Sixty minutes: the radiation pulse ghosted through the rings of Siberia, a huge green ice giant with attendant moons strung around it like lucent pearls. They flashed briefly and sprouted streamers of glowing gas as the rings flared violet, forming a huge glowing disk of light that jetted outward from the star, consuming the mass of a small moon in seconds. Siberia absorbed a huge pulse of energy, sufficient to melt the tundra at its core and spawn gigantic storms. Hurricanes the size of Moscow raced toward the nightside of the giant planet as it, too, sprouted a glowing cometary tail. Unlike the inner bodies, Siberia was too huge to evaporate entirely. Though it glowed white-hot and molten, and its orbital track was distorted by the tremendous shock wave of the stellar explosion, the innermost core of nickel-iron remained — a gravestone marker that would take millions of years to cool in the twilight emptiness of Moscow system. The first survivor weathered the blast at a range of ninety-eight light minutes. Sleeping in deep orbit around the outer gas giant Zemlya, a robot beacon blinked awake at the first harsh glare of energy. The beacon carried huge reserves of coolant within its faceted black-armored carapace. Designed to withstand direct hits from a battleship’s laser grid, it weathered the storm — although it was sent tumbling, blasted right out of its seventy-year orbit by the surge of heavy charged particles. The beacon was 118 years old, one of 750 in its series. Code-named TALIGENT SPARROW, it was part of the early warning system of the Strategic Retaliation Command of the recently vaporized Moscow Foreign Office.

TALIGENT SPARROW blinked and took stock. The stars were occluded by glowing gas and debris, some of them its own ablated skin. No matter: it had a task. Deep memory remembered the pattern of the seasons and turned sensors in search of Moscow. It tried vainly to swivel a high-gain antenna that had been reduced to a crumpled mass of molten tissue. Other sensors tried to distinguish the gamma flux of inbound relativistic missiles and failed, overloaded. A primitive expert system plumbed the depths of its decision tree and determined that something unknown had attacked it. Qubits trickled into entropy as TALIGENT SPARROW powered up its causal channel and shrieked murder at the uncaring stars.

Somebody heard.

The police drone was robotically curt. “We’ve found your daughter. Please come to deck G-red, zone two meeting point, and collect her.”

Morris Strowger stood up and glanced at his wife. He smiled. “I told you they’d find her.” The smile slowly faded.

His wife didn’t look up. With her bony fingers thrust together between her knees and her bowed head, Indica Strowger’s shoulders shook as if she’d grabbed hold of a live power supply. “Go away,” she said very quietly, her voice hard and controlled. “I’ll be all right.”

“If you’re sure—” Already the police drone was moving off. He glanced back uncertainly at her hunched form, then followed the insect away through crowded, human-smelling partition-runs, runs that were already deteriorating into a high-tech slum patrolled by bees with stun guns. Something about their departure, perhaps the final grim reality of dispossession, had snapped a band of tension that had held everyone together through the dark years just ended, and the solid ground of depression was giving way to a treacherous slurry of despair, hysteria, and uncertainty about the future. Dangerous times.

Wednesday was waiting at the meeting point just as the bee had said. She looked alone and afraid, and Morris, who had been thinking of harsh words, suddenly found himself unable to speak. “Vicki—”

“Dad!” She buried her chin in his shoulder, sharp-jawed like some young feral predator. She was shaking.

“Where’ve you been? Your mother’s been going crazy!” That wasn’t the half of it. He hugged her, firmly, feeling a terrible sense of hollow unease ebb away. His daughter was back, and he was angry as hell at her — and unspeakably relieved.

“I wanted to be alone,” she said very quietly, voice muffled. He tried to step back, but she refused to let go. A pang: she did that when she didn’t want to tell him something. She was no good at dissembling, but her sense of privacy was acute. An old woman behind him was raising a fuss at the harassed constable, something about a missing boy — no, her pet dog. Her son, her Sonny. Wednesday looked up at him. “I needed time to think.” The lie solidified in a crystal moment, and he didn’t have the heart to call her on it. There’d be time for that, and to tell her about the official reprimand later: trespassing off-limits on board a ship wasn’t the same as exploring the empty quadrants of a station. She didn’t know how lucky she was that the Captain was understanding — and that unusual allowances were being made for stressed-out adults, never mind kids leaving home for the first time they could remember.

“Come on.” He turned her away from the desk, rubbed her shoulder. “Come on. Back to our, uh, cabin. Ship’s undocking soon. They’ll be widecasting from the bridge. You don’t want to miss that?”

She looked up at him, an unreadable, serious expression on her face. “Oh, no.”

Two hundred and forty-six minutes after the Zero Incident, the freighter Taxis Pride congealed out of empty space, forty-six degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, six light hours away from its final destination. Brad Momington, skipper, was on the flight deck, nattering with Mary Haight, the relativistics op. Taxis Pride was a three-point shuttle, connecting Moscow to Iceland Seven station, thence to the Septagonese transshipment outpost at Blaylock B. Brad had made this zone transfer eighteen times in the past seven years, and it was as routine as the mug of strong, heavily sugared coffee that Alex placed by his elbow before the jump countdown commenced, which was just then cooling down enough to drink.

Brad put out the standard navigation squawk and waited for a detailed flight path. In the meantime he pondered the food situation: the kitchen was getting somewhat monotonous, and the downside ferry would give him a chance to stretch his legs and reacquaint himself with clouds and sky again. Taxis Pride was a fast freighter, built to carry time-critical physical mail and perishables. The extremal singularity in her drive core let her accelerate in real space as rapidly as some warships: six light hours was a one-week cruise for her, not the painful odyssey an old hydrogen burner would have to endure. Mary concentrated on a backup star fix — routine, in case the traffic controllers were on strike again, just to keep her professional certification up to date. In her spare moments she was wondering if there’d be time to drop in on an old friend while they were docked for their cargo load cycle.

Then the bridge screamer went off.

“What the — get that!” Brad’s coffee went flying as he scrambled for the comm terminal. Mary jolted upright, whey-faced.

“Got it. That’s not traffic—”

“Hello, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero responding to broadcast squawk from, ah, Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, we have handshake. What’s the—”

“Something flaky here, boss—”

Red flashing lights blinked on the conference circuit. There was a thirty-second delay while they waited tensely for a reply.

“Echo Gold Nine Zero this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, emergency relay service. Admiralty signal blue four, authentication follows message. This is a systemwide military emergency. Moscow is under quarantine — the whole system is under lockdown, no exceptions. Evacuate immediately. I emphasize, get your kernel spun up and get out of here immediately! Please acknowledge.”