‘Saul, did you notice anything weird?’ asked Lester. ‘About the distribution of those clouds, I mean.’

Saul forced himself to open his eyes again, despite a rush of dizziness. ‘Weird in what way?’

‘I ran a comparison between the spread of the clouds and some speculative climate simulations designed to predict the effect of nuclear winter and major eruptions – that kind of thing. From what I can tell, they’re not acting like clouds are supposed to act. They’re moving against the prevailing winds, for a start, except for where there’s a storm system in the Indian Ocean.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t even begin to tell you how much that scares me. It’s like those clouds are alive.’

‘Worst thing,’ Amy muttered, ‘is not even knowing what started it all.’

‘How much did Jeff tell you about the growths?’ asked Saul.

‘Well.’ Lester squinted, as if uncomfortable with the subject, ‘more than we wanted to hear, to be honest. Mainly he talked about some whole big network of CTC gates leading all over the galaxy. He talked about so much stuff it was kind of hard to take a lot of it on board.’

‘Did he tell you about stealing confidential files from a secret research platform out at Tau Ceti?’

‘He did, yes.’ Lester nodded. ‘But what you just said there is about the sum of what he told us.’

‘We only got the essential details,’ Amy added. ‘But Olivia did say you had copies of the files. Did you bring them with you?’

‘I did. They’re all the proof you need. Here they are.’

Their expressions glazed over for several seconds, as they each received their own copies of the stolen files.

‘There’s a lot of stuff there,’ Saul warned them. ‘It took me a good few hours just to skim through the document abstracts. Jeff wanted to broadcast it all to the world, but it looks like he ended up on the run instead.’

‘Not that there’s much of a world left to broadcast it to,’ Amy said quietly.

‘A couple of days ago I was on Newton,’ said Saul. ‘The military have been moving thir people through, and staging an armed takeover of the colonies. They’re desperate to suppress any evidence that the growths reaching Earth was the result of human error.’

‘Then why are you giving this to us?’ asked Lester, refocusing his gaze on Saul.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lester,’ said Amy, her tone sharply admonishing, ‘they want the colonists to know what happened. That’s what Olivia said, remember? And damn right, too.’

‘You can carry the files in your contacts through to whichever colony you head for,’ said Saul. ‘Same for the rest of your people on the VASIMRs. Do you have secure links you can use to forward those files to the rest of your people?’

‘Sure do,’ said Amy. ‘Matter of fact, I’m doing it right now.’