An animated image of the Earth. Lurid red pimples appearing everywhere. First they came in a belt at about the latitude of Britain, spreading westwards, across the US, Asia; and then more pimples and scars in most of the world’s geologically unstable regions: the Ring of Fire, the subduction volcanoes around the Pacific basin; the rift volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic and other mid-ocean ridges; the hot-spot volcanoes, like Hawaii. In other places, more usually stable, the Moonseed seemed to be making its own volcanism by just digging its way towards the asthenosphere through old flaws in the crust, such as at Edinburgh itself.

Henry said, “The data here comes from worldwide sources, including our own USGS Earthquake Information Centre in Colorado and the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana—”

The Admiral said, “Dr Meacher, tell me what’s going to happen to us from here on in.”

He started to pull up charts. They showed the past records of cataclysmic geological events: volume of eruption, in cubic metres, plotted against repose time, in thousands of years… “Even for what’s likely to hit us in the short term, we have no precedent in historical times. The larger the magmatic event, the less frequently it occurs. But we have evidence that many eruptions in prehistoric times were larger — ten or a hundred times — than the huge eruptions we know about, like Thera and Tambora.”

Thera destroyed a civilization. Tambora was the greatest ash eruption of the current geological period; it caused the Year Without a Summer, in 1816. Ten or a hundred times as large.

“Are you saying,” Admiral Bromwich said, “that some of this stuff is — normal?”

“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?”