The debris formed a cloud, through which the plasma glow, fading, cast thousand-mile shadows.

Shallow gravitational waves crossed the Solar System, subtly perturbing the orbits of the planets.

Then, placidly, the remaining children of the sun resumed their antique paths, barely affected by the loss of their sibling.

Earth’s closest companion was more disturbed.

At the loss of the tides from its lost parent, the Moon shuddered. Water sloshed in its crater lakes, in giant circular ripples. Ancient faults gaped, for the first time in a billion years, and dusty lava flowed, as if the satellite was aping its parent’s demise.

Some humans died.

But it didn’t last long. And the inhabitants were prepared.

Then the orphan Moon sailed on, alone, cradling its precious cargo of humanity.

And, at the site of Earth, when the cloud of dust and volatiles and planetesimals dispersed, something new was revealed: a tear in space, a jewel of exotic particles, a wind of massless black holes fleeing at the speed of light.

Cautiously, tentatively, the ships from the Moon crept towards the ruin of Earth.

PART VI
NADEZHDA

…And, twenty years beyond the Bottleneck:

In the confines of Sagan’s airlock Nadezhda put on her gloves and snapped home the connecting rings. Then she lifted her helmet over her head.

The ritual of the suit assembly checklist was oddly comforting, a litany now decades old: in fact, almost unchanged from the routines endured by the original astronauts from Earth.

But the Sagan was no dinged-up low-Earth-orbit space truck, and right now Nadezhda was far from home.

She felt her heart hammer under her suit’s layers.

Jean Massie, on the hab module’s upper deck, was monitoring her. Nadezhda, you have a go for depress.

Nadezhda heard a distant hiss. “Let’s motor.”

She twisted the handle of the outer airlock hatch and pushed.

Nadezhda Pour-El Meacher Dundas gazed out into space.

She was looking along the length of the Sagan’s hab module. It was a tight cylinder, just ten yards long and seven wide, home to four crew for this six-month jaunt. The outer hull was crammed with equipment, the sensors and antennae clustered over powder-white and gold insulating blankets. The flags of the contributing lunar nations and agencies were here: NASA-L, the Russians, the Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the star-in-crescent flag of the Federal Republic of the Moon itself. At the back of the hab module she could see the bulging upper domes of the big cryogenic fuel tanks, and when she turned the other way there was the emergency return module, a capsule stuck sideways under the canopy of its big aerobrake.

The whole thing was just a collection of cylinders and boxes and canopies, thrown together as if at random. She knew every cubic inch of it.

She moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway.