Good. She only hoped the squid had been smart enough to understand death.

A little after that, she found herself coming into view of the blue circle. She pressed herself against the regolith. Such was the tight curvature of the asteroid, the claustrophobic nearness of its horizon, that she was uncomfortably close.

Three figures were standing near the artifact, loosely tethered. They moved to and fro in her sights, gesticulating, talking.

As she’d been trained, she braced her toes in the regolith and fixed her tethers tighter before she raised her weapon. Otherwise the recoil might blow her clean off Cruithne. She aimed. Unlike on Earth, the slug would travel in a dead-straight line, not significantly perturbed by Cruithne’s miniature gravity. She’d trained others for this; now they would never have a chance to put those skills to use.

She fired. And again.

Reid Malenfant:

The invisible slug hit Emma hard in the leg. She was knocked off the surface. The tether attached to her waist reached its full extent, jerked taut, and pulled her back. She came slamming down to the surface, landing on her back. And then she bounced, drifting upward and back along the length of the tether.

“Emma? Emma!” Clumsily, ignoring his own tether drill, Malenfant hurried to her. He hauled her in by her tether, like landing a fish, and picked her up. Her thigh was a bloody ruin. Malenfant could see blood boiling and popping. “We need a tourniquet.”

Regolith splashed at his feet.

Cornelius grabbed his arm. “No time,” he said. “They’re coming for us.”

Malenfant looked around at the pocked landscape. He could see nobody. There wasn’t even any sound to help him tell where the shots were coming from.

Another splash, another new crater.

There was no shelter, anywhere.

The blue circle towered over Malenfant, framing darkness. “This way,” he said. “Into the portal.”

Cornelius pulled back. “It’s one-way. We won’t be able to get back.”

“I know.” Malenfant studied Cornelius, wishing he could see his face. “But we’ll be alive. And something might turn up.”

“Like what?”

“Trust me,” Malenfant said.

And, clutching Emma in his arms, he loosed his tethers, braced against the regolith, and jumped.

There was a blue flash, an instant of astonishing pain—

PART FOUR

Manifold

Maura Della:

Open journal. April 14,2012.

Maybe I’m just getting too old.

I should have expected this, this brush fire of panic that has swept the planet after every TV news channel and Net site carried the pictures of the Blue kids sailing out of a nuclear explosion. After the confusing messages and visions from the sky, a consensus seems to have emerged: that we were shown a false future, that the Carter prophecy is real, that we have just two centuries.

To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes — information, ideas, fears, and hopes — spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed.

It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.

Anyhow I guess this is what happens when the lead story — all over the TV and radio channels and info Nets of a wired-up humankind — is doomsday…

Atal Vajpayjee:

Atal lay in the undergrowth and focused his binocular corneal implants.

The Pakistani soldiers who guarded this place walked back and forth, weapons on their shoulders, oblivious in the dense sunshine. It gave him a pleasing sense of power to be able to see those soldiers, and yet to know they could not see him.

He had found his spotting position without disturbance. He had followed the Grand Trunk Road between Rawalpindi and Peshawar until he reached a modest track that led into these wooded hills. From here, the buildings of the Topi scientific research institute were clearly visible.

Topi was the place where scientists had developed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Now he need only wait for the command to come through.

The day was hot. He wiped his forehead, and his fingers came away stained with camouflage paint. He wondered if the boy who had come home that day more than ten years ago would recognize him now.

Atal had been just eighteen years old.

He had grown up knowing that Kashmir was India’s most troubled province. Still, he had been happy, his father a prosperous cloth merchant in Srinagar. Even the crackle of gunfire at night, off in the hills, did not disturb him.

Everything changed on the day he came home from his studies — he would have been a doctor — to find his mother crumpled on the step, crying, wailing. And in the house he had found the remains of his father.

Remains. A cold, neutral word. Only the lower half of the body had been identifiable as human at all. His mother had been able to identify it only by a scar on the left foot. The authorities were able to provide no comfort, to produce no suspects.

Atal soon learned the truth.

His father had worked for many years as an agent of the central Indian government. He had striven to maintain the precarious stability of this troubled place. And in the end that cause cost him his life.

Since then, Atal had worked for revenge.

The war had already begun, with skirmishes between troops in the hills, border raids by Pakistani jets, the firing of India’s Agni missiles against military targets.

It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted. If the strange predictions of the Western scientists were true — if the world really was doomed, if superhuman children had defeated the U.S. Army in the desert and flown to the Moon — then it was important that ancient wrongs be righted before the darkness fell.

He knew he would probably not live through the day. But that did not matter. There would be no future, no world for his children. There was only this, the goal, the taste of victory before the failing of the light.

The radio screeched. Grunting, he gouged the little device out of his ear. It lay on the grass, squealing like an insect.

Electromagnetic pulse.

He looked over his shoulder. Contrails: four, five, six of them, streaking from the east. Ghauri missiles, nuclear tipped. Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta had only minutes to live.

But the returning fire from India was assured.

It was the day, at last. He stood, raised his weapon, roared in defiance.

A movement to his right.

An explosion in his head. Light, sound, smell became confused, whirling.

He was lying on his side. Darkness fell.

Xiaohu Jiang:

Xiaohu opened her window and gazed out at the Beijing night. This tower block was one of a series, well maintained but utterly cheerless, marching like tombstones around the perimeter of the old city. Her mother had told her that the Beijing sky, at this time of year, used to be famous for its clarity. Now, even the sun at noon was sometimes obscured.

Xiaohu was particularly tired this night.

Her work, at the state-run municipal waste-processing plant, was as ever grim and demanding. And — notwithstanding the strange news from America, the bright new spark everyone could see on the face of the Moon — she had no choice but to attend the xuexi hui, the weekly political study session, in the large communal area at the base of the building.