“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.