But the missiles were all still sitting in their tubes. The dead and decaying AI knew that and communicated something like shame and chagrin through Harman’s tingling palm.

Harman’s heart was pounding so fiercely and he was breathing so raggedly that the osmosis mask had to lower the oxygen input so he wouldn’t hyperventilate.

Forty-eight missiles. Forty-eight warhead-platforms. Each warhead was MRVed and carried sixteen separate reentry vehicles. Seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads, all armed, primed, safeties off, set to go. They had been targeted at seven hundred and sixty-eight of the world’s remaining cities, ancient monuments, and dwindling rubicon-survivors’ population centers.

But these were no mere thermonuclear warheads such as carried in The Sword of Allah’s torpedoes.

Each of the seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads still aboard this sub carried a tenuously contained black hole. The human race’s and the Global Caliphate’s ultimate weapon at that point in time—its ultimate detergent, thought Harman with a noise that was part sob, part giggle.

The black holes in themselves were small. Each not much larger than what one of the dead crewmen had described in his urgent and religious farewell speech as “the soccer ball I grew up kicking around the ruins of Karachi.” But when they escaped their containment spheres and dropped on their targets, the result would be much more dramatic than a mere thermonuclear weapon.

The black hole would plunge into the earth, creating a soccer-ball-sized hole in the center of whatever target city it arrived at. But the second it was exposed there would be a plasma implosion a thousand times worse than a thermonuclear explosion. The descending black hole, turning all earth, rock, water, and magma ahead of it into a rising cloud of steam and plasma, would also suck in behind it the people, buildings, vehicles, trees, and actual molecular structure of its target city and hundreds of square miles around it.

The black hole that had created the kilometer-wide hole in the center of Paris Crater had been less than a millimeter wide and unstable—it had eaten itself before reaching the Earth’s core. Harman knew now that eleven million people had died because of that ancient experiment gone wrong.

These black holes were not meant to eat themselves. They were meant to ping-pong back and forth through the earth, reemerging into atmosphere, plunging back through the planet. Seven hundred sixty-eight plasma and ionizing-radiation surrounded spheres of ultimate destruction coring and recoring the Earth’s crust, mantle, magma, and core again and again and again, for months or years, until they all came to rest at the center of this dear, good Earth and began eating the fabric of the planet itself.

The twenty-six crewmen’s voices Harman had listened to had all celebrated this outcome to their mission. They would all be reunited in Paradise. Praise God!

Wanting only to be sick within his constraining osmosis mask, Harman forced himself to keep his hand on the black-monolith AI for another full, endless, eternal minute. There had to be some instructions here for finding some way to disarm these activated blackholes.

Their warhead containment fields had been very powerful, designed to last for centuries if they had to.

They had lasted for more than two and one-half millennia, but they were very unstable. Once one of the black holes escaped, they all would. It did not matter one iota whether they began their voyage to the Earth’s core and beyond from their targets or from this place along the north wall of the Atlantic Breach. The outcome would be the same.

There were no procedures in the AI or anywhere in The Sword of Allah for disarming them. The singularities existed—had for almost two hundred and fifty of Harman’s standard Five Twenties—and in a world where old-style humans’ highest technology consisted of crossbows, there was no way to reset their containment fields.

Harman pulled his hand away.

Later, he had no memory of finding his way out of the submerged parts of the submarine, or of staggering out through the dry forward torpedo room, through the rent in the hull, out onto the sunny strip of muddy dirt that was the Atlantic Breach.

He did remember peeling off his cowl and osmosis mask, dropping to his hands and knees, and vomiting for long minutes. Long after he’d gotten rid of the little substance in his belly—the food bars were nutritious but left little residue—he continued dry retching.

Then he was too weak even to stay on his hands and knees, so he crawled away from his own vomitus, collapsed, and rolled onto his back, looking up at the long, thin blue strip of sky. The rings were faint but clear, revolving, crossing, moving like the pale hands of some obscene clock mechanism counting down the hours or days or months or years until the warhead containment spheres just yards from Harman decayed to collapse.

He knew that he should get away from the radioactive wreck—crawl west if he had to—but his heart had no will to do so.

Finally, after what must have been hours—the strip of sky was darkening toward evening—Harman activated the function to query his own biomonitors.

As he’d suspected, the dosage he’d received had been lethal. The dizziness he felt now would only grow worse. The vomiting and dry retching would soon return. Blood was already pooling under his skin. Within hours—the process had already begun—the cells in his bowels and guts would begin sloughing off by the billion. Then would come the bloody diarrhea—intermittent at first but then constant as his body began literally to shit his dissolved guts out into the world. Then the bleeding would become primarily internal, cell walls breaking down completely, entire systems collapsing.

He’d live long enough to see and feel all this, he knew. Within a day he’d be too weak even to stagger along between the episodes of diarrhea and vomiting. He’d be prostrate in the Breach, his stillness broken only by involuntary seizures. Harman knew that he wouldn’t even be able to look at the blue sky or stars as he died—the biomonitors already reported the radiation-induced cataracts building on the surface of both his eyes.

Harman had to grin. No wonder Prospero and Moira had given him only a few days’ worth of food bars. They must have known he wouldn’t need even that many.

Why? Why make me Prometheus for the human race with all these functions, all this knowledge, all this promise to give Ada and my species, only to let me die alone here… like this?

Harman was still sane and conscious enough to know that billions of human beings no more elect than himself had hurled similar final thoughts toward the unanswering skies in the hours and minutes before their death.

He was also wise enough now to be able to answer his own question. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Adam and Eve tasted of the fruit of knowledge in the Garden. All the old creation myths told versions of the same tale, exposed the same terrible truth—steal fire and knowledge from the gods and you become something more than the animals you evolved from, but still something far, far below any real God.

Harman at that second would give anything to rid himself of the twenty-six last personal and religious testaments by the madmen who crewed The Sword of Allah. In those impassioned farewells he felt the full weight of the burden he had been about to bring back to Ada, to Daeman, to Hannah, to his friends, to his species.

He realized that all of the last year—the turin-cloth story of Troy that had been Prospero’s little joke-gift to the old-humans, passed on through Odysseus and Savi, their various mad quests, the deadly masque on Prospero’s Isle up in the e-ring, his escape, the Ardis Manor people’s discovery of how to build weapons, fashion some crude beginnings to society, discover politics, even grope toward some religion…