“Yes. We’ve lived, as a species, through a quiescent period in Earth’s geological history. The Moonseed is a lubricant. Enhancing the problem. But what’s hit us so far is the violence of Earth itself, Admiral. A lot of this stuff could have happened at any time.

“Beyond this near-term stuff we’re predicting a timetable of escalation.”

“A timetable?”

“Depending on the thickness of the crust. In a month the Moonseed will penetrate oceanic crust — the sea bottom — where the plates are thin. Six weeks, a couple of months beyond that, we expect major events in plate boundary regions. Subduction zones, mountain-building areas, like the Pacific rim. And a month or so beyond that we’ll see the first breaches of the continental crust itself.”

There was a brief, shocked silence.

Henry delivered this with a chilling calm, Monica observed. He looked overworked, but calm. Hollow, He’s already accepted the logic of his argument. And its ultimate conclusion. That all this is just going to get worse and worse, until—

I hope to God, she thought, he has a plan.

Bromwich shook her head. “What do we tell the President?”

“Aside from the direct damage, expect climate changes,” Henry said. “All that ash in the stratosphere, blocking out the sun. The injection of so much heat, greenhouse gases, destruction of ozone — we have to model this. Figure out what it means for crops, this year and next.”

“Shit,” said the Admiral, and she scrawled notes on a pad in front of her. “Refugees. Crop failure. Starvation.”

“We’ll be lucky to avoid war,” Alfred said.

“The British are already dealing with this,” Monica put in.

“We’re not the damn British,” Admiral Bromwich growled.

Henry said, “The point is, we’re only seeing the start. This isn’t going to go away. We’re going to have to expect a movement of populations, from the more geologically unstable areas of the world, and from the areas most impacted by the Moonseed itself, like Scotland.”

“A movement? Where to? Where is the safest place to be?”

“Shelters,” Henry said. “Like greenhouses. Maybe subsurface. Maybe off planet.”

“Off planet?” That surprised Monica. “How? To make a colony viable, you’d have to sustain a breeding population — say, several hundred — independently of Earth.” Even the Space Station, which in its present form could hold all of three people at a time, depended on almost continual resupply from Earth.

The Admiral said, “Where the hell? Mars?”

Henry shook his head. “Not Mars. Too far. Too difficult.”

Monica said, “Mars or not, we don’t have the technology to sustain a colony off planet. If we had another century—”

“But we may not have another century,” Henry said evenly.

“Australia,” Alfred Synge said.

“What?”

“Australia. The oldest place in the world. All the mountains worn down to a nub. That’s where I’d go.”

That didn’t help, Monica thought, watching Henry. He has some recommendation. Some case he’s building, carefully. He isn’t ready yet.

I can’t read this guy. I wonder what the hell he wants.

Henry pulled up another chart. “That’s the short term. Further out, we have to expect something like an extinction event.”

Bromwich frowned. “I thought it was some big rock from space that killed the dinosaurs. I seem to remember listening to one of you assholes pitching for a Star Wars system to blast the rocks out of the sky. Like the one that’s coming in 2028—”

“The Cretaceous extinction was actually relatively minor,” Henry said. He pulled up more data from his laptop. “The Permian event was maybe the most significant Earth has suffered. Two hundred and fifty million years ago. A single giant continent, Pangaea, dominated the planet… Half the number of known marine families disappeared. Only two out of a hundred and thirty genera of brachiopods survived. All forty genera of the large fusulinid foraminifers were—”

“Enough,” Monica said.

“All told,” Henry said, “we lost eighty-three per cent of marine invertebrate genera, three-quarters of the amphibian families, eighty per cent of the reptilian.”

“A fucking big rock,” Bromwich said.

“Probably not a rock,” Henry said. “Violent volcanism is the best hypothesis.”

“You say,” David Petit said. Petit was a Nobel Prize winning chemist, a thickset man with a Brooklyn accent. “Others don’t agree—”

Bromwich snapped, “And is this where it will stop? With this Permian shit?”

“No,” Henry said. “Ultimately, the mantle infestation will be the most serious. When the Moonseed is spreading under the crust.”

“Why?”

Monica saw that Bromwich still didn’t understand.

“Because,” she said, “it will blow the crust off the planet.”

“Like Venus.”

“Yes, Admiral. Like Venus.”

Silence, briefly.

Henry brought up molecular structure charts and scanning microscope images. “We think we have a handle on how the Moonseed works. If not why. It primarily attacks basaltic rocks, particularly those rich in olivine.”

“Like the Earth’s mantle material.” That was Alfred. “And comet dust, and primordial debris.”

The Admiral asked, “Primordial?”

“Left over from the formation of the Solar System,” Alfred said. “Admiral, this thing feeds on the most basic rock suite in the universe. It is well adapted to conditions in this universe. More so than we are, in fact. We should have suspected the existence of this thing. Even logically deduced it.”

Henry said, “It appears to reassemble the crystalline structure of a mass of rock in a recursive form which—”

“In English, doctor,” Monica said.

He brought up another image. A slice of rock, the crystal structure picked out with false colour. A maze of dwindling tunnels, disappearing beyond the resolution of the “scope into some invisible centre, a heart of darkness, “It is changing the structure of the rocks it touches. Building something.” It was a kind of bootstrap process, Henry said. The manipulation of the outer layers of a crystal structure enabled the more detailed rebuilding of inner layers, which in turn enabled changes on a still smaller scale… and so on. Like waldos, Monica thought, each layer of miniaturization building the next level down, on to invisibility.

“There is a certain logic in this,” Alfred mused. “Between planets, where resources are scarce, one might expect an evolutionary drive of this type. Towards the very small — the utilization and building-in of complexity into even the smallest grains of matter available.”

David Petit, the chemist, locked his boxer’s hands behind his head. “Your qualifications are all in geology, Dr Meacher. True?”

“Yes.”

“Not in chemistry or particle physics or biology.”

“That’s true.” Henry was quite unfazed.

Petit stopped there, satisfied he had made his point. For now.

Alfred Synge said, “Of course maybe this isn’t some kind of geological thing, or even biological. Maybe this is nanotech. By which I mean the manufacture of materials and structures with dimension less than a billionth of a meter. Molecular machines—”

That started an argument.

“Nanotech is on our own horizon,” insisted Alfred. “We can manipulate atoms with microscope probe elements, we can use the amino acids to make new, non-natural proteins. We can posit self-replicating assemblers that can take inexpensive raw materials — any hydrocarbon feedstock would do — and produce anything from a rocket ship to a disease-fighting submarine that would roam your bloodstream—”

David Petit slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “Nonsense,” he said. “Sure you can manipulate atoms. You can even get them to hold still for a while. But only by cooling your sample down to liquid helium temperatures. At room temperature, the atoms of your assemblers will start combining, with the ambient air, water, with each other, whatever medium your assemblers are floating in.