In the event they didn’t even reach the lab.

Maura actually saw the quark nugget bullets come flying out through the walls of the compound, then falling into the body of the Earth.

Then the retreat began.

Three troopers had died. Two more were injured and had to be carried out by their companions. One came out with her SIPE half disabled, one leg dragging crazily.

The children, fragile-looking stick figures in their tent of wire, didn’t seem to have moved.

Dan Ystebo grunted. “One option left, then.”

It took another ten hours for the final approval to be obtained.

Far beyond her jurisdiction, Maura Della was nevertheless consulted by administration officials. She was invited to take part by e-presence at security meetings in the White House family theater. The attention was flattering, the weight of the decision overwhelming.

Before she made her final recommendation she took time out, went and sought out a shower room, stood in the jet for long minutes with the dial turned to its hottest, and the air filled up with sauna steam.

She hadn’t slept for maybe thirty-six hours. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat down to eat. She had no idea how well her mind was functioning.

But this was, it seemed, a battlefield. The front line. And you don’t get much sleep on the battlefield…

Open journal. March 8,2012.

It’s clear that whether she meant it or not, Anna’s briefly sketched prospectus — a new social order devised by the Blue children — has finally crystallized hostility to them, even more than the physical threat they represent. Nobody is about to submit to an ideology drawn up by a bunch of swivel-eyed kids. And underlying that is an inchoate fear that even considering the proposals will somehow lead to a transfer of actual control to the children.

After all, what were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but triumphs of a centralized, planning, “scientific” elite? It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest.

That isn’t to say that in all parts of the planet the response will be the same. Maybe some deranged totalitarian asshole is trying to recruit local Blue kids to prop up his lousy regime even now. And even some politically advanced parts of the world might not find the children’s proposals quite as instinctively repelling as Americans. The French, for example, have an instinct for centralization that dates back to Colbert in the seventeenth century. As a visiting American I have been bemused to observe how their senior people work, top managers trained in the grandes ecoles gliding between positions as ministerial advisers and captains of industry.

Not in America, though. America was after all built on the belief that centralized control is in principle a bad thing. And what about democracy? In fact I would be deeply suspicious of anybody, any stern Utopian, who advocated handing over power to any elite, however benevolent.

But I suspect there is a still deeper fear, even an instinct, that lies buried under the layers of rationalization. Even in my own heart.

It may be that these children are in some sense superior to the Homo sapiens stock from which they emerged. Maybe they could run the world better than any human; maybe a world full of Blues would be an infinitely better place, a step up.

Maybe. But as I was elected to serve the interests of a large number of Hsap — and as a proud Hsap myself — I’m not about to sit around and let these Blues take my planet away.

If this final solution is turned down now, presumably further military options will be discussed, rehearsed, tried out, in escalating severity. Maybe we will, in the end, come back to this point again, the unleashing of the fire. But by then it could be too late.

Time is the key.

But all this is rationalization. I have to decide whether to destroy eleven American children. That is the bottom line.

I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils.

Always assuming we still have a choice.

Learning to live with myself after this is going to be interesting.

She turned off her shower. The steam dispersed, the air cleared, and she was instantly cold.

Once again she stood with Dan Ystebo in the C Cubed center. But the place was silent now save for the soft hiss of the air-conditioning, the whirr of the cooling fans of the equipment.

The various instruments monitoring the children’s physical state, their heartbeat and respiration and temperature, and measuring the temperature and air composition, and the electromagnetic fields and particles crisscrossing the rebuilt physics lab — all of this was ignored. Everybody was watching the softscreens, the visual images of the center’s exterior, the children in their cage.

And the moment came unexpectedly, softly.

There was an instant of blinding light.

Then it was as if a giant metal ball had dropped out of the sky. The center — the buildings, the drab dormitory, the fence, a few abandoned vehicles — seemed to blossom, flying apart, before they vanished, their form only a memory. A wave passed through the ground, neat concentric pulses of dirt billowing up, and it seemed to Maura that the air rippled as a monstrous ball of plasma, the air itself torn apart, and began to rise.

The sensor burned out. The screen image turned to hash, and the bunker turned into an electronic cave, sealed from the world.

The bunker was well protected. She barely felt the waves of heat and sound and light and shattered air that washed over it.

“A backpack nuke,” she said to Dan Ystebo.

“Cute name.”

“About a kiloton. They buried it in the foundations, weeks ago.”

A wall-mounted softscreen came back online, relaying a scratchy picture.

It was an image of the center. Or rather, of the hole in the ground where the center had been. A cliche image, the stalk of a mushroom cloud.

The camera zoomed in. There was something emerging from the base of the cloud. It was hard, round, silvery, reflective, like a droplet of mercury. It was impossible to estimate its size.

There was utter silence in the bunker, the silver light of the droplet reflected in a hundred staring eyes.

The droplet seemed to hover, for a heartbeat, two. And then it shot skyward, a blur of silver, too rapidly for the camera to follow.

“I wonder where they are going,” Dan said.

“The downstream, of course,” she said. “I hope…”

“Yes?”

“I hope they’ll understand.”

The mushroom cloud swept over the sun.

Emma Stoney:

And on Cruithne, Emma prepared to explore an alien artifact.

The continual shifting of the light, the slow wheel of the stars and the shrinking of her shadow, lent the place an air of surre-ality. Nothing seemed to stay fixed; it was as if craters and dust and people were swimming back and forth, toward her and away from her, as if distance and time were dissolving.

Somehow, standing here on the asteroid’s complex surface, it didn’t seem so strange at all that the “empty” space around her was awash with trillions of neutrinos — invisible, all but intangible, sleeting through her like a ghost rain. If she was going to hear echoes from the future anywhere, she thought, it would be here.

But nothing seemed real. It seemed wrong that she should be here, now; she felt like a shadow cast by the genuine, solid Emma Stoney, who was probably sitting in some office in New York or Vegas or Washington, still struggling to salvage something of Bootstrap’s tangled affairs.