FOREMAN: We're not in retreat-

ROBISON: Right. It's a strategic evacuation. But even that doesn't wash. There's at least a billion species left on this planet. Do you think you can save them all? I doubt it. And what about those of us who get left behind? What do we become? Worm food?

FOREMAN: Nobody's being left behind. You're assuming that some of us are abandoning all of us. That's not the case, all of us are making it possible for some of us to operate out of a safe harbor. Consider it insurance. We're making it possible for humanity to survive the very worst-case scenario…

The airship was the size of a nightmare-and the same color too. She had been painted to look like a king-worm, and the resemblance was horrifying.

My first glimpse of her was an accident. I was looking out through the chopper window, admiring the lemon-and-rosecolored afternoon as we coursed over Panama City, when I spotted something red and purple glittering under stadium floodlights, looming huge against the skyline. My brain translated the image immediately into worm. Except it couldn't be-it was larger than the buildings that it sat beside. It sprawled across an open field, dwarfing everything around it like a set of precision miniatures.

My brain struggled for an instant with the disparity of images. The differences of scale refused to resolve, and for a moment I couldn't focus my eyes properly. What was I looking at anyway? King-worms didn't go out of their nests, so it couldn't be a king-worm. And those weren't houses; they were airplane hangars. And, oh my God! That's the Hieronymus Bosch, isn't it? She was incredible!

I wanted to say that she was beautiful, but I couldn't. Nothing painted those colors could be beautiful. Nothing that looked like that belonged on this planet. Except this one was ours. She was brighter and louder and more impressive than any Chtorran that had ever slimed its way out of a shell. I couldn't help but feel proud of her. And her mission.

She had been built by Amazement, Inc., back in the days when there were enough millionaires in the world to make luxurious lighter-than-air travel a profitable fantasy. Once upon a long-lost time, there had been a three-year waiting list for vacation bookings on this ship. It had always been one of my private dreams to put aside enough money for a luxury air cruise.

Since the Chtorrans had come, a.much higher proportion of the Earth's population had become millionaires, some by multiple inheritance, others by skillful application of the reclamation laws. But it hardly mattered. Labor inflation had eaten up most of the gains, and scarcity of goods had taken care of the rest. Some luxuries remained possible-coffee and chocolate to name twobut it was the idea of luxury that had become impossible. Unfashionable. Somehow shameful in the midst of all this dying.

Before the Chtorrans, this ship had been called the Fantasia. An airborne confection, she had carried three hundred passengers at a time in astonishing grandeur. She had sailed extravagantly across Europe and the Atlantic, up and down the Americas, over to Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and then back across. Alaska and the great northwestern wilderness, across Canada to New York and Boston, then to Ireland and Europe again. Once upon a lovely time, she had drifted across the skies of summer like a city in the clouds. All summer long, from May until September, she had floated above the cares of a simpler, less terrible world.

Now… she was the Hieronymus Bosch, and she had been converted into an enormous airborne science lab for Operation Nightmare.

She was a great flat ellipse, containing three separate lifting frames. Her primary airframe was constructed around a long keel of carbon-doped polymers and woven ceramics; it was flanked by two additional outrigger frames, each almost as long and almost as thick in diameter. All three airframes were linked together inside a gigantic pressurized skin. From nose to tail, her primary airframe was 350 meters long. Her flanking frames were each 300 meters long. She was 30 percent longer than the legendary Hindenburg, and with her outrigger gasbags full, she had more than four times the lifting power. She had twelve near-silent linear-array coldthrust engines, and could easily maintain a cruising speed of 200 kilometers per hour. She'd been clocked as fast as 250 on several occasions when the weather was right and her captain had been daring.

She was also the perfect ship for this operation. She could hover over a Chtorran mandala camp for days, even weeks, allowing the observers within her to drop thousands of probes and cameras and testing devices of all kinds into the settlement. For the first time, we would be able to observe the day-to-day life of a worm camp.

Once planted, the remotes would continue to relay information for months. We even had probes that would attach themselves to a passing worm, burrow into the creature's skin, and transmit a continual stream of tracking information and other data. Operation Nightmare represented our best opportunity ever to discover the social structure of the Chtorran gastropedes.

We would photograph and listen to and sniff and taste and feel and measure everything we could, from the smallest microorganisms to the largest king-worms. We expected to discover aspects of the infestation that we had never known before. Once and for all, we would determine if the worms were sentient beings or not. We would monitor what they ate and what they excreted. We'd count their teeth and measure their belches and sniff under their arms. Our nano-probes would get into their blood and into their intestines and into their brains; not just the worms, but every creature in the infestation. We'd monitor the comings and goings of every host and symbiont in the settlement, tracking their patterns of behavior, their relationships, their interactions; everything and anything that might give us a clue to understanding who and what they really were.

Would our presence disturb them? We didn't know. We expected it would, but we had a theory about that too. The airship had been painted to resemble a gigantic worm; we hoped the gastropedes below would see it as a kind of sky-god watching over them. We'd seen the phenomenon several times before. Blimps that were painted in stripes of pink and red and purple produced the most amazing reactions among gastropedes on the ground. The Hieronymus Bosch had also been strung with a brand-new active-crystal lighting system across the entire surface of her external skin; she was capable of generating and. displaying brilliant high-resolution images in 120 fps (frames per second) real-time. The effect was nothing less than dazzling. She was her own traveling fireworks display.