Dawn was breaking across India, Pakistan, and the Gulf of Oman. Soon daylight would fall upon the remaining Eastern Coalition nations—and would reveal how much or how little was left of Zafirah’s native Arabian Peninsula. Tears came when she thought of Sabih and his huge, dark eyes. And little Kalil, who was always so curious, so trusting. She hoped that death would not linger when it came for them.

This may be the last new day the human race ever sees.

Along with its deadly freight of thermal energy, neutrons, X rays, gamma rays, and an irresistible blast wave, the detonation of a high-yield nuclear device unleashes something else: a fierce electromagnetic pulse that can scramble every electronic device—from radio transceivers to computers to [61] the electronic ignition systems of automobiles, planes, and hovercars—within dozens of kilometers of Ground Zero.

Detonate scores of such devices simultaneously across every inhabited continent and the effects quickly engulf the planet. Hundreds of spots on the Earth’s surface briefly become hotter than the Sun’s photosphere, and the world-girdling electronic noosphere that comprises twenty-first-century global civilization abruptly crashes. Like a human being whose head is suddenly perforated by a high-powered rifle round, a world can die without even knowing what had hit it.

But Zafirah was also grimly aware that such a neat, tidy death would come only to a relative few. The lucky ones,she thought. Kalil and Sabih are among those blessed few,Inshallah.

If Allah wills.

Certainty was steadily growing within Zafirah that she had just witnessed the suicide of humanity’s emerging global culture. But even if every human being on Earth had been instantly exterminated—an unlikely eventuality, even in a full-scale nuclear exchange—she knew that Vanguard was home to 844 of the best and brightest individuals that H. sapienshad ever produced. And there were five other L-5 colonies whose people and resources could also be brought to bear on the problem of saving whatever remained of Earth’s civilization. After all, Earth’s industries had for years depended upon the L-5 colonies’ labs and factories for a good number of modern necessities, from genetically engineered pharmaceuticals and crops to ultrastrong nanotube construction materials that could be created only in microgravity environments, to the exotic subatomic particles that promised mankind the eventual conquest of the stars.

Fortunately, the electromagnetic blast that had silenced Earth was confined to the planet’s atmosphere. Here in space—inside an asteroid orbiting a Lagrange point that [62] stayed perpetually some 383,000 kilometers from both the Earth and the Moon—the pulse could not reach.

Simultaneously haunted and buoyed by these thoughts, Zafirah ran alongside McNolan into the lift, which swiftly rose forty-six levels. She felt their weight decline to nearly nothing as the lift progressed toward the asteroid colony’s core, the region least affected by the spin that created the nearly Earth-normal gravity experienced by those who worked and lived on the outermost levels.

The lift soon deposited them on a catwalk overlooking the cavernous central chamber, a great, yawning abyss that stretched across the vaguely carrot-shaped asteroid’s entire fourteen kilometer-long axis. Illuminated by sunlight brought through the colony’s enormous transparent aluminum end-caps and reflected deep into the great rock’s interior by a series of internal and external mirrors, the passage formed a rough cylinder some fifty meters in diameter. Deep gouges and striations were visible in the nickel-iron walls, marks left by the automated, diamond-tipped diggers that had scraped the radioactive layers away after Vanguard’s builders had hollowed the asteroid out using shaped nuclear charges.

How easy it was to forget the true purpose of such devices,Zafirah thought. She wondered if the Kaaba, the ancient, cubical shrine at the sacred heart of Mecca, a place that had been holy since before the time of the Prophet, had survived.

Grasping thé catwalk’s handholds as though her very life depended on them, Zafirah closed her eyes tightly. Visiting this shaft of vast emptiness—essentially a giant straight cylinder whose ends vanished to pinpoints in two directions, neither of which seemed to be up or down—always gave her an intense feeling of vertigo. She preferred to stay nearer to the asteroid’s crust, the direction that the great rock’s spin—and her inner ear—told her was “down.”

“You all right, Zaf?” McNolan asked, recovering some of [63] his customary singsong lilt. “You look like you’re about to send your lunch out on an EVA.”

When she felt his hand on her arm she opened her eyes. She assayed a weak smile. “If I do, I’ll try to warn you first. But I’m afraid we’ll have to take the express route regardless. I don’t want to waste any time getting to the Director’s office.”

McNolan looked like he was considering carrying her back into the lift, then calling a groundcar to take them across one of the higher-gravity levels instead. That would have been quite a detour, however, since the Director’s office lay some eight kilometers away, near the asteroid’s south pole.

But when the director had called, she’d told all the senior staff to assemble around her as quickly as possible. Zafirah knew as well as McNolan did that flying along the freefall axis was by far the quickest way to get where they needed to go. Besides, she could already see several other raptorlike shapes in the distance, their broad, amber-colored wings pushing near-weightless human forms swiftly southward along the wide tunnel’s seemingly infinite length.

Still feeling green, Zafirah nodded toward the emergency locker beside the lift, where several sets of three-meter-long wings hung.

“Pry it open, Mack. We’re going flying.”

Zafirah often thought that Kuniko Mizuki, Vanguard’s director, might be the most ancient human being she had ever encountered. Because the director spent most of her time in the colony’s light-gee, coreward levels, her sallow skin was no doubt far smoother than it would have been had she lived on Earth. But the slight woman’s eyes held depths of wisdom and memory that Zafirah had never seen in anyone else. Zafirah wasn’t sure of Mizuki’s precise age, but guessed that she might have watched Neil Armstrong on live television as he left humanity’s first bootprints in the lunar dust.

[64] Today, it seemed to Zafirah that the director’s years wore heavily on her.

The department heads and their staffs were still filing in, arriving from points all over the asteroid, having dropped whatever business or pleasure they’d been occupied with when the nuclear hammer had fallen upon Earth. At least twenty people were crowded into the director’s spacious office-cum-conference-room thus far, and all eyes were riveted to the huge flatscreen monitor that dominated an entire wall.

Thanks to a satellite relay linking Vanguard to one of the orbiting Earth-science telescopes, the planet’s entire day side was now in view. No new explosions were evident, though hundreds of surface fires were visible, even in the waning daylight. Huge gray plumes of dust and detritus—particulate material thrown aloft by the nuclear conflagrations—had spread out greatly, obscuring giant swaths of what had to be the Pacific Ocean and the western coastlines of the Americas.

It was immediately clear to Zafirah that very little sunlight was reaching the ground, and that it would probably take months for that situation to change.

“We seem to be witnessing Doctor Sagan’s nightmare,” said Director Mizuki, now looking and sounding even older than Allah Himself. “A full-scale nuclear exchange. A cloud-generated icehouse effect is starting right before our eyes. That will be followed by massive crop failures and world famine.”