But now Alfred had found something else on the IAU net. Evidence of more Planckian cosmic radiation, just a trickle of it, coming — not from a remote planet, not from exotic sources that lay maybe beyond the Galaxy itself — but a lot closer to home.

He pulled up a sketchy diagram from a new preprint: a circle centred on a schematic Earth, two points picked out on the orbit of the Moon. “L4 and L5. Gravitationally stable, like shallow pits in spacetime the places in the Moon’s orbit, ahead of it and behind it, where you’d expect debris to collect. Dust, whatever.”

She looked at the closely-printed text, tried to follow it. “What are they saying? That the Venus killer is there?”

“No. Just that, on a small scale, the processes we’re observing on Venus are replicated there, on a much smaller scale.”

She frowned. “How so? Something working on the raw material there? But what?”

“I don’t know.”

“And how did it get there? Did it start on Venus, and come here, to Earth-Moon? Or…” Or did it start here, on Earth or Moon, and spread out across space, to Venus?

There was, of course, no answer: merely new pieces of the puzzle, fragmentary glimpses, imperfectly described by the staid, passive language of technical papers.

Glimpses of something monstrous.

She wondered how she was going to express this to the Administration.

Something had turned Venus into a kind of giant particle accelerator, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything humans had ever conceived. But that great experiment had wrecked the planet, literally disassembled it, from the core outwards, blowing its surface and atmosphere into space over a timescale, as far as anyone could tell, of no more than a few months.

Something had done this. Or someone.

But who? How? Why? And what, if anything, was going to protect the Earth from a similar cosmic visitation?

If, she thought bleakly, it isn’t already here.

…And in the dark and warmth of an Edinburgh night, Henry tried to explain to Jane what they were finding, in the lab.

“There are two aspects to this. Two structures, if you like. 86047—”

“The Moon rock.”

“ — is coated in a layer of quicksand dust.”

“The same as the Arthur’s Seat stuff?”

“Presumably.”

“Are they connected, then?”

“I don’t know. It would be kind of a coincidence for this stuff to show up in two places independently. We’re not running a clean facility in there. Maybe there’s been some kind of — breach of quarantine.” Quarantine. The word disturbed her, and she tried to figure out why. He said, “Even the surface dust is like nothing we’ve seen before.”

His matter-of-fact tone chilled her. “What do you mean?”

“Each grain has a structure. On the outside there’s a shell of silicate — a rock — although even that’s a mineral we haven’t seen before. Super-quartz, we’ve been calling it.”

“And inside the shell—”