“That should be sufficient,” Nemoto hissed.

“Sufficient for what?… Never mind. Nemoto, how can you choose death? You’ve lived so long, seen so much.”

“I’ve seen enough.”

“And now you want to rest?”

“No. What rest is there in death? I only want to act.”

“To save the species one more time?”

“Perhaps. But the battle is never over, Meacher. The longer we live, the deeper we look, the more layers of deception and manipulation and destruction we will find… Consider Mercury, for example, which may be doomed to become a resource mine for the Sun-breaking Crackers. Why, if I was a suspicious type, a conspiracy theorist, I might think it was a little odd that there should be a giant ball of crust-free nickel-iron placed so conveniently right here where the Crackers need it. What do you think? Could some predecessors of the Crackers — even their ancestors — have arranged the giant impact that stripped off Mercury’s crust and mantle, left behind this rust ball?”

Madeleine was stunned by this deepening of the great violation of the Solar System. But, deliberately, she shook her head. “Even if that’s true, what difference does it make?”

Nemoto barked laughter. “None at all. You’re right. One thing at a time. You always were practical, Meacher. And what next for you? Will you stay with the others, huddled in the caves of Mercury?”

Madeleine frowned. “I’m not a good huddler, Nemoto. And besides, these are not my people.”

“The likes of us have no ‘people’—”

“Malenfant,” Madeleine said. “Wherever he is, whatever he faces, he is alone. I’m going to try to find him.”

“Ah,” Nemoto whispered. “Malenfant, yes. He may be the most important of us all. Good-bye, Meacher.”

“Nemoto?—”

Mercury exploded.

She had to go over it again, rerun the recordings, over and over, before she understood.

It had happened in an instant. It was as if the top couple of meters of Mercury’s surface had just lifted off and hailed into the sky.

All over Mercury — from the depths of Caloris Planitia to the crumpled lands at the antipode, from Chao City at the south pole to the abandoned settlements of the north — miniature cannon snouts had poked their way out of the regolith and fired into the sky. The bullets weren’t smart: just bits of rock and dust dug out of the deeper regolith. But they were moving fast, far faster than Mercury’s escape velocity.

The Crackers didn’t stand a chance. Mercury rocks tore through filmy wings, overwhelming self-repair facilities. The Cracker ships, like butterflies in a reverse hailstorm, were shredded. Ships collided, or plunged to Mercury’s surface, or drifted into space, powerless, beyond the reach of help.

The Moon flowers, of course, were the key — or rather their dumb, gen-enged descendants were, transplanted to Mercury by Nemoto, a wizened, interplanetary Johnny Appleseed. The Moon flowers could make a serviceable chemical-rocket propellant for their seed pores from aluminum and oxygen extracted from Moon rock — or Mercury rock. Nemoto had engineered the flowers’ descendants to make weapons.

The Crackers had nobody even to fire back at, no way to avoid the rising storm of rock and dust. Even one survivor might have been sufficient to resume the Crackers’ mission, for all anybody knew. But there were no survivors. The Crackers had taken a thousand years to reach Mercury, to fly from Procyon and battle through a shell of Gaijin ships. It had taken humans — rock-world vermin, contemptuously ignored — a thousand seconds to destroy them.

As she watched that cloud of peppery rock rise from the ground and rip through the gauzy ships — overwhelming them one by one, at last erupting into clear space — Madeleine whooped and howled.

The debris cloud continued to expand, now beginning to tail after Mercury in its slow orbit around the Sun. It caught the brilliant light, like rain in sunshine. Maybe Mercury is going to have rings, she thought, rings that will shine like roadways in the sky. Nice memorial. The major features of the surface beneath had survived, of course; no backyard rocket was going to obliterate Caloris Planitia. But every square meter of the surface had been raked over.

She contacted the Coalition.

Every human on Mercury had survived — even those who hadn’t taken Nemoto’s advice about deep shelter. Already they were emerging, blinking, under a dusty, starry sky.

Every human but Nemoto, of course.

At least we have breathing space: time to rebuild, maybe breed a little, spread out, before the next bunch of ET assholes come chomping their way through the Solar System. Good for you, Nemoto. You did the best you could. Good job.

As for me — story’s over here, Madeleine. Time to face the universe again.

And so Madeleine fled before the hail of rubble from Mercury — still expanding, a dark and looming cloud that glittered with fragments of Cracker craft. Fled in search of Gaijin, and Reid Malenfant.

PART FIVE

The Children’s Crusade

A.D. 8800, and Later

Near the neutron star there were multiple lobes of light. They looked like solar flares to Malenfant: giant, unending storms rising from the neutron star’s surface. Farther out still, the founts of gas lost their structure, becoming dim, diffuse. They merged into a wider cloud of debris that seemed to be fleeing from the neutron star, a vigorous solar wind. And beyond that there were only the Galaxy core stars — watchful, silent, still, peering down as if in disapproval at this noisy, spitting monster.

This was a pulsar. You could detect those radio beams from Earth.

Malenfant had grown up with the story of the first detection of a pulsar. Pre-Gaijin astronomers had detected an unusual radio signal: a regular, ticking pulse, accurate to within a millionth of a second. Staring at such traces, the scientists had at first toyed with the idea it might be the signature of intelligence, calling from the stars.

In fact, when envoys from the stars began to make their presence known, it was not as a gentle tick of radio noise but as a wave of destructive exploitation that scattered mankind and all but overwhelmed the entire Solar System — and the same thing had occurred many times before.

We put up a hell of a fight, though, he thought. We even won some victories, in our tiny, scattershot way. But in the end it was going to count for nothing.

It was ironic, he thought grimly. Those old pre-Gaijin stargazers had thought that first pulsar was a signal from little green men.

In fact it was a killer of little green men.

Chapter 32

Savannah

She woke to the movement of air: the rustle of wind in trees, perhaps the hiss of grass, a gentle breeze on her face, the scent of dew, of wood smoke. Eyes closed, she was lying on her back. She could feel something tickling at her neck, the slippery texture of leaves under the palms of her hand. Somewhere crickets were calling.

She opened her eyes. She was looking up at the branches of a tree, silhouetted against a blue-black sky.

And the sky was full of stars. A great river of light flowed from horizon to horizon. It was littered with pink-white glowing clouds, crowded, beautiful.

She remembered.

Io. She had been on Io.

Her Gaijin guides had taken her to a grave: Reid Malenfant’s grave, they said, dug by strong Neandertal hands. She had, briefly, despaired; she had been too late in her self-appointed mission; he had died alone after all, a long way from home.

The Gaijin hadn’t seemed to understand.

Then had come a blue flash, a moment of pain—

And now, this. Where the hell was she? She sat up, suddenly afraid.