Get out of here, go to the stars.

Godspeed to all of you.

There was more bare magma ocean than continent left now. Giant plumes, everywhere, more of those fists punching out to space—

And here came another shock wave, slamming into the bunker.

An instant of confusion, pain, extreme noise.

He was on his back.

The force field had held. But the whole bunker was over on its side, the floor and walls cracked, shattered to powder.

It felt as if he had bust a leg, a couple of ribs. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t hear anything.

He didn’t suppose it mattered. He was lucky to have survived so long.

The force field was tough. Maybe it would come sailing out of the final destruction event with his old bones preserved inside, battered and crushed.

One monitor was still working, by some miracle. He could still see the Earth.

The planet was a ball of red-brown light, an ocean of magma, barely differentiated, just a few scraps of continent, patches of black slag. But now there were spreading pools of white light at the rims of the magmatic convection cells: plasma, presumably, from the high-energy stuff going on in the interior.

Just like Burnet said. This is the fire. And soon we will merge with God.

The planet looked lopsided. Here came the biggest plume yet, poking out of the equator, where the Pacific plate used to be.

The limb of the planet was… lumpy. Jets of rock vapour pushing out of the lumps, into space. Some of the lumps were falling back, creating craters hundreds of miles across, spectacular impact basins that weren’t going to last more than minutes. And now, a new upswelling—

Shit. You can’t call that a plume. The core must be splitting.

Oh. I’m rising. Like an elevator. The continent must have split. Jane, I think —

6

Earth was once more a ball of magma, everywhere molten, reduced to a primordial smoothness, as it had been when young.

But the planet was expanding.

The unified-force energy released in its core and mantle was overcoming the controlling pull of its gravity. But the expansion was uneven, and bolides, giant chunks of rock, burst out of the churning surface and traced long, glowing curves around the world.

New cracks appeared in the magma ocean, wide fissures filling up with rivers of plasma light, white and yellow and green. As if emerging from a rocky egg, the plasma ball broke open the last shells of Earth, the remnants of the mantle and asthenosphere, molten rock and iron, and hurled out giant globules of spinning, cooling fragments.

The Earth became briefly flattened, its rotation driving its fluid form outwards.

Then the cloud expanded, suddenly, an eruption of light and fire, the energy embedded in its own substance being exploited to destroy it in a silent concussion.

Thus it ended, in a moment of unimaginable violence.