too far. We just don’t have the launch capability any more.”

Hartle’s nicotine-stained fingers drummed at the table. “You’re telling me we can’t shoot this thing down?”

“No, sir. Of course we don’t know for sure if it’s going to hit Earth anyhow.”

“Let’s start talking about what we do if it does. Gareth, are we prepared to strike at the Chinese? Should we launch before the impact? And what—”

An aide walked in, a girl. She walked towards Hartle. He watched her approach, impassive, his face like a piece of Mount Rushmore. Her gait was awkward, Fahy thought, her steps uneven, as if she were close to fainting.

“Sir,” she said. “We heard from NORAD. They have a fix on the incoming’s ground zero…” The girl officer started to cry, big salty drops rolling down her cheeks.

Everyone was standing now; orders were shouted back and forth.

The Atlantic,she heard. The Atlantic.

Two young officers had clustered around Al Hartle. “Come on, sir; we have to get you out of here, over to NORAD. There’s a chopper waiting…”

Holy shit,Fahy thought. They got confirmation. This isn’t just some military wet-dream fantasy of Al Hartle’s. It’s real; it’s going to happen.

I’m going to die.

Holy shit.

Jake Hadamard parked at the foot of the Vehicle Assembly Building. His car was the only one in the lot.

When he looked up at the face of the VAB, it was like peering up at a cliff. In the flat morning sunlight he could see that the wall was heavily weathered, streaked with seagull guano, and there was even some lichen, he saw, busily burrowing into the face of the VAB, as if it was some immense tombstone. It was a little difficult to believe that modern humans, in some epochal moment of madness, had built such a monument.

He had a sudden, jarring sense that history was going to end, here, today.

He walked away from the VAB, towards the press stand.

The uncompromising old wooden bleacher was evidently abandoned now, its roof broken open to the daylight, dune grass colonizing the lower levels. He climbed a few steps and found a seat; he brushed it clear of dirt and sand and sat down, looking east.

He was looking towards the ocean, across the Banana River, and, beyond a treeline, towards Launch Complex 39. The sun, still early-morning low, was bright in his eyes. The press portakabins that had once stood here had long since been hauled away, and the other relics of human launches — the gigantic countdown clock, the flagpole — were gone too. Nothing remained but obscure concrete podiums and platforms, already crumbling under the assault of sea and vegetation.

Beyond the treeline, on the other side of the river, he could see the two LC-39 launch complexes, side by side, blocky mechanical towers blue-misted by distance. Now 39-B was all but demolished; little had been left after the scrap teams had moved in but a shell of rusting iron set on a concrete platform.

An effort had been made to preserve 39-A, however; for the benefit of the tourist trade, Disney-Coke had erected a gigantic carbon fiber mockup of a Saturn V to stand alongside the launch gantry. It was easily visible now, a slim white tower, more than three hundred and sixty feet tall, tapering up from the flaring fins of the S-IC first stage, all the way to the pencil-thin escape rocket at the tip of the dummy Apollo spacecraft at the apex. But it was unpainted, many of the details missing, so that it looked like a child’s unfinished model.

The sun was to his right and in his eyes, already hot. Hadamard was dressed in a suit, his tie loosely knotted. He adjusted his sunglasses for greater opacity.

He wondered if he ought to put on some sunblock.

He checked his watch. Well, if what he’d heard from his contacts inside NASA and NORAD was correct, he wouldn’t have long to wait. He could risk doing without the sunblock.

Rosenberg and Benacerraf huddled together at the galley end of the hab module. The door to Bill Angel’s quarters was closed; there was no sound from within.

Even so, Rosenberg and Benacerraf were talking in whispers.

“Sixty miles,” Rosenberg said. “It’s not so far. If we could manage ten miles a day, we could be there and back in a couple of weeks…”

Rosenberg was in a mood Benacerraf had learned to recognize, and mistrust: a mood of excitement, in which he would be carried away by some new idea.

The trouble was, around here it was only Rosenberg who came up with any ideas at all.

“Tell me again,” she said. “You’re sure this is a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite crater?”

“As sure as I can be.” Rosenberg had spotted the crater, punched into the border of the big Cronos plateau, in Cassini orbital radar imaging. “The size is the thing. Look, Paula, the nature of the impacting bolide determines the cratering profile. The most common type out here, far from the inner System, will be weak, icy, cometary bodies. If an object is small and weak, it’s going to break up in Titan’s thick atmosphere. For a bolide of a given yield strength you have a minimum radius below which you shouldn’t find any craters. For the ice bolides, that comes at around thirty miles. The stronger the material, the smaller the crater it can create.”