Amanda laughed and shook her head. ‘Nick? I think he’s watched too many bad TriView shows. No, it’s probably something much more prosaic than that.’

‘Like what?’

‘A construction tool,’ she suggested. ‘An earth-digging machine that a bunch of ants accidentally figured out how to switch on, and now it’s rolling over their own anthill. That would be about the size of it.’

‘He was right about one thing: there are easier ways to wipe us out.’

‘What you said about the earthquakes. Do we know if that’s the case?’

‘Think about the amount of energy the growths must need to reach such an enormous size in so little time.’ A big wave smashed into the ferry, and they staggered slightly as the deck tilted first one way, then the other. ‘The leaves are for gathering solar energy, but I reckon that wouldn’t give them a fraction of the total power they’d need. Geothermal power is a fast way to get the rest of that energy, so they drill deep into the crust, or maybe even further.’

‘And the atmospheric phenomena we’re seeing? What about that?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t think Tesla’s got much to do with it.’

‘I’m still glad we came here, you know,’ she said. ‘Somehow seeing it like this – actually being here – makes all the difference.’

‘You think we’re getting what we deserve by being here?’

She looked at him. ‘Don’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘I think we were just unlucky. Curiosity defines us. It’s what makes us human. There’s no way you could explore something like the Founder Network and not expect to get your fingers burned.’ He pulled her closer and nodded up at the sky. ‘Out there, quo;re seeuo;ll survive . . . or other people will, at any rate.’

A message was broadcast over the ferry’s tannoy system before Amanda could form a reply. The captain proposed taking a vote on whether to sail the ferry to within a kilometre of the growth’s base, and the result of the vote would be announced the following morning.

Fowler felt overcome by a mixture of excitement and terror as he listened. That single glimpse, in a fragmentary video, of Amanda standing on the deck of this very same ferry, had given him the sense of fulfilling some kind of personal destiny just by being here. The end was close, but at least it was an end they had chosen together, and of their own free will. From this point on, there could be no surprises.