“Nuclear winter,” Zafirah said, the words sounding surreal. This cannot be happening.

“Then it’s ‘Game Over,’ ” said Avram Baruch, the tall, lanky Israeli who oversaw the particle accelerator project. His eyes were sunken, hollow. “Humanity is finished. Mekhule.”

Zafirah knew a little Hebrew. Mekhulemeant “exterminated.”

“That’s a lot of frog-hair,” said Claudia Hakidonmuya, the sun-baked Hopi woman who ran the colony’s genetics and [65] life-science research units. “Humans are a pretty tough lot. Besides, the first thing a nuclear war wipes out is the ability to make more nuclear war. We just need to get a better handle on how much actual damage has been done down there.”

“Why not just lob a few kilograms of that antimatter the particle folks have been synthesizing down there?” said Norman Arce, the huge Fijian construction foreman. “Put the goddamn place out of its misery.”

“Stow that talk,” Hakidonmuya snapped. Arce immediately went silent. But he still looked miserable, apparently on the verge of tears he didn’t know how to shed.

“Fine,” Baruch said, his eyes wild, nearly manic. “So mercy killing’s out. How about I just say a long, patient Kaddishfor the whole planet instead?”

Dr. Mizuki put up an aged hand and silence engulfed the room like a shroud. “Let’s not do this, people. I know things look bad at the moment. But the human species is anything but finished.”

That was true enough in a literal sense, Zafirah thought. After all, probably fewer than 100,000,000 souls perished in the actual explosions. Even the deaths from cancer, radiation burns, and famine that were sure to follow over the next few months might not come close to extinguishing all of the world’s ten billion people.

But Baruch was still right in every way that really mattered. Humanity’s nascent global civilization, still trapped in its cradle—the species’ single inhabited world—now spasmed in its death throes. The dog packs of the nation-states and the multinational megacorps had finally unbottled the nuclear djinn,and human culture had reaped the whirlwind. Perhaps the various stockpiles of biological and chemical agents secreted around the world had also been unleashed, making further havoc, pain, and death inevitable. How many centuries might it take for the survivors [66] to rebuild that civilization into some semblance of what it once had been?

Zafirah suddenly felt an unaccustomed kinship to Baruch, and only belatedly understood the reason for it: if the Kaaba of Mecca had been razed, then just as surely nothing remained of Baruch’s native Tel Aviv but radioactive ash. Jerusalem, sacred to Jews and Muslims alike, was no doubt likewise destroyed.

“The human species will endure,” Mizuki continued, her usually rock-steady voice slightly shaky. “Twenty-two years ago, a half-dozen Earth-crossing asteroids nearly sent us the way of the dinosaurs. But the Americans, the Europeans, and even the ECON decided to put aside their differences, at least for a while. That decision allowed them to develop the technology it took to land on those big rocks and nudge us all out of harm’s way.” She gestured broadly about the room.

“That’s old news, Kuniko,” Baruch said, flailing an arm toward the planetary charnel house still being displayed on the wall-screen. “What’s your point?”

Mizuki seemed unperturbed by the physicist’s outburst. “Just this, Avi: None of us would be here, living and working inside one of those hollowed-out rocks, if human beings lacked the capacity to cooperate. We’re supposed to be humanity’s best and brightest. Therefore we ought to have that cooperative quality in spades. We also have a lot of technology that nobody dirtside has. I’d say a great deal of Earth’s recovery is going to be up to us.”

“Ducking the ’Thirty-One asteroids was mostly dumb luck,” Arce interjected, almost snarling his rage and pain. “We dodged a bullet back then because we happened to bend down to tie our shoes at the exact right time. Today we blew our own brains out deliberately.”

The ironic truth of the orbital construction engineer’s words was not lost on Zafirah, nor did anybody else seem to miss it either. Zafirah felt something gradually loosening, [67] something deep within her soul. It’s hope,she thought. I’m simply letting go of hope.

“What about the rest of the El Fivers?” said Hakidonmuya, still sounding aggressively upbeat. No one had to be told that she referred to the permanent denizens of the other five O’Neill colonies that orbited the Earth-Moon system’s Lagrange Five point along with Vanguard.

Mizuki smiled, a pale, unconvincing gesture. “You mean do they see themselves as Earth’s last, best hope as well?” The director shrugged. “I can’t speak for anybody but Vanguard. But I’ve already checked in with the directors of the other colonies. Believe me, they’re as stunned as any of us. But the NicholCorp colony has just given me news that gives me some real hope that human race will pull out of this. It’s from a report they received on their microwave transmitter. Apparently, at least one of the Project Phoenix ground facilities has survived both the firestorms and the E-M pulse.”

The director paused, her eyes meeting Zafirah’s for a moment. Cautiously, Zafirah recovered her grip on the very faintest of hopes.

With all eyes upon her, Mizuki said, “Zefram Cochrane and a few key members of his staff are still alive.”

Perhaps the world had not ended after all. Maybe the human adventure was really only beginning.

Inshallah, Zafirah thought, clinging stubbornly to a hope she’d nearly given up for dead. If Allah wills it. If Allah wills it.

Chapter 7

In the autumn of 2031, technology, money, and politics converged fortuitously. Had this not happened, the human species would very likely have come to an ignominious end, casually extinguished by an uncaring universe that had already created and destroyed so many other forms of life. Lieutenant John Mark Kelly, already aboard the Ares IVspacecraft on his solitary, year-long voyage to Mars, might suddenly have found himself the only Earth-born intelligent creature left alive in the entirety of the cosmos.

But such was not to be humanity’s fate. The determined effort of many thousands of people around the world—from the United States, to the European Union, to the Pan-African Alliance, to the Eastern Coalition, to the emerging democracies of the Muslim Bloc nations—narrowly prevented Earth’s destruction by a group of killer asteroids. The great rocks had apparently once been a single body, a mix of stony and metallic materials, until it had been ripped asunder by Jupiter’s prodigious gravitational field, the same fate as had befallen comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 late in the previous century. But unlike the comet, which had plunged into the gas-giant planet’s metallic-hydrogen heart, several of this new object’s largest and heaviest fragments were flung elsewhere.

Directly toward the Earth.

[69] After humanity’s most powerful heavy-thrust nuclear-electric rockets had nudged the fragments from their original trajectory, six of these stone-and-nickel-iron hulks—each one measuring more than ten kilometers in length, with masses comparable to the bolide that slammed into Yucatan some sixty-five million years ago, putting paid to the reign of the dinosaurs—had taken up long-period orbits around the entire Earth-Moon system.

But this arrangement wasn’t gravitationally stable. The great rocks would have to be moved again, within a very few years, lest the sky fall once again. Seeing as much opportunity as danger in this looming crisis, humankind acted in concert once again, this time employing the new technologies that had been developed to nudge the worldlets out of Earth’s path in the first place, as well as a goodly number of Cold War-era nuclear weapons, devices that had never before found a constructive purpose.